Your website might serve many basic purposes – telling people about your business, giving product and price details and letting them know how to find you.
Depending on your type of business, you might think there’s no value in putting too much ‘extra’ content on your site, or adding to it over time. But you could be missing some big opportunities – to build customer relationships, boost SEO and keep your site’s value high.
Here are some good reasons to keep your web content fresh.
Engage by providing added value
If you’re trying to attract prospects and keep existing customers, you need to give them a reason to engage with your brand.
Ideally, you want a ‘sticky’ website that people come back to again and again – building the relationship and your reputation. The best way to achieve this is with a flow of fresh, entertaining and reliably expert content.
If your site appears inactive, people won’t come back – making them prime targets to be poached by competitors.
The Google ‘freshness factor’
Content is what brings search engines to your site, and what helps them rank pages. In 2001 Google announced it was introducing a ‘freshness factor’ to its algorithm for some topics – treating newly-uploaded content as more ‘relevant’ and so ranking it higher in results.
Regularly-updated content – eg on current industry news and events – could help you take advantage of this, boosting SEO.
Refine keywords over time
If you want to get the best SEO results for your site, it’s important that you keep looking at what’s working and what isn’t, and improving your approach.
Keyword research is something you should be refining continually, as you discover what’s important to your customers and what works best for driving traffic from search engines.
Adding fresh content regularly gives you a change to weave in these popular keywords as you discover them.
Keep your ad space value high
If you sell advertising space or sponsorship on your website, a steady stream of traffic is all-important to keep the value of that space high.
A stagnant site won’t attract a turnover of potential customers, and so won’t be desirable to advertisers – a big problem if that’s how you’re funding the site.
