Importance of Fresh and Updated Website Content

Any SEO or web design professional will tell you how vital content is within the online marketing realm, and recent periods of time have seen some changes within the blog and content world. In particular, there’s been a trend toward Google and other search engines prioritizing more recent and updated blog content over older blogs, even if these older blogs are on more authoritative sites.

At SEO Werkz, content creation is one significant arm of our comprehensive white label search engine optimization services, which include everything from web design and basic SEO optimization to PPC. As marketing pros and content creators look to adjust to new trends within the blog and content world, it’s important to differentiate between updating old content and creating “fresh” content – and to understand the major value both areas hold in increasing site traffic and conversions.

Updating Old Content Vs. Creating Fresh Content

First and foremost, it’s vital to separate these two areas, which may seem similar but are not the same. Fresh content, as the name suggests, involves creating entirely new blogs or other forms of content from scratch, creating brand-new pages for the website. These pages help the site rank for new or existing keywords, often assisting companies with adding long-tail keywords or phrases that don’t fit well in other locations.

Updating old content, on the other hand, refers to repurposing or otherwise refreshing previously published content. Both of these approaches have significant benefits in the right situations – the rest of part one of our series will focus on the benefits of updated content and some tips on which content to target for updates.

Updating Benefits

There are several specific areas of SEO and content creation that see direct benefits from updating and repurposing old content, including:

• Reader trust: Content that’s been updated shows readers and prospective clients that not only are you interested in providing content, you’re taking the time to refresh it and keep readers informed of the latest information.
• Backlinks: Being the first to update relevant content often means you’ll be able to poach backlinks from other sites that have not updated similar content, especially when using a backlink checker tool.
• SEO best practices: As anyone in the SEO world knows, it has undergone several massive changes over the years, even just in recent years. Updating content allows you to bring any areas that are not up to current standards to the proper place.

Content to Update

Which kinds of content should you be shooting to update, refresh or repurpose? A few good options:

• High-traffic pages: Looking at pages that have done well in the past is always a good route, particularly with an eye toward which can help you even further grow traffic for a given product or service area. If you have new content related to the old post, or if the topic is in the public eye for some reason, these are also good themes.
• Quality links: If you recognize blogs on your site that have built solid link profiles on other sites but need help with ranking, refreshing them can help rankings in major ways.
• Keyword impressions: Some blogs on your site may have plenty of keyword impressions, but for whatever reason did not rank well initially. There are several approaches here to boost these kinds of posts, which our pros will be happy to detail.

Fresh Content Importance

You might be wondering: If updated content has such a positive impact, as we went over in part one, why worry about creating large amounts of fresh content to begin with? Well, because the benefits are very different – and actually complement prudent repurposing efforts in several ways.

When it comes to site visitors, fresh content is a big part of what keeps them coming back to your site. Think about your preferred news source as an example; if you went to it and saw weeks- or months-old content, it wouldn’t be your preferred source a whole lot longer, would it? Not every site will need to be updated as often as a news outlet, of course, but this theme applies to a variety of consumer-facing websites – fresh content will keep both old and new visitors’ eyes on your pages, including many of those who may not have been on your site otherwise.

Direct Impact on SEO

Fresh, quality content impacts SEO efforts in multiple ways:

• Keyword optimization: While SEO pros in generations past might have been able to simply stuff important keywords into sites without any relevant or engaging content, Google and other search engines eliminated keyword stuffing and related practices years ago. For this reason, strong, fresh content is often your single best tool for keyword optimization.
• User activity: New content allows you to build a returning audience and build traffic, which in turn increases authority for your site.
• Crawlers: Search engine crawlers, or bots that search sites, are can spot fresh pages and see when pages have been updated. These kinds of content will improve rankings on organic search results. The more you publish, the more often you’ll be re-indexed, leading to greater improvements.
• Link-building: Finally, adding new pages also creates a new link for your website. This will increase your ability to interlink between pages and build backlinks, which refer to another website hyperlinking to yours – backlinks are a big deal for establishing credibility and authority in your industry.