A Guide to Refreshing the Content on Your Site

One way to stay relevant in search engines and in front of your customers is to regularly update the content on your site. Content “freshness” is one of the major elements Google uses to rank websites in search results. When approaching the content on your website for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) purposes, the two main efforts to be aware of are:

Google consistently checks your site for fresh content, in fact when a new page is created on the internet, it is given a freshness score that decays the longer the content is left to mature. Whether your freshness score has a positive or negative impact on your rankings depends on the freshness of the other sites you are competing with for rankings.

Luckily, these efforts can easily be worked into your larger content marketing or digital marketing plan to get the most value out of the content you produce for your brand. Join us as we explain the best strategies for adding new content to your site and refreshing your existing content to keep your freshness score, well…fresh.

Your goal for adding new content should be to serve as an authoritative resource for those customers searching for topics about your products and services. If Google sees you are informative and reputable, they will rank you higher in search results. Websites with regularly updated content are more valuable to users as they contain up-to-date info for the user. This means it is important to have a structure on your website where you can continuously post new content such as a blog or resource page. You’ll also want to attract traffic and stand out from competitors, thats why it is important to write content that is engaging, interesting, and offers value.

Think conversions. You should create content for your website that will drive users towards a desired conversion that will benefit your business. Conversions are wanted behaviors such as submitting a contact form or making a purchase. This means you should write about pics related to your industry and business and that encourages readers to take action. When indexing this content, Google ranks your site for searches relevant to those topics. If you stray too far from the purpose of your business with your content, Google won’t rank you for the proper search terms.

You also want to choose topics you know will bring people to your site. You can use keyword tools like Moz & Wordstream to find what topics are receiving traffic and plan your postings around them. Buzzsumo also can show you how popular a topic is based on social shares. These tools will allow you to see what questions people are asking that are relevant to you.

A few other strategies for finding blog topics include:

Keep in mind it can be beneficial to post helpful content that does not need to be continuously updated, called “evergreen” content. Examples include:

Have a page that is low in ranking? It may be time to refresh the content on that page.

When doing a Google search, you will notice that most of the top results have been posted within the last year. This is due to the freshness score mentioned above. Refreshing your old content tells Google this content is new without going through the effort of generating an entire new topic and article. Audit your site with the following tips in mind:

Keep in mind that updating your content too frequently may confuse Google about the topic of your page, hurting rankings. Update your content methodically, not obsessively!

Here are some tips for refreshing your old posts:

The effort of continually adding new content and refreshing old content is important to keep your online business’s freshness score high and keep you prominent in search rankings. These efforts should be a part of your ongoing digital marketing strategy to ensure you are getting the most value out of your content generation efforts. At JTech, we have experience researching, choosing and developing content topics that will bring value to your brand. If your organization needs help with its content, we are happy to talk to you about it, give us a call 406-586-7100 or fill out our brief questionnaire.