7 Reasons to Update your Website Content
If you want to get more traffic to your website, refreshing old content is the perfect way to do just that. Writing a business blog is a great way to boost your SEO by adding more content to your site, similarly, refreshing the old content on your website can prove to be just as fruitful an investment of your time.
Consider your business when it launched vs where it is today; think about the language you use, the services you offer, and even the images you chose back then to best represent your business online; these are all things that will have changed with time.
In this post, we explain seven reasons why updating your old content needs to be top of your to-do list.
Why is content important for SEO?
Good content can help you attract more people to your site, and it’s one of the most effective ways to get high-quality backlinks and boost your SEO. Quality copywriting delivers a great user experience, and it can help your site rank higher for any relevant keywords.
When writing content for a website, people often get confused about whether they should focus on SEO copywriting tactics or the content itself. But in reality, they both are interrelated.
Great website content should contain relevant keywords that fit naturally into the content, and not overused just for the sake of squeezing them in. If your website content was written some time ago, then the chances are, Google has made many changes to their algorithm since it was produced. If this is the case, this old content could be severely hampering your SEO efforts.
If you want to make sure your website content is up to date with the latest SEO copywriting guidelines, hire a copywriter to optimise and refresh it for you.
Here are seven reasons why you need to refresh your old website content
Here’s How a Content Refresh Will Boost Your SEO
1 – It’s great for SEO
Top of the list for most website owners and content marketers is SEO. Essentially, this is a key metric that tells you how easily your business can be found online. To quote Content Marketing Guru Neil Patel:
“Your content needs to accomplish two goals: first, appeal to the end-user (customers, clients, prospects, readers, etc.) and second, solve a particular problem.”
Neil Patel – Content Marketing Guru
Good content will encourage more viewers to click on your links, which will, in turn, increase your CTR rate. It will improve your chances of getting better rankings as Google considers CTR as an essential ranking factor for your website. Quality content allows you to give a great user experience, and this is the very foundation of being successful with SEO in 2020.
2 – It’s an opportunity to use more keywords
If you focus on creating new content on a regular basis, it automatically increases the number of keywords on your website. If you never update your content, then Google, (and other search engines of note) will only ever that single set of keywords to use, and without any new content to crawl, you will start to notice your rankings and visibility subside.
95% of people who search online only view the 1st page of a search engine. This is why getting your keywords in order is so important.
Source:Brafton.com
It doesn’t matter what type of content you choose to update your website with. Here’s a list of the different types of content you can publish on your site.
- Business Blogs and Articles
- Press Releases
- Company News
- Client Testimonials
- Case Studies
- New Product and Service Descriptions
- Webpage Copywriting
The fact is, the more quality content you produce, the more relevant keywords you will have on your website, the better optimised those keywords are, the higher your SEO will be.
Now, considering your old website content; if it’s been a while since you updated this, the keywords could no longer be relevant, they could be poorly optimised, and they might not reflect who your business is and what it does in the present day.
Understanding the interrelation between keywords and SEO is imperative if you want your website to succeed online.
3 – It represents your present-day branding
Is your business the same as it was when you originally wrote the content?
Unlikely.
Giving your website a content refresh can help your business portray the company it is, rather than who it was when you first started out. In terms of how this relates to boosting your SEO, it helps give the audience what they’re looking for; an authentic and real overview of what you do and what you stand for. Updating your old website copy will ensure your landing pages, your business blogs, news section, social media, and all other content is relevant, accurate, in-tune with your customers, and that speaks to your market in the right way. Aside from this, a content refresh will update your content to reflect current SEO copywriting practices that optimise your copy according to the latest search guidelines.
4 – It gives you and your website greater authority
Every business strives to prove their authority in their respective field and to be known as experts in their niche. If you write articles for your website on subjects that are relevant to your readers; and these articles are inclusive of relevant keywords and search terms, it can help you establish yourself as an industry authority and give your business the attention it deserves.
Aside from this, it can exponentially boost your domain authority, which is another major SEO factor that takes years to improve upon and develop.
Publishing new articles regularly about your business is a great way to demonstrate your knowledge and expertise. As your viewers benefit from your expertise, your influence will gradually increase. Also, Google tends to index sites that stream regular content. So, the more relevant content you post, the more likely Google is to consider your website as an authoritative figure in your field.
The brand value of any company depends on the trust of the customers. And this trust is built on the usefulness of the advice, the service you give. So, if you regularly publish new useful information about your industry through your website or blog, you can easily acquire this trust.
Writing blogs for your business is also a useful and highly valuable medium for building authority. Blogging is considered to be the 5th most trustworthy source of data, and if you have one, you are adding value to those customers who are looking to research before they buy.
