Does Fresh Content Matter For Your Website’s Ranking? (A Complete Guide)

In the same way that a plant needs water to survive, your website requires fresh content to thrive.

Google is improving and wants to keep its users informed with up-to-date information. One way is through fresh content.

That means having an established website with appealing content won’t guarantee a higher ranking if you leave it without frequent updates. As a digital marketing agency, we’ll ensure that your content is updated to secure you with higher ranking potential.

This article will delve into the importance of fresh content for your website’s ranking. Keep on reading and gain the valuable insight you need!

What is Fresh Content?

Adding new pages to a website counts as creating fresh content. You can do so by publishing new articles, adding products, and creating new service pages.

Unfortunately, many people believe that simply changing the dates will fool Google. In fact, Google is smart enough to detect this deceptive Black Hat SEO strategy quickly. Thus, doing so may decrease rather than increase your rankings.

What Measures As Fresh Content?

Following the freshness algorithm update release in 2011, Google prioritises pages with trending and time-sensitive keywords to put in higher rankings. Hence, people are trying to produce fresh content on their websites and win the search engine result page (SERP).

If you’re new to SEO and wondering what measures as freshness, take a look at the following factors:

1. Page inception date

Page inception date indicates its freshness. Typically, fresh content will score higher for specific search queries. But as time goes by, the score will decrease as the content gets older.

Many slacker practitioners try to change the published date to trick Google into thinking the page is new. You should avoid doing this pointless ploy as Google calculates page inception date based on when the Googlebot first recognises and indexes the page.

2. The number of webpage changes

A newer page inception date isn’t the only thing that Google considers fresh content. If you have existing pages, you can make regular changes to achieve a higher freshness score.

However, you should consider the number of changes as it plays a significant role. For instance, slight sentence tweaks won’t increase much freshness score compared to major changes in the main body text.

3. The importance of the page changes

The number of changes affects your freshness score, but you should also pay attention to the changes you attempt to make. There are less important tweaks that have little impact on your score, such as Javascript, Boilerplate material, and navigation, among others.

What Google considers essential changes lies in the main body text. You might want to make the relevant and necessary adjustments to the text and emit a stronger freshness signal, as it is preferable by Google.

4. The frequency of page changes

A higher frequency of existing webpage changes indicates a well-maintained website. Thus, the more you make changes to your page, the more likely Google will consider it fresh content.

Let’s use a news website as an example. New events will be added to the homepage daily, resulting in high-frequency changes. These regular adjustments lead to Google scoring it differently than other sites.

5. The number of new pages

Creating new pages plays a vital role in increasing the freshness score. Websites that publish more new pages may score higher than those that add content less often.

You can publish new blog posts regularly to win your website’s freshness score. Ensure that each unique content you produce is SEO-friendly and targets different keywords to avoid keyword cannibalisation.

6. The rate of acquired fresh backlinks

Earning backlinks from sites with a high freshness score will improve the freshness of your site. Backlinks from old and static websites won’t provide the same worth as links from up-to-date and dynamic pages.

7. Traffic and engagement metrics

A list of results will appear when you enter a keyword into a search engine. Using this list, Google will calculate how much time users spend on each site. The more traffic it drives and the more time users engage with the content, the higher the score for freshness and relevance will be.

Why Does Google Love Fresh Content?

As the most influential search engine, Google expresses its love for fresh content. New content is most likely accurate as it is more up-to-date than stale and static content.

In addition, by placing new content on higher rankings, Google will provide its users with relevant results that match their search intent. It’s a part of its commitment to be a trustworthy search engine.

Hence, to appeal to both Google and users, you should pay attention to what you share. Ensure you cover all the important information with the right keywords to answer search queries.

Cover More Keywords With Fresh Content

Publishing new content allows your website to contain more keywords. According to Backlinko, keywords remain an essential Google ranking factor in 2022.

This means you’ll need to put in the effort to update your site. Usually, people rely on blog posts as fresh content. You can copy this strategy, but you should divide the main topic into several parts to cover more keywords that drive higher traffic to your site.

Let’s assume you’re the owner of a hiking equipment website. You intend to publish three articles in a week. Instead of talking about hiking equipment in one sitting, you can focus on specific aspects of hiking, like ‘hiking shoes,’ ‘hiking jacket,’ and ‘hiking backpack.’

Although the pages discuss different topics, they still target the main keyword, which is ‘hiking.’ Thus, it allows Google to notice your website as the right place for people looking for information about hiking.

Avoid writing content based on keywords

Yes, keywords are significant to get your pages indexed and ranked. But should you focus solely on keywords? Definitely not.

For Google, the number of keywords on a website is insignificant. Google is looking for high-quality content to prioritise in its indexing.

This is not to say that you should ignore keywords in your SEO strategy. However, instead of focusing solely on keywords, you can create excellent content that includes your keywords, but the keywords should be placed naturally where they belong.

Rather than cramming keywords into your content, build it around what your readers want. For instance, you can explain something, answer search queries, recommend products, and so on. The keywords should then be placed in the meta tags, title, and description, with the rest of the content remaining natural.

