You hear it all the time in the SEO world. A healthy website is a happy website. The reason being is Google tends to give your website a “pat on the back” if your website is updated regularly.
“Updated regularly” can mean a lot of things. It can be making sure to add new pieces of content to your website, but it can also be updating the content currently on your website! But what pieces of content should you update, and how do you know when you should update them? Here are some of the common reasons to update content on your website!
The information on the page is outdated
Marketing is a constantly changing and evolving industry. There are new trends, changes to algorithms, and updates that make keeping a piece of content up to date very difficult.
While this means more work for you, it also gives you a great excuse to update content on your website. In our Beginner’s Guide To SEO, we talk about something called E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). To summarize E-A-T, all web pages should have some beneficial purpose and should avoid spreading hate, causing harm, or misinforming users.
The best way to gain E-A-T for your website is to not only make sure that the content you’re putting out is the correct information that is updated when things change.
For example, if a new law has been put into place that affects your business you would want to make sure to update your website with the new, updated information.
You added new content that can compliment old content
If you’re adding new content often, there is bound to be content that can complement other pieces of content on your website.
A great example is what we did above. We brought in information from our Beginner’s Guide To SEO, specifically from our Link Building chapter of the guide.
This is important because Google loves to see a healthy “web” of internal links throughout your website that connect pages to one another. This shows a good user experience and that much of your website is connected to a common message. A great way to do this is to bring in content from other pieces of content you’ve published on your website and link back to that specific piece of content. A win-win!
The page has been negatively or positively moving in rankings
If you’re adamant about making sure your website is performing well, something you should be doing is monitoring your website’s analytics. There are a lot of great reasons for doing this, but one of the most important is that you’re able to track what pages of your website brings in traffic organically from SEO.
Make sure you know what these pages are and figure out what keywords people are searching for in order to get to these pages. This can be done by using an SEO tool such as Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest.
If you use a free tool, you’ll probably have to make sure to document what keywords are ranking well. Check this on a regular basis, and if you notice that a specific page has been dropping down the rankings, this is probably a good time for you to update this content.
If you use an SEO company or a premium version of an SEO tool, they should keep this information documented and do this step for you. Regardless, it’s crucial that you have a way of documenting what has been working and what has not.
How often should you update your website’s content?
So now you know some of the common reasons you can update your content, the question is, “How often should you update this content?” And what a great question that is!
The key here, and with most marketing, is consistency. If you want a successful marketing plan, you need to make sure that your plan is organized and you have a plan to succeed in the first place. Everyone’s plan to reach that success is going to be a bit different.
You have to account for the amount of time you have available to you, money available to budget, and the competitiveness of your specific industry. It’s tough to give a cookie-cutter answer here, but we’ll try. We recommend small business owners at the very least to sit down once a month and give your website the attention it needs. Write a new blog, post that blog, update any dated content, check out your analytics, and do a little planning.
The reason we say that it’s tough to give a cookie-cutter answer is that once a month simply might not be enough for what you’re trying to accomplish. Building trust in Google’s eyes in a long-term battle and something we can say with confidence is the more time you spend on your website, the more of this trust you will gain.