All of our SEO campaigns include the creation of fresh, optimised content that is written and loaded to your website each month. It is a critical part of any SEO campaign, but it is also one of the SEO package inclusions I get asked about the most.
In this article I’m going to break down the importance of fresh content and the role that it plays in the success of your SEO campaign. I’m going to tell you about the six different SEO ranking signals that relate to fresh content, and I’m also going to share some of the benefits that blogging in particular has for how well your website performs in Google.
Why do I need fresh content or blogs for my SEO campaign?
This is the question I get asked the most when I am discussing our SEO packages with prospective clients. They want to know what the impact on the campaign will be if we cut the blogs, or whether they can produce the blog articles internally to reduce costs.
Fresh content is a crucial factor in an SEO campaign. Search engines like Google prioritise fresh, high-quality content because it indicates that a website is active and relevant. Websites that regularly update their content are more likely to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) than websites that have stale or outdated content.
In addition to improving search engine rankings, fresh content can also help attract visitors to a website. When visitors see that a website is frequently updated with new content, they are more likely to return to the site and share the content with others.
However, it’s important to note that simply creating new content alone is not enough to boost SEO rankings. The quality of the content is just as important as its freshness. In order to achieve the best SEO results, it’s essential to create high-quality content that is relevant, informative, and engaging for your target audience.
That’s where our SEO copywriters come in – they write fresh content for your website that is both interesting as well as optimised for Google. While we are open to working with your internal team to produce some of the content, we recommend that the blogs are sent to our team of copywriters to review and optimise before they are loaded to your website.
SEO Ranking Signals that Relate to Fresh Website Content
There are a number of ranking signals that directly relate to fresh website content. Think of ‘ranking signals’ like criteria that determine how well your website performs in Google. There are over 200 ranking signals that feed into Google’s algorithm, and a lot of them directly relate the quality, quantity, and freshness of the content on your website.
Here are six of the most important signals that relate to how new or fresh your website content is:
Frequency of updates:
Websites that are updated frequently rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) than those with infrequent updates.
Publication date:
Google pays attention to the publication date of content and gives preference to more recently published content. This is especially true for news-worthy content like blogs.
Content relevancy:
Search engines look for fresh content that is relevant to the search query. Websites that provide up-to-date, informative, and relevant content are more likely to rank higher.
User engagement:
Search engines also consider how users interact with content on a website. Fresh content that generates high levels of engagement, such as social shares, comments, and backlinks, is considered to be of higher quality.
Content length and depth:
Longer and more in-depth content performs better in search results than shorter, less comprehensive content.
Content diversity:
Offering diverse content formats, such as video, images, infographics, and podcasts, can also help keep a website fresh and engaging for visitors.
Adhering to these ‘ranking signals’ by creating and updating fresh content that is relevant and engaging for your target audience can improve your website’s SEO rankings and drive more traffic to your site.
What are the SEO Benefits of Adding Fresh Content to Your Website?
There are several SEO benefits of adding fresh content to your website. Here are some of the most important ones.
Improved search engine rankings:
Fresh content can help to improve your website’s search engine rankings. Search engines like Google prioritise fresh, high-quality content because it indicates that a website is active and relevant.
Increased organic traffic:
When you regularly add fresh content to your website, you can attract more organic traffic from search engines. This can lead to more website visitors, more leads, and more conversions.
Enhanced user engagement:
Fresh content can also help to improve user engagement on your website. When visitors see that a website is frequently updated with new content, they are more likely to return to the site and share the content with others.
Increased social media visibility:
Fresh content can also help to increase your social media visibility. When you share new content on social media, it can attract more likes, shares, and followers, which can help to improve your overall social media presence.
Improved website authority:
By regularly adding fresh, high-quality content to your website, you can establish your website as a trusted authority in your industry. This can help to improve your website’s overall authority and reputation, which can lead to higher search engine rankings, more traffic, and more conversions.
