It can be easy to fall behind on tasks when you have so much going on. Many people today are constantly pulled in multiple directions, so prioritizing some tasks, while others are forgotten about, is often necessary. In many cases, the tasks that end up getting left behind are related to marketing your business. This can be especially true for your content marketing efforts if you don’t have anyone responsible for it. If this is true for you, maybe it’s been a while since you’ve had any new or updated content on your website.

While one of the best benefits of content marketing is that evergreen content, when done right, can benefit you long into the future, you shouldn’t rely on just old content. You might have old content on your website that can still be successful, but this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t worry about creating new content.

Content freshness is more important than you might realize. So, if you’ve been putting off creating new content for a while, you need to know the value that content freshness can have for your SEO.

Why Does Content Freshness Matter?

Out of everything you need to be concerned about with your website, how recent your content is might not seem as important. However, content freshness is extremely important to Google. In some cases, content freshness is a ranking factor.

Of course, there are many great reasons to update older content and put out new content. You want to stay engaged with your audience and answer their questions, and content marketing is an important tool for communicating with them. If you aren’t regularly creating content, your loyal audience may begin to forget about you. There are always ways you can create new content to stay in communication with your audience. Whether this is covering topics you haven’t touched on before, going into further detail on those that you have, or discussing news and trends in your industry, there are always content topics you can find.

Showing your audience new content isn’t the only reason it’s important. The more you update old content or publish new content, the more your site is indexed. Not touching your website for a while can hurt its crawling and indexing, which negatively affects its performance in the SERPs. Keeping your website up-to-date can help it get crawled and indexed more efficiently, rather than leaving it to be forgotten about.

Refreshing old content and writing new content can also help give you new opportunities to rank for keywords. Maybe there are new keyword opportunities you can target or there were relevant terms you left out of older content. These are more chances to get your content in front of the right audience, so you don’t want to neglect taking them.

What is Fresh Content?

How do you know if your content is fresh? To some, fresh content might sound like content that’s only a few days old, while to others, any content that’s been published within the year and is still relevant could seem fresh.

There’s no one answer for what’s considered fresh content. You’ve likely read many older pieces of content that still answered your questions perfectly. In many cases, how fresh a piece of content is isn’t that important if it’s information that very rarely changes. Some pieces of content can perform even better over time when they’ve earned backlinks, helping to show your authority on the topic to search engines.

Content freshness doesn’t mean that all of your content needs to be recently updated or brand new. However, freshness is vital for certain pieces of content. Google does state in its Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines when freshness is important for meeting users’ needs, which includes the following types of queries:

  • Breaking news queries
  • Recurring events queries
  • Current information queries
  • Product queries

Users searching for these types of content need the most recent results to get the accurate information they need. How recent the content needs to be may also vary. Google always wants to provide the most helpful results to users, and when it comes to “newsy” content, what information is most accurate can sometimes change in an hour or a month. If you’re covering any time-sensitive information, you need to ensure that you’re staying up-to-date if you want it to drive any traffic.

Improve Your Content Marketing with ENX2 Marketing

Constantly publishing new content and revising your old content can quickly become an overwhelming amount of work. However, this is necessary if you want your content to be successful. While many businesses can’t achieve this on their own, working with a digital marketing agency can give you the resources you need to make it possible. At ENX2 Marketing, our content marketing services can help your content be more successful.

Contact us today to learn more about how we can help!