5 Reasons Why Fresh Content is Critical for Your Website and SEO

SEO is important—there’s no question about that, it’s simply a fact of life if you’re doing business online.  Active promotion is all well and good, but you also need qualified traffic coming in from the search engines to leverage your website as the investment it is.

But SEO isn’t something you can just do once and then sit back.  Optimizing your website is a never-ending process, and for it to work to its full potential you need something to optimize: content.

Content is more than just words for Google to find on your site.  It’s a critical part of the equation for effective SEO, a part you can best take advantage of by posting plenty of fresh, high-quality content on a regular basis.

Why does that make such a difference?

Consistent, fresh content means frequent indexing

Google—along with the other search engines—uses programs called web crawlers to find and index websites based on a variety of factors, such as incoming links, information about keywords on the site, and how often the site is updated.  When you make a change to your site, the search engines notice and re-index it.

Of course, getting indexed frequently doesn’t automatically mean getting higher search rankings.  But the more often you make significant updates, the more often search engines will check your website for quality signals and adjust your rank accordingly.  That gives you more frequent opportunities to improve your rankings with fresh, high-quality content.

Part of the key is being consistent with how often you add content.  One of the best ways to ensure that you stay on top of things is with a content marketing calendar.  It’ll help you maintain focus on your content publishing goals and stay consistent.

Google uses frequent, significant updates as a quality signal

Google is the most popular search engine, and as such it makes sense to keep an eye on what factors it tends to rank highly.  Google appears to incentivize frequent updates, so you should add fresh content to your site as often as possible.

That doesn’t mean making changes just for the sake of making changes, though.  Nor does it mean updating numerous times per day—one significant update per day or at least two or three per week will be enough to be considered frequently updated.  

You don’t have to completely overhaul the site, either.  Smaller changes like adding an article, an image, or updated copy will get Google’s attention just fine—and as long as the new information is always reliable and valuable, you have a good chance of getting a higher search ranking.

Adding a blog to your site and posting articles your viewers will notice and appreciate is an easy and effective way to stay fresh.  User comments on the articles will also count as an update, though a smaller one, so make them interesting and do your best to start a discussion.

The more content you have, the more keywords you can rank for

Every piece of content you publish doesn’t just give you a new page for the search engines to index.  It also gives you an opportunity for your site to rank for more keywords.  The more content you have, the broader range of keywords you can target and the more effectively you can optimize your site for the ones that are most relevant.

Don’t think you can just cram your site full of keywords, though—Google doesn’t care much about how many keywords a given page has, especially if it’s low-quality.  You need to focus on quality content that helps your readers in some way, and organically includes your keyword a couple of times—not mediocre content that’s heavily keyword-focused.

That might leave you in a tough spot: you need enough content to fill a regular publishing schedule, but it all has to be high-quality.  Fortunately, there are plenty of tools available to help you get what you need.

  • BuzzSumo - Easily find the top-performing content for your chosen keyword or niche, to give you ideas for what kind of content to create
  • Grammarly - If you decide to create content yourself, this online proofreading tool can help you make sure the text is free of confusing grammar and spelling errors
  • Smart Paper Help - If writing isn’t your strong suit, outsource the content creation—as well as proofreading and editing, if you need it
  • Hemingway App - This free web app will help you get your message across in the clearest possible language so that it can reach the most people

 

Fresh content helps keep your audience engaged

The point of all this content—besides improving your SEO rankings, of course—is to provide value to people and show them how your brand can help them get what they want or need.  Solid, high-quality articles and pages will effectively communicate your brand’s message to your audience and keep them interested in what you have to offer.

Updating regularly gives you the chance to keep your audience up to date on what’s going on with your business, such as events, promotions, and new products.  Fresh content also helps new visitors see that your business is active, rather than old and out of date.

Keeping it fresh, interesting, and above all useful, means you’re giving the audience something worthwhile, and when they know they can get value from you, they’ll spend more time on your site.  That not only gives you more opportunities to turn readers into customers, it also lowers your site’s bounce rate—another factor search engines consider in page rankings.

High-quality content encourages sharing

Finally, with the decline in the SEO value of building backlinks from numerous websites (at least, websites with low authority), social media sharing has become one of the most effective and reliable ways to build your site’s relevance and authority in the eyes of the search engines.  And no one is going to share low-quality content.

Frequently posting great articles ensures that you’ll always have something new for your site’s visitors to read, learn from, and share with their friends.  That, in turn, will bring in qualified leads who are already interested what you have to offer, giving you new opportunities to impress people with your brand’s message—and consequently, increase your conversions.