The Importance of Fresh Content to SEO

SEO experts are likely familiar with the phrase “Content Is King.”

Bill Gates wrote an essay that had the same title. Gates predicted that the internet would be driven by content. Years later, content still reigns supreme. Your website is an online living entity. 

Each update to your website after it has been “live” online plays a role in interacting with visitors, customers, search engines, and other users. Search engines may view a static website as dead if it has no updates.

Quality content attracts people to your site and makes them want to buy whatever product or service you offer. How can your website be distinguished and dominate the search engine rankings game if this is true? 

What does SEO Companies Australia mean by fresh content, and how does it affect your ranking?

What Is Fresh Content?

It is essential to keep your content current. Fresh content is up-to-date information. Visitors will value the most current, reliable, and relevant information that answers their questions. 

Google determines that your website provides valuable information when visitors spend more time learning about it. This is one key factor that influences your site’s rankings.

Google may not automatically rank your new blog post or your new webpage just because it has a new page. However, it is fresh, keyword-rich, well-written content that matters.

Fresh Content: Does It Affect SEO?

The short answer to that question is “YES.” Site visitors are drawn to high-quality, fresh content. Your website will attract new visitors if it regularly publishes relevant and new content. This will help you build loyal followers who will continue to visit your site every time you post.

Search engines use web crawlers or bots to locate new content and index it to show up in search results for a query. Google’s algorithm is continually updated to ensure that websites that appear first on search results pages value users.

Keyword Optimization: What Role Does It Play?

Keyword optimization is essential for fresh content. Your targeted keywords should appear organically and regularly in any new content you publish. Regularly publishing new, keyword-optimized content will build your authority in your niche and increase organic traffic to your site. 

You can see the importance of fresh content for SEO by improving your rankings. You can only damage your website if you stuff your content with irrelevant keywords to manipulate your rank. Keyword stuffing is now a Google offense and can get your website penalized.

Ways to Improve Content Freshness Score

Let’s quickly review some of the best practices and tips for incorporating the content freshness element into your SEO strategy.

1. Publish evergreen content.

It doesn’t mean you have to publish content on every topic. As we have seen, the rate at which you create new pages is your freshness score. It would be best to create new content regularly, regardless of whether it is time-sensitive or evergreen. Google will crawl your site more frequently if you publish content regularly.

2. Update old content.

This Google research publication explains that search engines can’t crawl every page due to the massive amount of new content published each day. Google crawls pages based on the frequency of content updates.

You can improve your freshness score by updating outdated content frequently. This will make it easier to rank your time-sensitive content.

While it’s common to update the article’s publication date and year, Google doesn’t find this a good signal of freshness. Google values changes to pages’ main body more than the adjustments to date/time tags. This means that you will need to change the core content.

And if you end up with weaker engagement metrics, that certainly can harm your ranking.

3. Check the SERP.

It is easiest to determine the degree of freshness users want by looking at the publication dates. You can look at the top 10 to 20 results and determine their average age. To be more accurate in your calculations, you should weigh the highest-ranking results.

4. Submit to Google Search Console.

If you want to have Google crawl your content faster, you can resubmit the sitemap to Google Search Console after updating your core content. This will speed up the process of Google recrawling your updated content. 

Google will discover the changes automatically, so this is generally not worth it if you have more minor changes.

How to Know if You Need to Freshen Your Content

Keep track of your page performance to understand content freshness, including traffic trends, engagement, and other metrics.

1. Check keyword and query data.

2. Track performance metrics.

3. Keep an eye on impressions and clicks.

4. Look at position history.

Key Takeaway

You can rank high in search engines with excellent web writing! To increase your pages’ engagement and conversion rate, there are Denver SEO experts who can help you create informative and up-to-date content specific to your business.