Website Maintenance

The why, when and how of updating content

Ongoing website maintenance is essential to keeping your website up to date and friendly with Search Engines such as Google.

It’s important for you and your prospective clients that you are projecting the right messages and the most up-to-date information on your website at all times.

As business’s change, along with their products, services, staff locations, phone numbers and more, it’s important to thoroughly review, check and update your website content.

Website’s that stay fresh with updated content can also see the maximum SEO benefits.

While it’s important to have a steady stream of new content on your website, it’s equally important to ensure your existing content is up to date.

Here’s what you need to know about updating your content to keep your search engine rankings healthy.

Why should you update your website content?

Google’s algorithm (which is forever changing) looks at a page’s ‘freshness’ when determining its rank in search results. When a piece of content is first published it’s naturally going to be seen as fresh, but this may decrease over time.

By having a correctly updated and well-maintained website with fresh new content signals to Google and other search engines that the page is relevant. In other words, regularly making changes to your content helps ensure it continues to rank well in the search engine results pages. What’s more, fresh up to date content provides a better experience for your customers.

Changes made to the core areas of a website page such as the headers and body text signal ‘freshness’ to search engines. These should be substantial enough to make an impact.

What types of content should be updated?

Generally, with most websites, all website content can benefit from being reviewed and updated regularly.

How often should you update your website content?

It’s highly recommended that every website undergoes some website maintenance every six months or so. There are no hard-and-fast rules, and it can depend on the type of content you provide and often your business changes.

Core website pages such as your homepage could benefit from being updated every six months or so. Other website pages and their content such as specific landing pages could be updated more regularly to ensure they are up to date, relevant and informative with the latest information.

Also, consider the performance of all pages. If a piece of content such as a detailed article was once generating traffic to your site but has started to slow down, it may be a sign that it’s time to update.

Tips for updating your website content.

Regardless of what type of content you’re updating, adding new text is an easy way to keep it fresh. Add 200 words or so of new relevant text, potentially some frequently asked questions about the content or you can also replace the old text with new text.

Review your keywords: Search queries from prospective clients change over time, so it’s a good idea to do some research and make sure your content is still optimised with relevant
keywords.

Check your internal and external links to ensure they still work, and if not, update or remove them.

Make sure your new text content is accurate and valuable, because above all, else your website content should be helpful and relevant to your clients and potential clients.

Creating new content regularly is important and should be a part of your overall content marketing strategy.

Keeping a website well maintained and updated as you’ll achieve maximum SEO benefits for every piece of content you create for your website.

Did you know one of our website services is website maintenance to help keep your website up-to-date, fresh and secure?