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There isn't a golden rule telling you how often you should update your website’s content. But sprucing up your pages regularly is never a bad idea.
Doing so keeps your content fresh, your audience happy, and search engines even happier. Oh, and it’s faster than writing new articles too. Time-effective SEO for the win!
You can take my word for it—keeping my content up-to-date is one of the principles I used to grow my website to over 45,000 monthly organic visitors (see for yourself). Here’s what I’m going to cover in this guide.
1) Why should I update my content at all?
Keeping your content fresh does two things. First, it appeases search engines like Google, helping you rank better. Second, your audience will love that you put in the leg work to keep your information updated. It’s two birds, one stone!
a. Google loves it when you update your content
Google is pretty transparent about its approach to ranking websites. Among other factors, they want your content to be fresh and up-to-date. This is all part of their goal to deliver the most valuable, useful content to the world.
If you already know the basics of SEO, you’ll know that Google’s army of spiders are constantly crawling the web to find the most relevant content for its users. Over time, old content loses its value. It gets replaced by newer, fresher information.
When you update your writing, it’s like waving a sign to the crawler bots and saying ‘Hey, I’m still here, and I’m better than ever!’. And, when Google sees that your content is refreshed, the algorithm is more likely to rank it highly.
Don’t believe this works? According to our trusty pal Semrush, 49% of marketers saw an increase in traffic after updating their old content.
b. Your audience loves it, too
Ever clicked off a blog after discovering it was released nine-and-a-half years ago? If so, you probably already know why recency is a big deal.
Updating your content tells your audience that you’re active and care about providing the best information. This shows your expertise and helps potential customers trust you.
In the end, this all comes down to being a valuable source of information for your audience. And, as Google loves to remind us, search engines absolutely love when you’re delivering value.
2) When should I update my website content?
As a general rule of thumb, you should aim to update your content as much as possible. The more you keep your information fresh and the quality of your articles high, the better your chance of ranking on Google!
When it comes down to brass tacks, SEO is all about long-term consistency. The more you can show the search engines that you’re posting and refreshing great content, the easier it is to climb the rankings.
But let’s say you’re dead set on having a formula that you can use as guidance for when to update your website content. In that case, I think you should freshen up a page when at least one of these three things happens:
Your content is starting to look a little tired due to outdated or irrelevant information.
You have new findings, knowledge, or ideas that will make your content better.
You’ve noticed a drop off in monthly visitors and want to breathe some new life into your page.
Of course, you can also update your content whenever you like—no motives required. As I said earlier, there’s never a bad time to give your page a facelift.
Summing Up
To wrap this up, there are no hard-and-fast rules telling you how often you need to update your content. But there’s rarely a bad time to spruce things up.
Updating existing content is one thing. Creating it is quite another. If you’d like to learn a bit more about that side of things, here’s a super simple guide to writing beginner-friendly SEO content. Check it out!
My name's Claire and I’m an SEO and content strategy expert. I help startups and ambitious businesses improve their content, so that customers can find your website in search, and so that when they do, they convert.
I’m a former startup CEO, and I’ve worked for some of the world’s biggest publishers (Penguin Random House, Oxford University Press), as well as training with Google's in-house SEO team. I even built a website to attract 45k in organic search visitors/month. Drop me a line if you need help of any kind with SEO and content.
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