Your website is your face on the Internet. It’s often the first way potential clients come in contact with your business and with what it has to offer. You want to (1) make sure it’s easy for customers to find you, and (2) provide as much value on your site as possible with the goal of clinching conversions. Performing regular website content audits is the best way to ensure that your website is accomplishing those goals. In this post, we’ll cover how maintaining fresh content increases rankings and customer engagement as well as how to spruce up your website, from creating new content to reconnecting with existing content.
Why say goodbye to stale content
Search engine rankings
Search engines measure all of your documents for freshness using a variety of freshness signals. Newer content gets a higher freshness score. They also look at how much has changed, how often it’s changed, the addition of new pages and new links over time, and what type of content is changed—more important versus less important (more important content would be main body text above the fold)—and more. Based on this info, search engines then give users a ranked list of websites they’ve determined are the most relevant, i.e. fresh.
Moz provides a list of Google’s search ranking factors in order of importance. You’ll notice when looking at the list that when you’re adding new content, you’re often adding—organically—the items they rank for. These items include unique IPs linking to the page, external links to the page, keywords, etc. (You might even be adding Google +1s—#2 on Moz’s list—if you’re promoting your pages on Google+.)
Plus, when search engines’ spiders notice that your site is updated frequently, they’re more likely to come back more often to index your site and find more identifiers that tell the search engine your site is relevant and popular. However, if you’ve succumbed to the dreaded build-it-and-forget-it syndrome, you’ve probably got more tumbleweeds than spiders rolling through your website.
Customer engagement
Beyond rankings and automated spiders, let’s talk about people, namely those lovely beings that you want to buy your products and services, e.g. your current and potential customers. Higher pages rankings will make you more visible to them. Once they find you, you want to make conversion compelling with clear content and stable site architecture. You do that by providing fresh content that answers the questions that are on their mind.
Your customers’ needs are constantly changing, so your content needs to be constantly changing too—in line with those needs—in order to keep them engaged and coming back for more. As you respond to those ever-changing needs, you’ll be continually adding value to their experience on your website (and simultaneously keeping your search engine rankings up so that new clients can find you online).
In turn, repeat visitors will find that you regularly update your website, conveying a healthy business that’s in the know and on the current edge of what’s new and now in your industry. If your content is outdated, customers may think that, by extension, your products and services are out of date. Plus, visitors to your site will be much more likely to share fresh content that they gauge as useful.
Feed the spiders & the people
Now that your palms are sweating over the need to update your website, let’s look at how to go about that.
Firstly, you’ll want to come up with a strategy based on your business goals. What do you want your website to do? Get specific. What are the conversions you want from your site? A few possibles are a phone call, an email, a social media share, and an appointment. Once you know what a conversion is for your site, you can make a game plan that answers to making those conversions happen. This will range from writing new content to potentially updating your site’s architecture to make it easier for clients to navigate where you want them to go, down your conversion paths.
If you’re one of those folks who hasn’t looked at your website in a while, you’ll want to start by reading your website. What exactly did you write on there all those eons ago? Then, you’ll have a better idea of which pages need to be updated. It doesn’t hurt to have someone outside your business read your website too. They’ll be able to see things you won’t. Once you know which pages need to be improved with new or updated content, prioritize them, assign team members to tackle specific pages, and set deadlines.
After you’ve spruced up your existing content, you can look at new ways of adding new pages on a regular basis. Blogs are one excellent way to do this. They can add enormous value to your website, making it a place where potential clients check in regularly. You can provide a taste of the expertise that you can offer potential clients via industry news, opinions, and more. You show your smarts, you give away some knowledge for free, and you get devoted readers.
If you post regularly, it’ll keep your readers, i.e. your potential customers, coming back and checking for new info. You’ll of course also be sharing your blog content across your social media platforms, and that’s one more time (or potentially multiple times if they follow you on more that one social media network) that you’ll get exposure.
If you already have a blog, you can repurpose existing content in several ways:
• Link back to or re-reference earlier articles, especially within a blog, to increase click-throughs and engagement. (See our last link as an example.)
• Create cornerstone pages.
• Add update notifications on old articles to include new and current information (and, ideally, a link to new article that expounds on the topic).
• Re-post articles and info appropriately if the topic is still relevant and/or if it refers to current topics and issues.
• Feature popular topics/activities again along the lines of the #TBT concept, but with a more meaningful spin.
Your website provides endless opportunities for connecting with your customers, old and new. All you have to do is make it easy for them to find you and then provide value that keeps them coming back.
Want your website to stand out from the crowd? We can help with anything from creating a content strategy to evaluating your current site to producing crisp, creative content for your website and blog.
p.s. Extra points for anyone who can guess the number of times the words “fresh” and “freshness” were used in this blog post without counting!
Comments (3)