In the ever-evolving digital landscape, fresh and relevant content is crucial to maintaining a competitive edge and ranking well in search results. This guide will provide you with effective strategies to ensure your content remains up-to-date, valuable, and appealing to your target audience. By implementing these content SEO practices, you can stay ahead of the game and boost your online visibility.
How to create fresh content
Keeping your content fresh is all about providing a new take or new information to your audience. Content SEO is about providing value to your subscribers and website visitors, not just churning out or replicating the same information as everyone else.
Here are some ideas to consider for keeping the content across your website fresh and relevant:
Explore the latest hot topics in your industry
It’s difficult to be the ‘first’ to write about a topic, however keeping your finger on the pulse and being aware of the latest updates or business news within your industry can certainly help.
As part of your content marketing strategy, review what’s already out there, examine the posts that are ranking well, and identify what you can add to your content that would create additional value for the reader. Reviewing existing posts and identifying gaps is a great way to identify new types of content you can consider such as case studies, real-life examples, quotes from key stakeholders, or the latest statistics to provide your audience with a fresh perspective.
Collaborate with influencers and/or thought leaders
Writing about opinions and thoughts outside your organization is a great way to introduce new ideas and provide value to your audience. Reach out to them via social platforms like Twitter or via journalist request services such as “SourceBottle” to source the unique ideas, insights, and opinions of others. Incorporating external insights from individuals with an authoritative reputation in your industry not only benefits your audience by offering fresh perspectives but also boosts credibility for your business.
Publish surveys and reports
Survey results or reports are a popular form of content marketing because they provide unbiased information collected from a range of sources, making it credible. This information can usually provide the reader with an accurate picture of the landscape within their industry, which can go on to support decision-making.
You can create surveys using tools such as Typeform which involves writing questions and distributing them to gather valuable data which presents accurate industry insights to your audience.
The important part of this type of content is identifying how you can surface results that will be interesting and of value to your readership to support their decision-making processes.
Update your existing content
You don’t always have to reinvent the wheel. Updating your older blog posts is a great way to ensure your content is always kept up to date.
Squeezing all the marketing potential out of your existing resources also makes great business sense. As much as 50% of content from enterprises goes completely unused.
Review your analytics to identify and focus on those posts that perform well or are evergreen content (that means content that remains useful and relevant for a long time after publication).
You may not need to completely rewrite the content, but it’s likely you’ve learned new things or information has changed, and have more current examples to talk about. You may need to make some updates to the text in the main body of the page, as well as any links you’ve used, to ensure the content maintains its relevance and value long-term.
Tips for keeping content fresh
In addition to creating fresh content, consider the following tips for maintaining your existing content’s freshness.
Let people know when a post has been updated
If you’ve updated an older post, make this clear in your post. For example, add a modified date to the top of the post, and ensure you update the post date when you re-publish.
This makes a positive difference both for Google and the website visitor as it shows your content is current, relevant and can be trusted for accuracy.
Use the date in your titles
Depending on the content, some topics can benefit from including the year published in the title. For example, it’s likely that Google will prioritize ‘Your 2023 Guide to Digital Marketing’ over ‘Your Guide to Digital Marketing’ when it comes to spotting fresh content, and so will your target website visitors as it will be automatically perceived as up-to-date.
Maintain fresh content across your site
It’s not just about focusing on refreshing your blog pages. Keeping your whole website up to date is important, including your ‘about us’, ‘homepage’, and of course any writer bios that you include under your marketing content. Keeping all page types regularly updated provides trust signals to Google and users that your website is active and highly relevant at all times.
Promote your content
To increase the visibility of your content and attract fresh backlinks, make sure you shout about your content via social media and email when it’s posted, or if you are re-posting your content once it’s been updated. The more exposure your content receives, the more likely others will find it and reference it on their web pages with links.
Broken links
Broken links can negatively impact your site’s quality, user experience and ultimately rankings.
You can regularly check for broken links using the Broken Link Checker extension for Google Chrome. It’s a free extension that allows you to test for broken links across your web pages and address these issues to provide a seamless experience for crawlers and users and maintain the credibility of your content.
Maintain topic consistency
Updating your posts is important, however, be careful not to update them past the point of recognition. If your content changes too far from the original, ”search engines are likely to devalue such behavior.”
For example, if you have an old post about digital marketing, which slowly over time turns into a post about website development, those older links will become less valuable, reducing the perceived ‘quality’ of your post by Google and harming its visibility.
Final thoughts
When it comes to content SEO tactics, consistently providing fresh and valuable content is a no-brainer. Google rewards websites that offer fresh, innovative and valuable content, and your goal should be to always provide that to your audience, whether this is for SEO purposes or not. By following the practices outlined above such as staying updated on industry trends, incorporating external perspectives, and effectively updating existing posts, you can attract and engage your audience. By continually revisiting your older content and adding to it with new and useful articles, you can ensure a steady stream of quality content that appeals to both search engines and your audience.
The SEO Works have decades of experience in offering content marketing and SEO services and have worked with businesses in a huge range of industries to elevate their online presence in search. Speak to the team today for more information or for a free quote.
