Onsite SEO and traditional link building are incredibly important components of long term online marketing success. However, onsite SEO optimization will only take your website so far in the SERPs if you don’t have the content to back up your efforts. And while traditional link building is still a major factor in how well your website ranks and performs in the search engines, content marketing has the ability to take link building one step further and create links that generate links and build upon each other over time. Without fresh content to propel your SEO forward, sooner or later your efforts will plateau and your competition will start to overtake you.
Here are 4 reasons why fresh content is so important to SEO:
Fresh content gives the search spiders a reason to re-crawl your website.
Let’s say you publish a blog post Monday morning at 9 AM. You might be able to see it right then and there (and anyone who comes to your site will be able to open and read it with no problems) but it’s invisible to the search engines until they crawl and index it. And, unfortunately for site owners, this is not an immediate process. The search engines don’t crawl every page of every website every day—it’s just not a reasonable thing to do. You have to wait for the search engines to get around to your site and index that new post before it can start ranking in the SERPs. Major industry blogs might have their content indexed within a few hours; smaller, more obscure blogs might have to wait a few days or even longer.
Publishing fresh content on a regular basis gives the search spiders a reason to re-crawl your website more frequently, and can help speed up the indexing process. The faster your content appears in the search engines the sooner you can start earning new visitors from it.
Content fuels your social media marketing efforts.
Social signals are becoming an increasingly important factor in the search engines’ ranking algorithms. The more times a piece of content is shared on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and so forth the more valuable it becomes in the eyes of the search engines. Without fresh content to share, how are you going to earn these social signals?
Too often businesses turn their social profiles into advertising platforms and only focus on promoting their products/services. That is not the point of social media! You want to share, connect, interact, engage and communicate with your social networks. Fresh content (that is informational) is shareable by nature. People want to share things that make them think, teach them something or find interesting. The more fresh content you create the more fuel you have for your social media marketing efforts.
Content builds your authority both online and off.
If you want consumers to do business with you, you have to convince them that you are the best option available. Your expertise and authority has to surpass your competition and the way you do that is by providing your audience with fresh content. Prove to the visitors on your site that not only do you know what you are talking about, but that you know exactly what they are going through and how you (and only you) and help them address their issues. It’s important to remember that not every person who comes to your site is going to know your brand and your products. You can’t count on your brand’s reputation alone to help you land new business—you have to convince each and every visitor that you deserve that reputation.
Fresh content also helps build your reputation within your industry and helps you connect with some of the bigger players. For instance, someone new to the SEO community probably isn’t going to get asked to contribute to some of the major industry blogs. You don’t have the reputation or authority to garner that kind of guest blogging opportunity. However, when you invest in your own content marketing efforts and prove to your industry, as well as your target audience, that you are in fact an expert more guest blogging opportunities, interviews, speaking opportunities and more will present themselves over time. Great content leads to great opportunities!
Fresh content keeps your audience engaged and interested.
I tell my clients that I’d rather they not launch a business blog than create one, write a few posts and leave it to wither. What’s the point of a content marketing campaign if you aren’t going to stick with it? Fresh content gives your target audience a reason to come back to your blog, your website and your social profiles and helps keep your brand top of mind. When you have your finger on the pulse of your industry, consumers learn to come to your site for the latest information. When you provide consistently valuable expertise in your content marketing efforts, potential customers remember your name when they need help.
You have to give people a reason to do business with you. Fresh content not only helps bolster your industry reputation and work to instill consumer confidence in your company, it also helps grow your overall online presence and drives your social media marketing efforts forward. Without fresh content to push your SEO campaign along, sooner or later your efforts will flat line and you’ll start seeing diminished returns for your efforts. Content is what keeps you going.