Congrats! Your perfectly designed website that you spent more time and money on than you care to admit is done and ready for potential customers. Now you just need to sit back and let it do its job. Well, not exactly. Your website is a living and breathing entity. Refreshing your content regularly is vital to not only staying relevant in the evolving technology field, it’s also crucial to your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. A part that can easily be overlooked.
Fresh content shows your customers, potential leads, and search engines your site is active and a good resource for helpful information. It also helps your company to clarify its messaging over time. Say, for example, you started as a copier sales business, but, over time, you’ve begun offering office technology like A/V equipment, computers, or IT services. Your messaging needs to be updated to reflect not only your new products and services but also the unique pain points of your additional target audience.
But how does new content affect your SEO? For one, it shows search engines you’re current. They crawl sites looking for relevant content they can with their own users. When you add new keywords, keep up with trends, update statistics, and refresh messaging, you are telling search engines your material is worth sharing.
So where should you start?
Regular Content Audits – Updates every three months are ideal, but depending on your team’s size, you may do it less frequently. Look for outdated content or now-irrelevant information. Evaluate how that piece of content has been performing and ask yourself, “Has it been popular among your audience?” or “Has it led to little to no conversions?” This is all important information to consider when prioritizing what content to refresh.
Researching Keywords – The keywords you so artfully incorporated into your site may no longer be as searched as they once were. Or there are new keywords that now apply. Either way you’ll want to do solid research into trending, long-tail keywords (keyword phrases that are three or more words long) that your audience is searching for. Then naturally work those into your new edits.
Update and Revise – Based on your audit and priority list, take old content and update it with current information and keywords. You could add additional information about the topic, update outdated statistics, clarify your wording, or present the information in a new way or from a different perspective.
Don’t forget that while updating verbiage, you’ll want to enhance the structure and readability of the piece or page. Your content should have clear HTML tags like <H1> or <p> to help search engines understand the information. Plus, focusing on readability helps the user experience. Ask yourself, “Is the headline attention grabbing?” or “Is the information easy to digest?” Adding elements like bullet points, images with rich alt text, and other media helps your content become more accessible.
Create Fresh Content – Develop new content ideas based on your current audience’s needs and interests. Just make sure not to repeat content. This hurts your SEO through what is called keyword cannibalism. To avoid this, create a content map. These mind maps help you visually see the main topics that are a focus for your company and the sub-topics you have or want to add to your site.
Your content can be a new product or service page, a blog post, video, or infographic. Remember that the average person only spends 54 seconds on a page. So, the information needs to answer their question in a concise, visually appealing way.
Update Linking – Integrating links within your content is the next step. Remember that content map I mentioned just a bit ago? It comes in handy here too. By linking new and refreshed content to your main topic pages (like a pillar page, blog, or product/service page) and vice versa, you are building your website’s authority in the eyes of search engines.
Let’s not forget about external linking too. I know, it sounds counterproductive to link to another website, but for search engines it demonstrates that your site is providing valuable and credible information by referring to authoritative sources.
Track and Asses – Once you’ve done all your keyword research, refreshing of content, and linking, it’s time to assess the loading speed and mobile optimization of the content. These are important technical SEO elements. Ensuring your pages load quickly and are easily navigable and readable on mobile devices is essential these days.
Finally, it’s time to track the results of all your hard work. Remember that the results will not be immediate. It takes time. The frequency at which search engines crawl sites varies greatly, from every few days to every few weeks. But once they do, you’ll want to look at the amount of page views, time on page, and conversion rates. This will give you a better understanding of what is working, and what isn’t.
In the end, freshening up your website content gives your site a significant boost. It helps raise search engine ranking, improves user experience, and helps you stay competitive in a saturated market. By taking the step-by-step approach I have laid out here, refreshing your content will be easier and less daunting.
Jenna Miller
Jenna Miller
Jenna Miller
Jenna Miller is the CEO of Emerald Strategic Marketing, a digital marketing agency that delivers bespoke solutions like SEO, social media management, and other marketing services tailored to each client's unique brand story.