How often should you update your website content?

Benefits of Freshening Your Content

The answer to the question is one to three times per week. We can narrow that down further once we describe why it’s important to constantly update your website.

New content on your website accomplishes many good things, including:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO for short)

Search engines are pretty smart. They like long articles with new, unique content written to high quality standards. A steady diet of new content increases visits from your friendly web crawler. The crawler updates its index of your site, which makes it easier for searchers to find you. You can increase the benefit by setting up internal links according to SEO best practices.

Social Media

Every time you add content, you need to broadcast it to your social media channels so that the awaiting world has the benefit of your latest insights. This kind of promotion is critical to your success. New content is the fuel that keeps your social media fires burning.

Visitors

Your mission is to serve your visitors with useful, engaging content, written with punch and verve. Fresh content makes website visitors happy, especially if it is topical. But don’t overlook evergreen content offering authoritative information that never goes stale. It goes like this: Your new content raises your page rank so that you are more prominent in search results, giving you more visitors. Once they arrive and are impressed by your content, they may be willing to register, become prospects, and convert to customers. They may even recommend your website to others.

Competitors

All things being equal, a customer would probably be drawn to a website with fresh content than an equivalent one covered in cobwebs. So, adding content is a way to steal customers from your competitors and keeping your current customers happy. The same thinking applies to your customer support forum (you do have one, don’t you?). If you’ve let it sit for months or years, it’s an admission that your business is moribund, and customers shouldn’t expect support from you.

Links

When you have plenty of new, authoritative content, you increase the chances that other websites will link to yours. There is nothing that boosts your prominence more than becoming a target for external links. That’s one of the surest ways to get your listing on page one of search results.

What Constitutes Fresh Content?

Fresh content is unique content that is new to your website, not to the web. By unique, we mean that the all-knowing web crawling overlords don’t recognize your content as a copy of someone else’s. That’s a definite no-no — it can cause you to lose page ranking can even get you delisted from search engines. You can cover popular topics, but make sure you cover them in your own, unique way.

A word about quality. We’ve seen websites in which a business sacrificed quality for supposed SEO advantages. For example, someone has decided that you need to use many, many connective words at the start of sentences. Typically, these are adverbs like “typically.” It’s like salt in the bouillabaisse — too much ruins the soup. Be guided by well-formed, grammatical sentences. They can be short, but they should have perfect spelling and punctuation. Nouns and verbs must agree. Mixed tenses are not good, and never have been.

So, How Many Updates?

We’re assuming you run a small business, perhaps supporting an e-commerce store. What content can you add? A few things come to mind: Detailed product reviews, articles on how to use your offerings, product comparisons, and articles about your niche. That’s a lot of ground to cover, so you have plenty to write about. If that vaguely describes your business, we urge you to add fresh material one to two times per week. But remember, one high quality article is much better than two schlocky ones.

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