Increase Authority With Fresh Content

The competition between industries running in the same field is becoming more intense. You may be aware of it already, as when you enter a keyword for a product, you will receive several results from different companies.

Though the number of industries vying for similar keywords keeps increasing, there are still chances for you to rank on top of the search results. One effective way is to improve your site’s authority in Google’s eyes.

There’s a popular jargon saying, “Content is king”; thus, you should produce informative content to increase authority. It’s because doing so shows that you’re an expert in the industry and should be the source of reliable information for anyone.

However, being informative is insufficient, and you should consider the following factors too:

• Consistency: publishing informative content consistently (e.g., twice a week) leads to better results compared to creating posts every now and then (e.g., once a year). Google appreciates sites with fresh content and will give higher authority scores.

• Relevance: Google considers only relevant content in 2015 to be old and stale. Acquiring an authoritative score requires frequent adjustments to fit the current context.

• Value: informative yet impractical content brings less value than content that answers common search queries. Ensure that you combine the information with a value that readers can use in real life (e,g., how to do something, which product to buy, etc.).

Once you apply the above mentioned requirements, users will trust your site and come back to find what they need. Users’ loyalty is so precious, which you need to build over time, yet effectively boost your authority and conversion rates.

Fresh Content Leads To Frequent Indexing

Regularly updating your site, whether by posting new articles, tweaking existing pages, or adding service pages, leads to web crawlers (Googlebots) visiting your site more often. You’ll have the chance to rank better at search results as Googlebots visits your site often. 

However, the chance to rank better without publishing high-quality fresh content might become pointless. Googlebots notice and adjust your ranking on its index every time you make updates. Make sure you create top-quality content to avoid being pushed down the rankings.

The point is, creating fresh content is important. But you should be thoughtful about its quality. Forcing to create new content of crappy quality and crammed with keywords may result in a drop in ranking and a penalty, which will harm your SEO performance.

How To Consistently Create Fresh Content?

We can imagine a website as a living entity, with fresh content as a sign of life. Google and its users appreciate it when a site consistently adds new content, as it signals its liveliness.

However, you might run out of ideas at times. You might think that you have nothing new to publish on your website.

Avoid making your site static by using these methods to keep your ideas flowing, allowing you to consistently post new content:

• Keep up with current trends

Keeping up with current trends is important to becoming more involved in your industry. You can discover what innovations you can implement into new content.

You can do so by observing social media, reading the news, or attending webinars. All of these sources of information can help you understand your competition and the gaps you can fill.

Finally, staying current with trends allows you to better understand your customers. You can provide them with what they need through regular content posting.

• Empathise with users

Positioning yourself as a user can help you generate new content ideas. Estimate what your target audience needs from your website and see if you’ve covered it with your existing content—if not, create it right away.

Furthermore, empathising with your audience gives your fresh content a more appealing tone. For instance, if your audience consists of experts in a particular field, they will most likely expect you to use technical terms that make you sound knowledgeable.

• Utilise content research tools

Utilising content research tools like SE Ranking, SEMrush, and Ahrefs allows you to examine topics that you haven’t covered but that your competitors have. As a result, you will gain new content ideas to publish on your site.

In addition, content research tools also have a keyword research feature that enables you to turn the ideas you gathered through other methods, such as by keeping up with current trends and empathising with users, into SEO-friendly content.

• Store your ideas in a content bank

Ideally, any new content ideas you have are not to post immediately. Doing so might cause you to run out of ideas and have to stop posting content for an extended time. 

Instead, you might want to keep your ideas in a content bank. You can, for example, plan content for the coming months. That way, you’ll always be equipped with fresh content and can make necessary site updates, potentially increasing your ranks for certain queries.

• Do a content planning

You don’t need to post all the content you stored in a content bank all at once. Instead, you can post it periodically, such as twice a week, twice a month, and so on.

Therefore, you need content planning to be able to publish posts efficiently. When planning content, you can consider time sensitivity. For example, you could plan to publish a Christmas article a week before the 25th of December.

Does It Mean You Should Discard Your Old Content?

All of our explanations about the importance of fresh content do not imply that you should discard your old content. High-quality old content can frequently serve as a pillar for your website.

For instance, top-quality old content with certain and unchanged information may perform better than new content. That’s because Google considers it relevant, with many people visiting the link and the number of backlinks it acquires from other sites.

You surely don’t want to remove old content that performs well in search results. So don’t worry about old content as long as it benefits your site and improves your rankings.

Final Thoughts

Whether your website is new or already has several pages, coming up with new content ideas can be daunting. Not to mention the necessity to create unique content with different keywords, which may add to your complexities, particularly if you’re new to SEO strategies.

However, if you followed our suggestions in this guide, you should be confident that the new content or changes you make have the potential to rank you higher in search results. Always ensure to put quality first before anything else, and your site will perform better.

It’s also fine if you don’t know where to start when it comes to regularly post fresh content. Our SEO agency, consisting of passionate and talented SEO experts, is here to guide you through bringing new content and necessary freshness to your site. 

Schedule a call today, and we’re ready to help you out anytime of the day.

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