A common question clients ask us when discussing SEO and content marketing is how often should I be updating my website content? The truth is there is no one size fits all, and the answer to this question can depend on what type of business you own and what industry you work in.
Content is the backbone of any online presence, whether for social media, newsletters or SEO. It forms the basis of all marketing efforts and connects your business with your customers. As important as content is, it is essential to balance quality and quantity - too little content and you won't see the results you need; too much and you risk diluting the message or even protracting from the end goal. Business owners often get hooked on adding new content and forget about existing content, which can lead to issues for SEO and your overall online presence.
Updating existing content should form part of your regular marketing tasks. This blog will explore the benefits of updating existing website content and how often you should do it.
Content can quickly become outdated through changes in the industry, the marketplace, legislative changes, or even just derailed from your current business goals. There are also marketing and SEO benefits to updating existing content, such as adding new internal links or updating poor-performing blog posts to get more from them.
Some of the main reasons to keep on top of your old content and consider updating it include the following:
How often you should update your website content depends on your business and what type of content you post. However, a content audit every six months should allow you to spot trends and avoid any potential issues arising from outdated or underperforming content. It is essential, however, not to get too trigger-happy with this, for instance, if you are updating content to improve SEO and a post is only a few weeks or even a few months old but is not pulling in the desired amount of clicks organically, it could just need more time.
If you are time-poor, and let us face it, most business owners are, and you cannot afford to outsource your content and SEO, an excellent habit to get into is to do little and often. So it could be that you set aside an hour or two a week and work on your oldest content to your newest, and then when reaching the end, repeat the process where required.
To optimise existing content, you first need to gather data to see if it needs to be optimised. There are many tools to do this online, some that can be used pay-as-you-go, others that require a monthly subscription, so it isn't always cheap. However, one free way to do this is to use Google Search Console.
Google Search Console will tell you all you need to know about your posts from an organic search perspective. If you mix this with any analytics you have about internal clicks, you can see how many clicks your content gets, both organic and internal, and decide if it needs to be improved or removed. We would always recommend improvement before removal, but if you have tried to optimise the content once or twice and it is still not performing well - removal is probably the best option.
Things to look out for when looking at the data:
Things you can do to optimise existing content include:
Try to keep content optimisation simple; do not try to overcomplicate it. It can be as simple as changing a few sentences in the opening paragraph to adding internal links that can make all the difference to your content.
We are a team dedicated to web development, web design and SEO. Based in Stockport, Greater Manchester, we have been helping business owners all over the UK and beyond with their website needs, including SEO and content marketing. We offer a wide range of SEO services to help your business grow online and can help you with your content marketing and content optimisations! If you need help contact the team today!
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