Authority is a MAJOR SEO Factor
Authority as an industry-leader is important, but there’s a couple of other ways authority in SEO matters. To explain this fully, we need to bring out a couple of acronyms; namely EAT and DA.
EAT stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. Yes, this adds another dimension of depth to the importance of authority, but this time, it’s from Google’s perspective. This term was first released back in 2018 as part of Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. These guidelines serve as a rulebook for how the search evaluators at Google assess the quality of a website. One of the major updates released was that not only would they assess a site’s EAT, but they would now also look at the content creators EAT.
This change meant that Authors of content, along with any relevant experience, expertise, or subject credentials, matter now more than ever. THIS MATTERS, because, if your site content is old, and you have not addressed this in a content rewrite, this could be one of many factors that are negatively impacting your SEO.
To finish this section, we must mention Domain Authority or Page Authority as it is also known.
What is Domain Authority?
Also known as DA. It is an SEO ranking score that was created by MOZ to help website owners know how well their site will rank in the search engines. The score range is 1-100.
5 – It gives potential customers the right information about your business
The primary reason most businesses have a website is to inform people about who they, what they do, and how they can help potential customers solve a particular problem or fulfil a need.
For a moment, let’s put SEO to one side, and think of yourself as a customer. Some 20 years ago, when I had the pleasure of working at MBNA in Chester, this phrase was plastered on every doorframe and wall in the building. For those of you who don’t know, MBNA was an American-owned business, and we ‘brits’ often felt their branding and motivational messages that were displayed EVERYWHERE, were, at times, a little too much. However, fast-forward a couple of decades, and this practice is now the norm. But my point is this; you need to think of yourself as a customer – all of the time.
Look at your website through the eyes of a prospective customer, someone who knows nothing about your business or the people in it. Then ask yourself if it speaks to your business and its services or product in the right way, and it if clearly outlines your key value proposition to potential clients.
This is another area where an impartial person can really help give you the perspective you need. When you hire a professional copywriter in the UK, you benefit from their impartiality and their expertise.
Aside from the above point, if you’ve launched new products or services since writing your old website content, or you’ve updated elements of your services, rewriting your website content is a great way to reflect such enhancements.
6 – Keeping up with your competition
This point is going to be short and sweet.
Fresh content on your website has a compounding effect. This means that it will increase your traffic over time. The more fresh content you add to your site, the more attention your business will get. If you aren’t optimising your content for SEO, then you can be certain your competitors will be.
It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, or the products and services you offer, your customers are searching your businesses just like yours. If you fail to capitalise on the huge opportunity content marketing presence, then others in your industry will. In fact, it isn’t simply about keeping up with your competition, the ultimate goal of standing out and beating your competitors can be achieved when you focus on your content, and you regularly update your copywriting.
7 – Put things right, and up your game!
As a business owner, it’s important to stand out for the right reasons online, and refreshing old content on your website gives you the opportunity to correct any spelling or grammar mistakes. If you’ve ever visit3ed a website that has errors in basic spellings, what impression would that have given you of their business at the time? Probably not the best.
Broken links are another major sticking point. There’s nothing more frustrating than finding a page you need, then realising it doesn’t exist anymore. Most people won’t stick around to try and navigate your site to try and find the page they were looking for; instead, they will quickly click back to google and move on to the next page.
Use this tool, broken link checker to do a quick free check of any broken links on the site. It’s a good idea to do this periodically as links can often be changed or moved.
As a final point of interest, rewriting old website content gives you the opportunity to link to better, newer resources. Contrary to what people believe, outbound links are indeed a ranking factor for Google, so linking to high-quality, well-ranking sources online can get you even more brownie points and help you rank higher at the same time.
Closing Words
Whether you choose to write regular blogs, publish case studies, add testimonials, update company news, or refresh old webpages with new content, it’s ALL GOOD. In order to send the right signals to the search engines, you need to keep adding to your site, and you need to commit to publishing new content on a regular basis, weekly if possible.
The benefits of doing this will lead to better visibility of your site online, higher Google rankings, better customer engagement, and it will help to position you and your company as an authority in your industry.
We offer affordable SEO Copywriting for websites. This can help you get professionally written content that speaks to your audience and directly addresses their needs. Contact us or find out how much SEO content costs here.
CleverPen Content is a copywriting agency that focusses solely on writing great content. Our team is comprised of some incredibly talented freelance copywriters from around the globe, and our research team ensure we produce the best content there is. We write website content, blogs, content for brochures, product descriptions, and more.
Over the years, we’ve earned an impeccable reputation, an impressive client list, and we’ve helped content marketers and business owners produce great content that search engines and people love to read.