In 1996, Bill Gates wrote an essay entitled ‘Content is King’ in which he predicted that the success of the internet would lie in its content. He was right, and since then ‘content is king’ has become the mantra of internet marketing all over the globe. The human brain is hard-wired to be curious and thirsty for knowledge, which is why the biggest sites on the net revolve around sharing and finding content. Everything from social networks to video sharing sites revolve around content, as well as the obvious – Google – where most internet users will go several times a day in their quest to find more content.
One of the most important things that your website can do to stay relevant is regularly upload fresh content. It is not enough to have lots of information on there, your potential customers will be looking for content that is engaging, interesting, fun or entertaining. So why is it so critical to keep uploading new content to your business site?
Fresh content keeps visitors interested
These days, internet users expect websites to be up to date and a constant source of good information. People don’t have the patience to stick with a site which updates sporadically or is behind the times with regards to news and information. A HubSpot survey in 2015 found that companies that published 16 or more blog posts per month had almost 3.5 times more traffic than companies that published less than 4. The more a visitor heads to a site and finds new content that they enjoy, the quicker they will get into the habit of visiting that site on a regular basis.
It’s important to note, however, that your content must be interesting to your target audience, or it’s the same as not putting out anything at all with regards to prompting the visitor to come back. In order to keep visitors coming back, content should be:
- Useful
- Informative
- Interesting
- User-friendly
- Timely
Engaging content builds a loyal follower base
The most important thing to think about when you are deciding on what sort of content your page will provide is what you can offer than other pages don’t. You want your visitors to come to your page because they don’t feel that they can get anything better anywhere else.
This is where it is a good idea to think about the USPs of your business and bring those in. Perhaps you are a fun and exciting business, with funny stories to tell and a really unique way of telling them. Or perhaps you are at the top of your industry in knowledge and skills, so can use this knowledge to teach your audience and help them to use your products or services.
There are so many ways that you can make your content engaging and you don’t have to feel as though you are in competition with other websites in the same industry as you, because they don’t have the same personality as you.
If a visitor feels that they are getting something completely unique and special from your site, content-wise, they are far more likely to return.
Search engine optimisation depends on fresh content
In the past, search engines were primed to look for keywords and push content containing a high proliferation of these to the top of search results pages. This resulted in page after page of boring content stuffed with keywords sitting high on the Google rankings, despite being at best dull and at worst completely nonsensical. These days, search engine algorithms have been refined so that keywords are still used, but sit very low down on the list of priorities. In fact, if you do now put up content that is low quality and stuffed with keywords, you will find that your rankings are lowered as a result.
Keywords are still used for seo purposes, but the requirement for fresh content makes it easier to do this now. It is no longer important how many times a keyword is mentioned, just that it is there in the copy. So instead of stuffing one bland article with several keywords, you will write seven interesting articles about seven different topics and include one keyword in each, to climb easily up the rankings.
Search engine ‘bots’ trawl web content looking for a sophisticated series of elements when deciding which pages go to the top of the rankings, and these vary from search engine to search engine. However, one of the factors which always helps sites to score high is having regularly updated, interesting and high quality content.
New content is key
Google’s algorithms are looking specifically for fresh content, rather than just regularly updated pages, so it is not good enough to repost old blogs and news articles if you can’t be bothered to create fresh content.
In some cases, on social media particularly, it is ok to repost an old article maybe once, as social media algorithms mean that your followers don’t always get to see things that you have posted the first time around. However, this needs to sit between brand new, fresh content in order for Google to index your page highly in the rankings.
These algorithms are looking for user engagement and visitors to your page as well as updates, and engagement does naturally tend to be lower on a reposted blog than on a new one.
Positioning your website as an authority
The most important websites in any industry tend to be the ones which have thousands of pages indexed by Google, when their bots trawl the web looking for fresh content. Google measures site relevance by visitor numbers, keywords and updated content, as well as site saturation, meaning that the more valuable content you publish, the higher an authority your page will be considered.
You can build website authority using social media as well, commenting, sharing and liking posts by other businesses and internet users, but if your website doesn’t have anything worth coming back to when someone checks out your page, then chances are this status will not be held and your page will quickly lose its authority.
Wrap up
Keeping up a continuous update schedule for your website content can be tricky and time consuming, but it is definitely worth it. All that investment will pay of in time when you have a loyal readership base and great search engine rankings.
If you have not got the time and inclination to do this yourself then why not speak to the friendly and knowledgeable staff at MaxWeb, who can handle your entire online presence, including managing your social media and regular website updates. To find out more please call us on 0151 652 4777 or email info@maxwebsolutions.co.uk and ask to speak to our website development team.
Posted on Wednesday, April 3rd, 2019 in Web Design.
