When you go to the grocery store how do you select the right product? Do you grab the greenest banana you can find or the brown one? Or do you look for avocado that has just that right amount of soft smooshiness to taste perfect?
Well I think that as with our grocery shopping choice, your website should be no different – you need to keep it fresh, but it’s a balancing act – and it’s time to start treating it that way.
The Undeniable Importance of Fresh Website Content
Content plays a key role in what makes a great website. For one, it’s what informs search engines, including the all-knowing Google, that your website is alive and active. Posting new content and updating your old content is how they know what you have to offer is relevant and worth sharing in search results. Google specifically looks at a set of factors for your website content to measure its freshness including date created, last time you made an update, the size of updates and how often it’s updated overall.
Outside of search engine optimization, fresh content is what builds your business’s credibility. If a lead visits your website and sees noticeably outdated or inaccurate information, they’re going to leave, and your bounce rate will skyrocket.
Posting consistently and staying up to date encourages repeat visits and grows brand loyalty as your website becomes a trusted source for new information. With it, you gain higher conversion rates.
Why Should You Care About Site Freshness?
Because Google Cares
Google’s algorithms take a ton of different freshness metrics into account when determining how your website should rank. Google looks at all of the following on a per page basis:
Initial creation date: This factor works in two ways. Your overall “SEO Cred” is improved by having content that has been around longer, but Google also maintains a “Freshness Score” that degrades over time.
Size of the change: Google tracks how much of the content on the page is changed when the page is updated (is it a little change or a big change?) and calculates that into the freshness score.
Type of change: Changes to page content are more heavily weighted in your freshness score than changes to scripts, comments, advertisements or global page items like headers and footers.
Rate of change: How often the page is updated influences the freshness score.
New page creation: A website’s overall freshness rating is influenced by the rate at which new pages are added. For instance, if you increase your website’s footprint by 20 percent each year vs. only 5 percent, Google will see you as “fresher.”
Signs That Your Content Is Outdated
If you’re worried about the state of your website, look out for these signs that it’s in desperate need of freshening:
- You haven’t added new content in a month
- Your site navigation isn’t intuitive
- You can’t recall when you last updated the homepage
- It’s not mobile optimized or responsive
- It’s not on-brand
- Your images are outdated
- It’s not contributing to lead development
- Your web traffic is stagnant or declining
- The tone or message is inconsistent
- There’s old or inaccurate information anywhere
- You’re still using broken links
- The footer copyright date isn’t the current year
- Your listed new products/events aren’t new anymore
- The web pages are slow to load
If any of these describe your content, don’t fear. The following tips will help you turn your website around for the better.
Let Go of Those Outdated Posts
Sometimes an old post requires more fixin’ than a few edits or additional paragraphs can provide. Sometimes the topic itself is no longer relevant or never was a good fit for your target audience. This might be the case when a web page isn’t bringing in traffic or contributing to your goals.
When this occurs, when it’s hurting your performance more than it’s helping, it’s time to remove the content from your website. It’s difficult when you invested your time and effort into the content, but it’s what you have to do.
If the post contributes high-quality backlinks, you can try recycling it instead to prevent those losses, but you’ll want to treat it like a rewrite to ensure you’re creating new, valuable content.
Revamp Your Keyword Strategy
Popular keywords, search intent and trends are always changing, and you want to continue to reassess and improve your keyword strategy for success when maintaining your content.
Start by analyzing whether your intended keywords for a web page are working, and if they’re not, change it up. You should also check which keywords are bringing in traffic as it may surprise you. If there are ones that do, use them to inspire new content ideas and add them for improved rankings.
These practices will boost your SEO as search engines will pick up these changes and recognize your site as one of the living – not the living dead.
Keep Up With More Than Your Blog
While blogging has tried to take over the content scene, all of your website pages are important contributors to your SEO and customer experience. Each page, from product pages to FAQs, can hold outdated information. Your products may stay the same, but the way they’re viewed or the context in which they’re used can change. Even your about page may contain information that should be updated to boost your credibility, like the number of years you’ve been in business.
So make sure that you apply the tips in this post for all of your website content and not just your blog.
Unbury Your Content With Fresh Links
With the passing of time, older posts and pages may sink down the search results page and bring in less traffic as they get buried under more recent items. You can help extend the shelf life of great content by linking to it from other pages or earning backlinks from other sites. When you create a new piece of content, always look for old pages to link to and show how they’re still relevant.
Touch Up Your Web Design
Content isn’t all copy. Web design works hand-in-hand with readable content to complete the user experience, and updating your web design is just as important for freshness and SEO.
Before all else, it’s essential to ensure that your website is functioning with modern times and expectations. This includes responsiveness and mobile optimization. Once your website works well enough to do its job seamlessly, you should make sure that it makes a good impression as
75% of people judge credibility based on web design.
If you want a successful website that doesn’t just function but also converts visitors and looks good while doing it, then your best bet is to hire a web design specialist.
Don’t Waste Your Website Content
As time-consuming as it is, if you want the hours that you’ve dedicated to your website content to accomplish anything, then a strategy for content upkeep is a must. When you make an effort to keep your content fresh, you’ll find that each piece contributes more to your short and long term success with SEO, audience growth and conversion.
