It can be difficult to keep putting fresh content on a business site, especially if you are a small business owner trying to maintain the company’s site yourself. Finding or creating new content can be time consuming and it can be expensive to hire someone to create it for your site. You may wonder if it is really necessary to add fresh content on your site to increase your Google ranking and attract potential customers to your business website.
Why Fresh Content Matters
Google’s ranking algorithm has taken the freshness of a website’s content into consideration for many years and it still does. Even after Google updated its algorithm, keeping your site’s content up-to-date will help your site’s ranking on Google improve, sometimes exponentially. However, Google’s algorithm prioritizes certain types of fresh content, such as reviews, current events or topics. Another reason fresh content matters is because people want updated information at their fingertips. They want to read about the latest and greatest consumer gadgets on the market, they may keep up with the news via the Internet or they may just want to be informed when your company is having a sale. Think of it this way, do you want to visit websites with outdated content or that seem to have been forgotten about by the business owner? Probably not.
How Google Measures Content Freshness
Google incorporated a timestamp for content because when a searcher looks up a topic they are interested in, they want to read the most current information they can. However, the timestamp is usually only relevant for news sites, not everyday business websites. The way Google judges freshness for most non-news sites is primarily based on user behavior. Even older sites that were considered outdated can still be relevant to searchers if the recent events has made the site’s content relevant again . Also, an increase in visits via links to the older page indicates to Google the information on the site is still relevant to searchers, giving it a boost in the rankings.
How to Incorporate Fresh Content
A good way to keep a site’s content fresh is to have a blog on the site. Use WordPress to keep customers up-to-date on what is new with your company, inform them about new products or answer questions they may have about how to use your products. Overhauling a website can also help it get a boost in Google rankings.