How To Improve Your SEO With Fresh Website Content

When was the last time you updated your website? Do you upload a blog post every week, or has it been several months since you edited any of your pages? Did you know that making regular updates to your website could do wonders for your SEO? Today we’re looking at why you should regularly update your website content, how this could affect your position on search engine results pages, and how we keep things moving on the SilverDisc website.

Does Updating Your Website Improve Your SEO Rankings?

Freshness of content is one factor in how Google ranks your website in its search results pages. How much or how little your ranking is affected will depend on how much of the page has changed, the frequency of the changes, and the type of content that has changed (e.g. a large bulk of the main body text vs. advertisements). Find out more about how Google’s algorithm evaluates freshness in this handy guide from Moz.

Bear in mind that you shouldn’t update your website just for the sake of it – this won’t necessarily help your SEO. Instead, make important changes that will benefit the user by giving them useful information or a better user experience.

Is New Content Always Important?

How important it is that your content is fresh depends on what the user is searching for. Say you run an informational website about your hometown. Someone might search for “Kettering events” and land on the Events page on your website, which details events taking place in Kettering in the next month. Obviously, your page won’t be very useful to the visitor if it hasn’t been updated for six months and shows only events that have already taken place. Another visitor may search for “the history of Kettering town”, and land on your History page. If you haven’t updated that page for six months, it’s not as big a deal. Google can figure out the difference between these searches and determine how much the freshness of your page should affect your ranking in that particular instance.

However, remember that Google also favours pages that are older. So a website that was created in 2005 could be ranked more highly than a website created in 2017 containing similar information. Of course, it’s important to bear in mind that nobody knows exactly how Google’s algorithm works, and there are many factors that affect how highly your website will be ranked – not just website age or content freshness.

Despite this, we do know that regularly updated content is beneficial for many reasons, not just for SEO. So let’s take a look at what you can do to keep your website relevant.

How Can You Keep Your Website Pages Updated?

At SilverDisc, we know a few tricks for updating your website quickly and easily. For example, adding social media feeds to your website can add some dynamic content every time you make a social post, and if you post regularly this shows that you’re active within your industry or community. But there are also other ways to keep your site fresh, and our next example lies in your website’s technical architecture.

The SilverDisc website architecture mean that we can make changes that affect several pages, just by doing one thing. The answer lies in our blog posts, case studies, and testimonials.

Take uploading blog posts as an example. Whenever I upload a new blog post, this creates a brand new page on the SilverDisc website. Fresh content. But this isn’t the only change that is made on the website when a new blog post is born. The main blog listings page is also updated to list the new blog post. And as this blog post is filed under the SEO category, it now appears on the SEO blog post listings page, too. Fresh content. But that’s not all.

Mosey on down to our SEO Services page and you’ll find a link to this blog post there, too. Scroll down past the main body of text and you’ll see a section titled “Case Studies, Testimonials and Blogs”. Every time a blog post is added to the SEO page, it appears here because it is the most recent blog post that’s related to our SEO services. Fresh content. You’ll see that exactly the same thing happens on this page when we add new testimonials and case studies, too. Fresh content. But that’s not all. Head over to our homepage and you’ll find the same setup there. That’s right – even more fresh content.

Let’s tally it up – that’s one page that we’ve created, and it’s had a knock-on effect of automatically updating four other pages on our website without us needing to do any additional work. All we had to do was select the correct category for the blog post when we initially uploaded it.

What are the Other Benefits of Regularly Updated Content?

Not only is this good for SEO because Google likes fresh content, but it also increases the amount of internal links we have, making it even easier for search bots to crawl our website, index pages, and rank us in the search results pages. The regularly updated content also gives our visitors a more interesting experience because the website could be different each time they visit. And finally, this is a great CRO strategy. Imagine a visitor lands on a service page on our website, but wants more information on our services. On our SEO service page, visitors can see that we are experts in what we do because our latest blog post is listed there. It’s dated too, so they know we’re active and that our knowledge is up to date. They can also see that we have done this before because of the case study, and they can see that our customers are happy because of the testimonial. It’s all right there on the page and they don’t even need to go looking for it – they can just click through if they want to read more. Isn’t that person more likely to pick up the phone than if they had landed on a page that simply told them about the SEO services we offer? Wouldn’t your website benefit from a similar setup?

Of course, this strategy requires you to update your blog regularly, write case studies and gather testimonials. But if you put a little work in you could be greatly rewarded with the benefits of better brand awareness, more traffic to your website and increased conversion rates.

As technical professionals with SEO expertise, we have the knowledge to implement the kind of website architecture that sends us higher up Google’s rankings – and we do the same for our clients.

If you would like any help with your website design, SEO or content, get in touch with SilverDisc.