13 Ways to Win Traffic With a Branded Content Marketing Refresh
Google only cares about how you're able to serve your customers—a deceptively simple concept. The tricky part is understanding how their algorithm assesses how capable your site is to ‘serve.'
According to Google, the more active you are, the more present and authoritative you are in your field. To this end, Google assigns a hidden score to your site’s pages depending on how fresh your content is.
While you can’t see these scores, you can make educated guesses and take steps to make regular updates to content throughout your site. Updating your content like this is known as a 'branded content refresh.'
So, What Exactly IS a Branded Content Refresh?
Branded content refreshes can take several forms. You can:
- Refresh the keywords you use
- Rewrite and bump up the content on your blog & site pages
- Add new pages (if those pages are also needed and relevant)
Any of these options will help you drive traffic to your pages. Just be sure you're refreshing your branded content correctly and frequently enough to keep pace with other sites in your industry.
Our SEO team can often work a branded refresh into an existing marketing plan. As a busy business owner, it can be hard to stay on top of Google's insatiable hunger for content on your own—we want to support that need.
How Do You Know Your Branded Content Is Ready for a Refresh?
If you have the right tools and know what to look for, you can read the writing on the walls. A page with a flagging freshness score will begin to lag behind in organic traffic—among other things.
If you have an ongoing SEO plan with JTech, we'll let you know if we notice a trend. Afterward, we'll work to refresh the content on your site.
Questions to Ask During Your Site's Content Refresh
Before refreshing the content on your site, you need to create a content marketing-focused search engine optimization strategy.
Here's a summary of the 13 questions you should ask to frame your branded content refresh.
1. Are Your Keywords Still Relevant?
Most of the time, the keywords in your content will still be relevant. However, trends shift, people grow and tastes change over time. Staying on top of changes in your market's search terms is very important to an effective digital marketing strategy.
For this reason, we offer a keyword refresh service to our customers. To celebrate the new year, we're offering 10% off through March 31st, 2022.
2. Has Your Industry Experienced Recent Changes?
Businesses change year over year—more so over the last several years than in the past decade. 2020 and 2021 have accelerated many inevitable market changes.
Ask yourself, has your customer base changed? Have you noticed a difference in the products or services you're stocking/offering? Have you noticed your competitors shifting their brand's content marketing strategies?
If you answered 'yes,' then you're probably due for a content refresh, regardless of what Google says!
3. How Much Content Is On The Pages You Want to Rank in Search?
Google loves 'long-form content’—their algorithm often uses word count as a signifier for the quality of information on your pages when determining search engine rankings.
So, if you have a helpful but low-performing page, it's probably time to give that content some love. Just make sure your new content is valuable and original, not fluff.
4. How Old is The Data In Your Content?
Using old data is a great way to tell Google that you're not maintaining your site. Update your site every year to include new, relevant data and to remove data that is now obsolete.
A great way to add new data? Write case studies! Case studies add to your portfolio and build fresh, high-quality, branded content that speaks directly to your target audience. Writing case studies is also a great way to build backlinks.
Business owners and marketers love free press. So, if you link to the subject of your case study in your writing, those business owners are likely to link to your site back—raising brand awareness for your business in the community.
5. Is Your Embedded Media Still Relevant?
Embedded videos and images can go out of date just as quickly as keywords and data points.
Look through your content for broken links, videos and images. If it's broken, then that content needs refreshing.
6. Do You Include Embedded Media?
Google loves media-rich content. They've been boosting sites that include videos and images for years. Google Search Central even provides an in-depth guide for video SEO best practices.
If you need new images or videos to improve your site, we do offer photography and videography as services to our clients—get 10% off if you book a session before March 31st, 2022.
7. Are All Links on Your Site Still Working?
Broken links are another indicator to Google that you're not maintaining your site. Do a manual search or have the JTech team run an audit on your site to find any broken links.
You can also take this chance to review the web pages you're linking to on your website. If the sites you're linking to looks untrustworthy consider changing that link.
Linking to the wrong webpage will likely resonate poorly with your target audience.
8. Is Your Meta Optimized?
Metadata—or your page titles and meta descriptions—determine the information likely to show up in search results when new customers find you during a Google search.
Metadata also is the first contact that Google has with your site pages. So, getting your meta right is incredibly important. You can learn more about meta optimization in your site's My JTech support article section.
9. Are Your Headers Optimized?
Google's bots look at the headers on your site pages at the beginning of their crawl. Be sure to place your business's target keywords into your headings.
Placing keywords in Google's top-level analysis will help their algorithm understand your site more easily—increasing your opportunities to rank in search engine results.
10. Are Your Article Titles Interesting and Engaging?
We've been talking about Google in this article a lot. However, we can't lose sight of the Google algorithm's primary goal. Google's ultimate goal is to provide search engine users with content they find engaging.
Read your article titles and think, would I click on this? Does this give me enough information to pique my interest?
If your answer is 'yes!' You're probably good to go. Our SEO team can also help with a data and analytics-driven deep dive.
11. Do Your Links Need Updating?
As we briefly alluded to above, providing outbound links to relevant, high-quality content is a core component of creating a valuable user experience for your target audience.
In a 2021 Search Engine Journal article, Google's Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst, John Mueller, stated:
'Obviously, if you have good content within your website and part of that references existing other content, then kind of that whole structure that makes a little bit more sense and means that your website overall is a good thing.’
Google doesn't care about outbound links, but customers do. Google does care about engagement. So, write content with high-quality links that your target audience will appreciate and engage with—you're likely to get a boost in SEO.
Not sure where to start? Give us a call.
12. How Many Keywords Are You Targeting?
It's your job to create branded content that aligns with what Google expects to see in your industry. Google works by building a profile of your content. So, the better Google understands your site, the easier it will be for your site to appear in search.
Now for the hard part, how do you help Google understand what your site is about?
The answer is informative, audience forward content—supplemented by keywords of course!
If you haven't thought about keywords all year, it may be time to add some more to your content to improve search engine rankings. Our SEO team is happy to add new keywords into your content as part of an ongoing search engine optimization plan as well.
13. Are You Featuring Any Information on Your Home Page?
As you wrap up your content refresh push, it's always a good thing to re-evaluate what you want to feature!
This often means running press releases featuring your best pieces of content. However, you should also consider featuring content you want to promote on your website's home page.
Your homepage receives the bulk of your traffic, so it makes sense that you would want to feature information you’re proud of where your customers are likely to find it.
Let Us Refresh Your Content
Our local Bozeman SEO team is full of trained SEO professionals, and we're constantly looking for ways to improve our services.
We won't lie; a branded content refresh can often mean hours of work. Most of us don't have that kind of time. Our team works to reduce the load on your shoulders so you can focus on what you do best—running your business.
Want us to help you with your digital marketing? Schedule a consultation!