Adding fresh content to your website can have significant SEO benefits. By building out a body of relevant content – a mixture of blogs, whitepapers, videos, case studies, portfolio pages and galleries – you are proving your authority and credibility. To both Google AND your prospective customers.
How Important is blogging for SEO?
We’ve talked about how important fresh content is for SEO – but how important are blogs specifically? Why do SEO campaigns champion blogs over many other forms of content like video, case studies, testimonials and more?
Blogging has a number of benefits that relate specifically to SEO. While other forms of content like videos or testimonials might help boost engagement or promote your product, blog articles are usually focused on sharing information and knowledge.
Blogs allow you to the opportunity to capture people during the research phase of the customer cycle, and to start building a relationship with them from day one. You can target question-based search queries. A really really good example of this is the blog article you’re reading right now.
The title of this blog article is directly related to a question that people frequently type into Google. By answering it, we are educating people who are starting to think about engaging an SEO service for their brand or business. We are putting our business in front of them in a helpful and non-salesy or pushy manner. Hopefully, as they are researching SEO, they will keep stumbling across our blogs and find them helpful – increasing our chances of being the business that they contact first when they are ready to purchase.
There are some of benefits that regular blogging has for your SEO campaign including:
Fresh content:
As I’ve already covered, regular blogging allows you to meet the requirements of those six ranking signals related to fresh content. Search engines like Google prefer websites that are updated frequently with high-quality content.
More Content = More Keywords:
The more content and pages you have on your website, the more opportunities you have to target a wider range of keywords. Blogging gives you the opportunity to target specific and niche keywords that might not be relevant to the core content pages of your website – but which are valuable for your target audience.
Internal linking:
Blogging also allows you to create internal links within your website. Internal linking can help to improve your website’s structure and make it easier for search engines to crawl and index your site.
Backlinks:
This is a big one. Backlinks are a key factor in SEO, and having high-quality backlinks can help to improve your website’s search engine rankings. Creating high-quality and informative blog articles can help you attract backlinks organically. People who find your blogs helpful will reference them in their own content, providing you with free backlinks.
Social media:
Blogging also provides you with content to share on social media. We often create multiple social media posts from a single blog article – pulling out facts, or nuggets of information to share in bite-sized pieces via our socials.
Tips for Adding Fresh Content to Your Website:
If you struggle to sit down and write blog articles or long-form content for your website, there are some ‘tricks’ that you can try to help you meet the ‘fresh content’ requirements of Google.
These won’t be enough to get you to the top of Google if you’re in a competitive industry or are targeting high-volume keywords. But they will be enough to keep your head above water for a month or two if you’re time strapped.
Repurpose Social Media Posts:
If you’ve been fairly active on social media, round up a handful of your best performing social media posts and dump the text and image into a single blog article with a title like “April Round Up”. Add a couple of sentences as intro about how busy you’ve been this month, but here are a couple of highlights from the past month.
Cast Studies or Project Pages:
If you’re struggling to come up with a new topic to talk about on your blog, then add a project page or case study instead. A simple framework for this is:
- An introductory paragraph describing the client and the project.
- A paragraph describing the goals / key deliverables of the project.
- A paragraph describing the biggest challenge of the project and how you overcame it.
- A paragraph describing any highlights or ways you exceeded the client’s expectations.
- A concluding paragraph thanking the client and letting people know how to get in touch with you if they have a similar project in mind.
- If possible, get a testimonial or comment from the client to go along with the project page.
Refreshing and Republishing Old Content
Revisit a blog article from a few years ago and update it. Edit it to include some more recent examples, or additional information. Add another 200-300 words to the piece and then republish with today’s date.
Fresh Content and SEO
Fresh content and your SEO campaign go hand-in-hand. Not only does it help you meet the requirements of Google ranking signals, but it also provides a number of additional benefits, most notably the ability to target a broader range of keywords.
If you need help producing high quality content for your SEO campaigns, then get in touch to discuss how the team at BeKonstructive Marketing can help.
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