Is continually creating new website content still worth doing in 2020?
The benefit of continually updating your website’s content cannot be underestimated. You should not look at it as a chore, but as an opportunity to get yourself on the search engine radar - and stay there. You are an authority on your business and your industry and search engines need to know that. You should therefore think of your website content as your chance to constantly shine.
Better content gives you more website traffic
Google certainly keeps everyone on their toes, making daily tweaks to their search algorithm and continually updating the way search results are displayed. How are we mere mortals supposed to cope?
When deciding which pages to show at the top of a search, Google works on an E-A-T principle:
Expertise
Authority
Trustworthiness
Google has a laser-like focus on their users’ search experience so will prioritise web pages that fit the E-A-T ethos. They only want to show content they believe provides the most current, relevant and useful information. How do they decide? When it comes to a choice between two similar pages from two different websites, they will always opt to show the one that is the most recent and that can demonstrate the best credentials in terms of links and traffic.
Which is why you need to keep your website content continually updated. You have to constantly revisit, revise, monitor and update so that search engines can see that you are a viable business and that you have authority. Every time you update your website you are enhancing your visitor experience and keeping it on the search engine radar.
What’s clear is that just publishing a website then sitting back to wait for the business to roll in isn’t enough anymore. Your website needs to be a living, breathing entity. A “static” website without updates of any kind may be viewed by search engines as a “dead” entity – with no life and nothing new to offer. Which means it will view your business in the same light: nothing to see here, move along please.
How does Google work?
Here is an “In a Nutshell”-type explanation of how Google works. A very tiny nutshell.
Google stores billions of web pages in an index. It adds to and updates this index by following links. If you have optimised your website correctly, all your key landing pages should be listed in that index. So when you type something into their search bar, Google is rifling through its index looking for the most relevant pages to show you. It does not search the global internet for the answers, and there aren’t teams of Google employees browsing the world wide web all day and night looking for the answers to your queries!
So, creating fresh and useful content means increasing the number of times your website appears on that index, or increasing your “footprint” on the index. Which increases your chances of being found.
Sounds easy enough, right?
Unfortunately, just publishing fresh content won’t be enough on its own to improve your page rankings. The key is recency, frequency and originality. The more frequently you update your website with new and original articles, downloads, and new web pages that have a date against them (preferably in the headline), the more Google will notice your website and update its index with your new content. When search engines look at your site more frequently, the better your chances of achieving higher rankings.
Plus fresh content means you can keep your visitors updated with new information, enhancing your reputation. This doesn’t mean giving away the family farm and revealing all your secrets. It means providing all the reasons why they should buy from you and not from a competitor.
What represents “Fresh” content?
The most obvious way to keep your website looking “fresh” is to regularly publish entirely new articles, blogs and pages every time. This is a great way to demonstrate your expertise, authority and trustworthiness (remember the E-A-T principle?). Obviously for most business owners – unless they have a dedicated member of staff or they outsource the work– this is not feasible. But there are other ways to keep things “fresh”.
The amount of change on an individual webpage can also count in looking “fresh” to search engines. For example, changing a single sentence probably won’t work as well as making broad edits to the main body of existing or old text. There are lots of business owners who pay just as much attention to updating old content as creating new, which works just as well.
Not all freshness ranking signals are restricted to the page itself. Many external signals can also help. For example if a webpage sees an increase in its link growth rate (i.e. the number of other online channels linking to the page), this could be a “relevance” ranking signal, especially if those domains also rank highly themselves. This works particularly well for topical or seasonal content such as events or holiday gift buying guides.
Content freshness best practices
Your goal shouldn’t be to update your site simply for the sake of it and hoping for better ranking. Publishing poor quality or irrelevant content just to get something new on your site could do more harm than good. Instead, you should plan regular content creation as part of your ongoing website management activities with the aim of supporting your site visitors, increasing traffic and user engagement. Making a habit of this will naturally increase the amount of shares, comments, likes and clicks you generate. And search engines will take note as a result.
To summarise best practice:
Create new, original and useful content regularly
Remember that relatively small changes to existing content may be ignored. Wholesale re-writes and edits won’t be.
All other things being equal, links from fresher sites are likely to be more valuable than links from static sites
Updating older content works amazingly well when you also earn fresh links to the content
Whenever you create new content make sure to share it around in social media, newsletters, emails etc
About the author: Helen Say is the co-owner of CBL Copywriting & SEO. CBL are experts at creating fresh content that makes search engines sit up and pay attention.