It’s a common misconception that once you create and upload a piece of content to your website, the hard work is done.
In reality, even evergreen content (content that stays relevant indefinitely) needs to be updated regularly to stay fresh and see maximum SEO benefit.
While it’s important to have a steady stream of new content on your website, it’s equally important to ensure your existing content is up-to-date.
Here’s what you need to know about updating your content to keep your search engine rankings healthy.
Why should you update your website content?
Google’s algorithm looks at a page’s ‘freshness’ when determining its rank in search results. When a piece of content is first published it’s naturally going to be seen as fresh, but this decreases over time.
Updating website content signals to Google that the page is still relevant. In other words, regularly making changes to your content helps ensure it continues to rank in search engine results. Moreover, fresh content provides a better experience for your audience.
However, it’s not enough to simply edit the ‘published’ date on a blog or add a new heading to a landing page. Changes made to ‘important’ areas of a page (such as the body text) signal freshness to search engines more than minor tweaks – so updates should be substantial enough to make an impact.
What types of content should be updated?
Generally, all your website content can benefit from being reviewed and updated regularly. This includes your:
- Homepage
- About page
- Product or service landing pages
- Blogs
And any other pages with text or other content on your website.
If you are a local business and trying to actively promote your business through your free Google Business Profile then we also recommend that you ensure your About page and Product or Services landing page is optimised with specific locations and other local information that aligns with your Google Business listing. This will help you drive more traffic from local searches and other ‘near me’ search enquiries.
RELATED: How to optimise your website for local SEO.
How often should you update your website content?
There’s no hard-and-fast answer to this question and it really depends on the type of content and how often you can manage it (small business owners are busy enough as it is).
Having an effective content strategy also helps, as this provides you with a framework for not only the frequency of your content creation but also the target keywords and themes that you want to discuss and share with your audience. We have a great Content Strategy template that you can download for free which may help you get started if you don’t already have one in place. Click here to download it.
With that said, core website pages such as your homepage and About page could benefit from being updated every six months or so. Other pieces of content such as evergreen articles and landing pages should be updated more regularly to ensure they’re relevant and informative.
Also consider the performance of individual pages. If a piece of content such as a landing page or long-form article was once generating traffic to your site but has started to slow down, it may be a sign that it’s time to update.
RELATED: 9 basic SEO tips to help boost your Google rank.
Find out how your content is performing.
Before you go in and start updating or refreshing your website content, you need to know how each piece is performing. You can either do this on your own using a marketing metrics tool like Google Analytics or enlist the help of a digital marketing team like Yellow Pages.
If you’re doing the digging yourself, hop into Google Analytics and click on Reports > Behaviour > Site Content > Content Drilldown. Once you’re in this section, you should be able to see the breakdown of traffic for different sections of your website, such as to your blog or homepage.
Once you have this, you can begin to separate your content into:
Top-performing pieces of content: the best measure of success is to see which posts have the highest page views, visitors, or average time on page. In short, they’re helping more people discover and engage with your business online. These posts should be refreshed regularly.
Under-performing pieces of content: this could be a blog post with a high number of page views but a low average time on site (<1 minute), or a blog post with a high time on site but fewer page views. With a bit of tweaking, you can ensure these content pieces work harder for your website (more on that below).
RELATED: 7 reasons why your content isn’t being read.
How to keep content fresh.
Google loves new content and almost always prioritises relevant, updated web pages in search results. But don’t worry — you don’t need to completely rewrite your blog post every year! If your content hasn’t been updated in a year or more, follow these simple steps to give it a refresh:
Update any quotes and statistics that are in the blog post, so everything is as relevant and timely as possible. At the same time check your links and remove or replace any broken or outdated ones..
Update the post time. Simply go into your content management system (such as WordPress or Wix) and click ‘edit’ on your existing post. From there, you can adjust the publish time to a more recent date.
Tips for updating your website content.
Add 200 words or so of new text: Regardless of what type of content you’re updating, adding new text is an easy way to keep it fresh. You can also replace old text with new text if you don’t want the page to be too text-heavy.
Review your keywords: Search queries change over time, so it’s a good idea to do some research and make sure your content is still optimised with relevant keywords.
People also ask: Using this feature in google is a great way to gather research and subheadings within your content, simply enter your most relevant keywords and use the “People may ask” drop down menu, gather a few relevant questions and implement answers into your content.
Change your headings and subheadings. Make sure your headings and subheadings contain keywords, or they are answering “People may ask” questions
Check your links: Ensure all the links in your content still work, and if not, update or remove them.
Add imagery. Google wants to display websites that cater to a diverse set of users and their content preferences. If your blog content only features text, try adding a few images (and even a video) to improve the diversity of content on the page. Find great stock images here.
Content length. With the new age of Tik Tok and AI generated content, shorter concise content seems to be doing better, people want quick answers. Longer content is still ranking high but based on data it’s now levelling out. It’s predicted that shorter content will be ranking higher in the future so keep that in mind.
Check your links: Ensure all the links in your content still work, and if not, update or remove them.
Make sure it’s valuable: Above all, your website content should be helpful and relevant to your audience. With this in mind, the most important consideration is to make sure your content is still accurate and valuable (which will help your rankings as well).
For example, if you’re an accountant, a guide on how to create a Christmas budget would be considered valuable and relevant content. An article about how to choose Christmas decorations, on the other hand, would not.
Don’t forget about new content: Creating new content regularly is still important, and should be a part of your overall content marketing strategy.
Keeping a website updated does take time, but the results are worth it. Your audience will appreciate the value you provide, and you’ll achieve more SEO benefits for every piece of content you create.
The team at Yellow Pages provides expert digital marketing advice and products that boost your business’ online presence. From an online listing to digital display or social media ads, we’ll tailor a digital marketing strategy designed for your business. Find out more.
