Welcome to Day 24 of the the How To Drive SEO Traffic To Your Website Challenge!
Having updated content is very important because it helps build trust, show your expertise, and builds authority. Depending on your niche staying up-to-date can sometimes be difficult. For example, technology and fashion changes a lot, while some topics are truly evergreen like gardening or cooking. A recipe that works today is going to work tomorrow. But, technical advice or fashion advice given today may not work tomorrow.
In addition to content being out of date, there are other reasons to keep your content fresh, updated, and on topic.
Fresh Content Feeds the Search Engines
Remember that content is food for search engines and it’s hungry every single day. That doesn’t mean you must update the content daily, but it does mean that you could update daily and get great results if the content is always valuable, engaging, and useful to your audience while also including the right keywords to bring your target audience to the content.
Follow Trending Industry Topics
One way to stay up-to-date in your industry is to follow trending topics using Google Alerts. Plus, you can sign up for all your competitor’s newsletters and read them regularly. When you follow trending topics, you can often come up with a high-ranking topic to write about almost daily that your audience needs to know.
Keep Your Epic (Cornerstone) Content Up to Date
When you create epic content understand that this is going to have to be updated as often as it changes. When the info changes you should know that you need to change the epic content so that when users read that content it’s correct. You can even note on the content when it was last updated to help your audience.
Make a Note of Outdated Content
Sometimes when you have outdated content you want to keep it because it attracts a lot of traffic. In this case, you may want to use the space to link to a more updated version if you cannot update that specific content. Deleting content that gets a lot of traffic isn’t always the best answer due to this fact.
Update Traffic Generating Posts
Use Google Analytics to determine which posts get the most traffic. Make a schedule to update those periodically so that they always stay current and fresh. You can even change out images, update bullets and SEO as you learn more or as the algorithm changes even if the content itself is still perfect.
Redirect Outdated Content
One way to deal with truly outdated content that gets traffic but is so outdated that even updating it won’t work is to simply redirect it to a similar post containing the same information that the searcher wanted to see.
Keep Your FAQ Updated
This is simple but often overlooked. If you have an FAQ, please update it often so that your users will not get frustrated by erroneous information in the FAQ. Set up a system so that you’re reminded to update the FAQ when certain information comes to light.
Keeping your content updated and fresh on your website or blog is an important part of SEO. This makes your site look good to the search engines and makes your audience trust you more because they know you’re on top of your industry. It can turn into a lot of work so focus on the most popular blog posts and epic content so that you at least keep that up to date and current so that you not only please your audience but the search engines too.
Thank you for joining me! To go to your next lesson simply click the “Next Post” button below.
