Fresh content on your website is a must if you want to stay relevant for search engine optimisation (SEO). Even so, there are other reasons to update your website pages and blogs.
Stale content wastes a visitor’s time. It turns them away and loses potential sales. Fresh content improves your website, keeps readers engaged, promotes happy customers and generates into sales.
Recently, I had an appointment with a health specialist. On my way to the appointment from work, I recalled the practice was moving. I called their phone number only to discover it was disconnected.
So, I did the next logical thing. I went online to get the information from their website. Their welcome message on the front of their website confirmed their move, but after searching their site, I grew anxious.
The page had last been updated two months ago. Despite the message advising of their move, there was no new address or phone number. It only contained their old details. If only it had fresh content.
Fresh content reduces stress
Ironically, one of the reasons for this appointment was to treat anxiety.
To help prevent giving your customers stress, read on to discover the importance of fresh content and how it improves your website.
Why is fresh content important?
While web page content focuses on SEO, it’s only one consideration of a good web page writer. There’s another important factor that is often overlooked when producing web content: the reader.
Over the last few years, search engines like Google have made a number of changes to the way they collect and rate information on web pages. It’s led to the catchcry that SEO is dead, but this couldn’t be further from the truth.
What people should be saying is that keyword stuffing is dead and quality content lives.
Fresh content is all about providing quality content to your readers. That is to say, your web page content should be:
- Relevant.
- Factual.
- Easy to read.
- Accessible.
Google and other search engines like Bing have improved their methods of rating pages for quality content. While many web content writers still focus on SEO, it’s just as important to focus on your reader.
What does fresh content mean?
Fresh content refers to the relevance of text and elements you use on your website. Relevance is important to readers and to SEO.
Relevance provides readers with up-to-date information about your business, your products and industry news. It keeps people informed about what you have to offer so they can make informed decisions.
Fresh content also attracts attention to your website. It lets search engines know your site is actively engaged in producing content and keeps customers interested in what you’re doing.
8 Ways to keep your content fresh
1. Regularly update your business information
Keeping your business details up-to-date on your website should be a no-brainer. Wrong or outdated information deters people from becoming customers.
Imagine if you have an art gallery and you moved to a new space but you didn’t update the information on your website. You’re going to confuse your customers and lose potential visitors to the gallery.
Business content that you should check regularly includes:
- Contact details.
- Products and Services.
- Specials.
- Vacancies and placements.
- Terms and conditions for the website.
- Policies that affect customers and suppliers.
- Website forms that collect information.
2. Blog Articles
Your business blog should be updated with new articles regularly. Keeping your blog updated engages new and returning visitors. Give your customers and new visitors information that answers their questions.
A reliable content management system, like WordPress, helps you to manage your site’s content and blog. The benefits of having a consistent, regularly updated blog:
- Inspires visitors to return.
- Increases your permanent readership.
- Generates more sales with targeted content.
- Improves search engine optimisation.
Hire a blog writer to produce timely and consistent content. You could also invite guests to blog from other related sites, such as your suppliers.
Every now and then, revise the content of your old blog articles. Keep the content relevant and accurate. Also, check it against your current quality writing guidelines.
3. Multimedia
Multimedia includes:
- Images.
- Infographics.
- Videos.
- Sound bytes.
- Podcasts.
If you embed other users’ videos, there is a chance they could be removed, or made private. Regularly check:
- Embedded links remain active and relevant.
- Uploaded files have not been moved or deleted.
- SEO features such as ALT tags for multimedia are effective.
4. Polls, Surveys and Specials
Be sure to close your polls, surveys and specials on the date and time specified. You can use data from polls and surveys for creating new relevant content on your blog and web pages.
Leaving these elements open to interaction can skew data but also provide incorrect information especially where sales specials and sales events are concerned.
If possible, automate their closure or set up a reminder in your diary to close them.
5. Downloads & Links
Links, especially external links can become the bane of a website. There’s the issue of annoying 404’s, redirections and neglected websites have a tendency to get hacked.
Linking to external information that benefits your readers is vital and it can lend validity to the information you provide. But make sure those recommendations remain valid and secure.
You should also check that your internal links are valid. If you change a page’s URL slug be sure to add a 301 redirect to the new page.
While you may check your website page links regularly, go that extra mile to check and update links in marketing and auto-generated emails connected to webforms and subscriptions.
Be motivated to stay on top of your links on a regular basis.
External links include:
- Suppliers.
- Associations.
- Customers (from referrals or comments).
- Knowledge and resources.
- Embedded links, such as videos on YouTube.
- Community resources.
Internal links cover:
- Downloads.
- Other pages including your blog.
- Graphics.
- Multimedia uploaded to your own server.
- Forms.
6. Customer Referrals
Customer referrals are a wonderful way to prove your business does what it says. But you still need to check that the information your customer includes is relevant and accurate.
Often a business will ask customers for a referral in return for a free link. Be cautious that this offer doesn’t reflect a linking scheme which can negatively affect SEO.
7. Comments
- Add to the pages word count and fresh content.
- Interact with your website users by responding to comments.
- Solve negative comments, don’t delete.
- Delete unwanted spam and pingbacks.
- Use a good commenting plugin with your CMS to help you to manage comments.
8. Software, programmes and apps
Updating the software, programmes and apps that run your website is as important as the currency of information.
It’s the code that runs your site and if it is old and stale your site’s reliability is questionable. Hackers love websites that don’t run updates or keep up with new technologies.
Not only can it be detrimental to the information your websites collects, but poorly managed websites also affect reader experience and SEO.
How do you keep your website fresh?
To keep your website fresh create daily, weekly, fortnightly and monthly audit checklists. Make the process of checking these list part of your regular workflow.
Allocate the tasks discussed in Fresh Content to one or more of the above intervals that suits your requirements.
Improve your users’ experience
Your visitors’ experience on your website is critical. Put yourself in their shoes and browse through your pages. Will they find what they’re searching for? Will they return?
By keeping your website fresh, you improve the reading experience of your website and blog. In turn, this also improves your SEO.
It’s all about quality.
8 Areas to keep your website content fresh
To keep your website content fresh and improve engagement, audit these key areas on a regular basis:
- Business information.
- Blog articles.
- Multimedia.
- Polls & surveys
- Downloads & links.
- Customer referrals.
- Comments.
- Website software and programmes.
Get your blog noticed with Tina Dubinsky
Are you struggling to get your blog noticed? I help creative entrepreneurs write quality custom blog articles that consistently appear in Google’s top search engine results.
If you want to get more traffic to your blog and learn my blogging secrets, stay motivated with my free monthly eNewsletter on Entrepreneurship, Writing and the Arts.