We live in a digital society.  The Internet has become ubiquitous – most homes are equipped with a computer and an Internet connection, and almost everyone has a smartphone. Internet users belong to all age groups and all social layers – from 80 year old grandmothers to 8 year old school children. The Web has evolved from an information billboard to an advertising platform, and from a cheap and effective means of communication to the preferred place for hanging out or for shopping.  If you’re not on the web, your business will likely soon be dead.

Faced with such a dynamic context, webmasters deal with a real challenge: keeping up with this need for relevant and engaging content. To keep your competitive edge, you must constantly and consistently update your website with quality content in a style that’s all your own.  Let’s take a deeper look at the main benefits fresh content brings along:

1. Better position in Search Engine Results Pages (SERP)

When talking about search engines, we usually refer to Google. This does not mean that other players like Bing or Yahoo don’t count, but it seems that the Mountain View giant has become the go-to site for web searches; indeed they are so predominant, people don’t even call them web searches, they just say they Googled it. Just have a chat with webmasters from any field you want, ask about their objectives, and you will immediately hear something about higher SERP or Google ranking. What is their action plan? All of them will explain to you how important it is to observe search trends and to update your website’s content accordingly.

The reason for this is that the latest changes Google made to its search algorithm focus on novelty and originality. During the early days of the Internet, simply copying some articles from various sources was enough to drive traffic to your website. Nowadays, you have to come up with a new wording and this is not always enough. The age of evergreen web content is long gone. Google has set its sensors on updated content, pushing the old stories to the bottom of its SERP.  You should never think of your web site as static and, if you want to be high in the search results, you need to constantly and consistently add high quality content.

2. Returning visitors and low bounce rate

Other things you need for your site are an increasing percentage of returning visitors and decreasing your website’s bounce rate. What does this mean? Well, the first parameter indicates the number of people coming back to the website a second and third time. The second one quantifies those who “bounce back” to the search engine page or to the referral one in very short time after landing on your website, because your web site either wasn’t what they were looking for, or the information they needed was too difficult to find so they’ve decided to look elsewhere.

Now, what have these factors got to do with updated content? It is very easy. Let’s imagine the following scenario: you go to a museum or art gallery; there is no original exhibit and a thick layer of dust covers everything. Isn’t your first impulse to get out of there? Will you ever return? The same thing is true about a website. Why would people keep browsing pages that haven’t been updated in ages? They offer no incentive to stay or to come back and they don’t help you connect to a potential customer.  Opportunity lost.

3. Improving your website’s performance

Although Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a much talked about subject nowadays, there is no sure recipe for a website’s success. SEO experts observe the trends, make experiments, and track the results. If you don’t make any changes, there is nothing to track; hence, no opportunity for improvement and no helpful data to tell you what is working and what isn’t, or what your potential new customers are looking for.  Even if its results are negative, an experiment is still considered a step forward as it teaches you what to do and what not to do, and provides incredibly valuable insight into what your customers want and need. Constantly implementing changes and updating your website’s content is the only way you can increase its performance.

We offer maintenance packages or work by the hour to assist you in accomplishing this very task.  You don’t need to have an understanding besides a birds eye view of the concept – we will take care of the mechanics of content and relevance so you can concentrate on what is most important – YOUR business – and preparing for it to grow from your expanded web presence.  

Give us a shout, and our talented staff will put together a solution individualized for you!

–Sandra

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