Every day, more than 4.4 million blog posts are published. A whopping 95 million Instagram posts go up daily. Watching videos remains the most popular activity online. That doesn’t account for LinkedIn and Facebook content and infographics. In short, the amount of web content is staggering and the amount of time people spend consuming is massive and growing.
But having a lot of content is not enough. Today, you must constantly “feed the machine” by refreshing your current content and repurposing it into new and relevant blogs, social posts, videos, and other forms of content. This will help your business and brand rank, generate awareness, and sell your products or services.
Benefits of refreshing your content
Reasons you must continually freshen up your content:
- Improved SEO rankings: It contributes to your search engine rankings, according to Search Engine Journal.
- Establishes authority: Whether it’s talking about the future of your industry or offering simple marketing tips, you want to establish yourself as an industry expert.
- Fosters loyalty: If you provide timely, relevant, and compelling content, your target audience will return to your site. Think about your own behavior. Would you keep going back to the same store if they never had anything new on their shelves?
- Enhances trustworthiness: By educating and entertaining your audience, your brand will be viewed as being more tuned in and committed to its industry or category. Today’s buyers are constantly looking for new solutions but will remain loyal to those brands that anticipate and meet their needs and help them navigate decision-making.
10 tips for refreshing your content
Keeping your content fresh doesn’t necessarily mean spending hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars and hours on new creative ideas and pages of brilliant prose. These steps can not only help you produce fresh content, but also develop content that improves ranking.
1. Invest in keyword research
By conducting keyword research, you will know exactly what people are looking for when they go online. Embed those words into your content, but be sure that what you’re writing or producing still makes sense to the reader or viewer. When you write up your briefs (see #2), educate your writers/producers about the importance of freshness.
2. Develop clear and specific content briefs when making assignments
The writer or producer should not only know the purpose of the piece but also the keywords that should be used and the types of sources you want to be included. The more recent the sources, the more credible the content.
3. Develop a tight content plan
A content plan will help guide you but remain open to swapping out topics based on what’s going on in the world or your industry.
4. Engage your team (both in-house and external) in regular brainstorming sessions
Look at what your competitors are doing, but don’t be a copycat.
5. Provide incentives for creative new ideas
Educate your content team on the factors that feed into freshness and, when you’re reviewing their work, make sure every piece meets the criteria.
6. Take inventory of what you’ve already created
You may already be sitting on content that can simply be updated or repurposed. Transform it into new media, formats, or graphic treatments.
7. Write powerful headlines and tags that signal freshness
For example, we published an article called The Complete List of Trending Keywords for Your 2022 Content Calendar that not only included 2022 in the headline but also listed upcoming seasonal keyword trends as a guide for content marketers. This approach alerts both the reader and Google that the content is up-to-the-minute (or at least up-to-the-year). Because the world is changing so rapidly, viewers are typically looking for sources from the past year or two.
8. Expand your talent base
You’ll need the capacity to create fresh content all year long. Outsourcing your content creation can be a great solution. You can maintain brand consistency while building a steady stream of new perspectives and even voices. Plus, you can engage professionals who specialize in certain types of media or industries. You’ll find it can be very affordable and you’ll augment your in-house team with best-in-class content experts.
9. Pay close attention to your metrics
Of course, you want to see that your content is ranking high in searches. But you also need to know that your prospects and clients are engaging with it — commenting, sharing, and linking to it. Make tracking and reporting a fun activity within your organization. Content production is both an art and a science and your team should include people who love words and images as well as those who get excited by metrics and SEO trends.
10. Stay abreast of the freshness factors in Google’s algorithm
We know that SEO is not an exact science, so only by following trends and relying on experts can you develop the best content that’s relevant to your viewers and easily (and frequently) found online.
The role of content freshness in SEO
How does Google measure content freshness? No one really knows exactly what’s in Google’s algorithm. But search experts all seem to agree that fresh content is good for SEO.
That includes:
- Posting date
- Content that’s been recently refreshed
- Frequency of content posting
Content decay is what occurs when a piece of content remains online for a while with no updates. And who wants their brilliant words and images to decay? You can take some simple and powerful steps to remain relevant to both your viewers and the search engines.
The four main factors that Google considers when evaluating freshness are:
- Publication date
- Indexing
- Last crawl
- Modification date
Reuse, repurpose, recycle
Once you’ve established a good system for tracking the engagement of your content, you’ll get a great sense of what topics and formats are most appealing to your audience. You can then take existing content and freshen it up to reach broader audiences. Not only will that expand your reach but it will also signal the search engines that something is new.
Among the creative ways, you can refresh existing content are to:
- Turn a blog post into an infographic
- Produce a video
- Encourage content and comments from guest contributors
- Search for new updated statistics and make significant updates to existing content.
Books and online courses are among the many other ways you can turn evergreen content into something new and engaging. That not only helps SEO but could also broaden your audience to different types of content consumers.
Even if you don’t plan to overhaul older content, review it periodically. Perhaps you’ve included links to sources that no longer exist. Or, something new has happened in your industry that requires a slightly different slant on your perspective.
Great high-performing content can be timeless. You just want to be sure you’re taking the steps that will keep it top of mind for both SEO and your viewers. Remember too that the opposite of fresh content is stale content. You don’t want your valuable customers to think that you’re out of touch with their needs and trends. And you certainly don’t want your competitors to be consistently ranking higher than you in searches.
ClearVoice can help you find fresh talent. Freshen up your content and make your readers, viewers, and bots happy in 2022 — and beyond!
