Why Fresh Content is Critical For SEO

Anyone familiar with SEO is likely familiar with the phrase “Content is king”.

This phrase was actually coined by Bill Gates in 1996, in an essay with the same title. Gates predicted that content would be the driving force behind the internet, and he was correct. Over 20 years later, content is indeed king. More than that: fresh content is king.

Fresh, regularly updated content improves the SEO of a website, driving traffic while also improving website authority on search engines like Google.

Content Marketing Definition

The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as “a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action”

Content is any form of media that shares information and (hopefully) drives traffic to your website. Content comes in the form of blog posts, infographics, videos, quizzes – really any informative piece of media you can put online.

Your website’s content should answer customer questions, share news, or share any pertinent information related to your industry. Content has the power to drive traffic to your website, as it provides information that potential customers are interested in. From content pages, customers can be lead to money pages where they purchase your products or services.

Fresh Content

There is some confusion surrounding the meaning of fresh content, even among those who understand content.

Fresh content is not making small updates or changes to existing pages on your website. While some changes and significant overhauls to existing pages may improve ranking on search engines like Google, slight updates do not dramatically improve SEO.

Fresh content means adding new, fresh pages. One of the most common forms of content is a blog. New blog posts add fresh pages to a website. Adding these pages can help your website rank for more keywords, boosting SEO for keywords relating to the website’s industry.

New content on brand new website pages helps your site target a wider range of keywords. This allows websites to target more long-tail keywords and phrases related to their business. Fresh content pages also create new links for your website for internal and external linking purposes. Backlinks are essential for SEO.

Why is Fresh Content Important?  

While it’s clear that content can drive traffic to your website by answering questions asked by customers, many businesses don’t understand why content matters for SEO.

From a human standpoint, fresh content keeps visitors coming back to your website. If you have a favorite news site, you would be disappointed to check it and see no new content. While updated content is especially important for websites like news outlets, all websites need fresh content to keep users interested and to drive SEO.

Fresh, engaging content will bring new visitors to your site and keep old visitors coming. Content can attract visitors that may not have sought out your products or services before, but who may be converted to customers through careful content writing, retargeting, and conversion rate optimization.

Content and SEO

Content drives traffic to your website and improves SEO, helping your site rank higher on search engine results pages. Fresh content can help SEO for a few reasons, which we’ll go over for a better understanding of the relationship between SEO and content marketing.

Organic Keyword Optimization

Keyword optimization is important to SEO. Domain and landing pages include pertinent keywords to help search engine algorithms read and understand the website so that relevant traffic is driven to the right place.

If your website is an e-commerce site for lighting fixtures, you’d want to make sure that your website includes common keywords and phrases related to buying lighting fixtures. This will help search engines identify what your website is all about and place it in the proper search engine results.

In the past, websites crammed keywords into their websites without actually providing engaging  or relevant content. This is called keyword stuffing, and Google no longer rewards the practice. Now, keywords must be used organically on relevant pages to drive keyword optimization and SEO.

Fresh content improves keyword optimization because you can include the best, most relevant keywords to help your website rank better for those phrases. Publishing new pages with these keywords reminds search engines that your website is relevant to those keywords and will improve search engine positioning and overall SEO.

Search Engine Crawlers

If you know how search engines work, you should be aware of crawlers or spiders that crawl through existing web pages. As these crawlers find new content to index, they recognize fresh pages and can see when a website is actively being updated. When more content is indexed from a website, it can improve ranking on search engine results.

Moreover, the more often you publish new content, your site will be re-indexed. Google will crawl your website on its own, or you can submit new URLs to Google Search Console. When search engines detect a new page on your website, they crawl it so that it can be indexed. This can re-index other pages as well and improve SEO across your website.

Consistent User Activity

Updating content on your website gives visitors more to see. Publishing fresh content regularly can help you build a returning audience, which drives more regular traffic to your site. The more that people come to your website and bring traffic, the more authority your website has on search engines. This will improve SEO and help your page rank higher on search engines.

Link Building and Website Authority

As we’ve said, adding new pages creates a new link for your website with a unique URL. Building these links is important to grow your website and create relevant pages. Interlinking between pages can also help share traffic and improve SEO.

Backlinks, or inbound links, are especially important to SEO. When another website includes a hyperlink to your website, this is a backlink. Backlinks establish credibility, as one website is referencing another. This helps SEO as it gives your website better authority.

Publishing fresh content provides more opportunity for other websites to link to yours. These backlinks shows search engines like Google that your website is an authority on your topic or industry. Building website authority helps the website rank higher, as Google wants to provide accurate, high quality, authoritative information in response to search queries.

Content Marketing Case Study

To show you just how important content is to SEO, check out a case study from our website, Social Buddy. In January of 2019, we began posting consistently on Social Buddy’s blog, and the effect is clear. Traffic has drastically increased just with the addition of steady blog posts.

Google rankings have also steadily improved since the website began putting out consistent content.