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How To Keep Your Website Up To Date With Fresh Content

Guide Home

Chapter 1:
How to create the ultimate website structure for SEO

Chapter 2:
How to create search-friendly content for your new website

Chapter 3:
How to keep your website up to date with fresh content

Chapter 4:
How to create a strategy for off site search engine optimisation

Chapter 3: How to keep your website up to date with fresh content

If you’ve been following this guide, you should have

Your website may already be launched and working well to bring website visitors via search engine results pages. Now it’s time to keep that momentum going.

An important factor for SEO, is posting fresh content on a regular basis – to keep search engines crawling your site for your new content, and to let search engines know that your website contains quality, up to date information.

Develop a content plan to keep your website up to date

First things first – and we covered this in Chapter 2 – create a content plan to keep your existing website content up to date.

Although posting fresh content is important, it’s more important to keep your key content up to date. If you’re successful with SEO, you’ll be increasing website traffic to your site – and you want new website visitors to get the best impression of your business. Out of date or incorrect content doesn’t look professional.

If you didn’t create a site plan (read Chapter 1), now’s the time to do so – you need a list of every web page on your website.

Next, identify when each page should be reviewed and assign a ‘review date’, and assign who should be responsible for updating content.

The review date will depend on the type of content. If it’s general information, a yearly once-over may be plenty. If it’s time-specific information, you’ll need to review it more often, for example:

  • If you post events every week or month, you need to ensure your past events aren’t displaying as “coming soon” events
  • If you use your website to run advertising campaigns, make sure you know your campaign dates and review/unpublish pages where campaigns have ended
  • If your shop is having a clearance sale, ensure you know when your sale ends and update the site accordingly
  • If your stock changes every season, set a date to update your product catalogue

Make sure your review dates are actioned – we use Asana to keep a log of our web pages, assigning people and due dates for review – so we get a calendar reminder and the task isn’t forgotten.

To blog or not to blog? We help you decide

Now you have a content plan for keeping your website up to date. Next, you need a plan for creating fresh content. There are two options for this – and you may even do both! The more content, the better.

Blog / News

If you can commit to posting a blog at least once a fortnight (or more – there’s no limit except for your available time/resource), then you should definitely have a ‘Blog’ or ‘News’ section of your website. You can utilise categories and tags to incorporate key search terms into your posts. For example, one of our key search terms is “seo” – so we have an “SEO” category in our blog.

If you’re unsure what you have to write about – there are tools out there to help you!

Answerthepublic – enter your keyword and see a visual display of the questions users are typing into Google related to that word. Use these questions as titles/topics for your blog posts

Quora – search Quora for your key terms and see what questions users are asking. Copy/rewrite those questions into blog post titles/topics.

Google Keyword Planner – enter the keyword in the “Your product or service” field and then add “who, what, when, where, why, does & how” as modifiers in the “Keywords to include” filter. Click “Get ideas” to receive questions to resolve as blog topics.

Moz Keyword Explorer – enter your keyword/s and discover related search terms that may spark an idea for a blog post

Use a simple Google search as well – enter your search terms or blog post ideas into Google search, and see what comes up. Even if someone else has written a blog post, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write the same-titled post – Google likes to show users the most relevant results for them, and part of that is location. If an US company has written a blog post, and you write a blog post with the same/similar title – your post should appear to New Zealand searchers. The same applies for different regions within NZ – your content should be displayed to potential customers in your area.

During your research, you might identify topics that would better suit a new service, product or other core piece of web content – rather than a blog post. Adding new web pages can take any form – but don’t ‘water down’ your list of core services and products by listing things just for the sake of SEO.

Portfolio / Projects

If you can’t commit to new content on a regular basis, your next best option is a ‘Portfolio’ or ‘Projects’ section – perhaps you can commit to adding new content once every few months – get your key projects/work up from the previous few months.

Use keyword planning tools to determine how you might like to title your projects for maximum SEO. Pull a report from Google Keyword Planner for your key business offering (e.g. “Jewellery design”) and work your way through the list of related keywords (“custom ring design”, “handmade jewellery” etc.) Try to create a project/portfolio page for each relevant search term for your business.

Create a content calendar for writing fresh, new web content

Use a planning tool like Asana – or a good old fashioned Excel spreadsheet will do – to plan blog posts. Using Answerthepublic, Quora and Google Keyword Planner and Moz Keyword Explorer, you will quickly build a long list of potential blogs, portfolio, projects etc. You don’t have to write everything at once – keep a record of the titles/topics, assign dates to each one and you’ll have created a “Content Calendar”!

Decide how often you can commit to writing and posting new content, create a calendar that reflects that – and stick to the plan! The plan should be flexible around what you post – you might like to write a response to some recent industry news, for example. Your content calendar shouldn’t prevent you writing topical/spontaneous posts, it should simply ensure that something gets posted, regularly.

Make a plan to review the calendar too – ensure you have the next few titles/topics ready to roll, don’t let yourself run out of momentum.

Let Webstruxure give your blog a head start

If deciding what to blog about, creating a calendar and writing blog content is in the too-hard or no-time basket, Webstruxure can help. We can create your content calendar and give you topic summaries to get your creative writing juices flowing. We can write and publish your blog posts, and even share them on your social media pages (read Chapter 4 to find out why sharing your content is important). Talk to us today to get started on the blog train.

Do you have a plan for posting fresh content, forever? READ THE NEXT CHAPTER OF THE GUIDE…

Chapter 4: How to create a strategy for off site search engine optimisation