This is one of the most common questions I receive, and that makes a lot of sense because it isn’t something that is discussed very often in the SEO world.
Your website’s content is the key to everything when it comes to your ranking, and this is what Google and other major search engines are looking at when they index your page with their crawlers. These search bots will pick through your pages and look for anything they can find to help them find clearer associations and gain a better understanding of your website, just as you pick through them to find ways to insert more little crumbs for the search spiders to gobble up.
But that doesn’t address the frequency with which content is updated at all. The way we normally talk about search engine optimization would seem to imply that y
ou will get the same results if you post one perfectly optimized page and then never do a single thing with the site again. Is that true? Does it matter if you keep things moving, or not?
People talk quite a bit about the idea of new, exciting content. They will tell you that it is important to keep things fresh and interesting, but this is always in the context of the user’s personal experience browsing your site, not meeting the demands of the search engines. Further, it is almost exclusively something we talk about in regards to blog content and other things that keep people coming back, and it doesn’t seem to be very important that we make changes to individual pages for services or products, since that kind of information doesn’t change very often.
When it comes to those types of pages, which should already have comprehensive information available which describes the products themselves, then I don’t see any reason to make a modification. You should certainly keep reconsidering your content, thinking of anything that might be missing or improvements yet to be made, but if you think you already have very complete pages then it is best to leave them be.
Search bots are very sophisticated, so while in truth there is sometimes an advantage to be gained by updating content, there is an important counter to this, which is that the search engines also give more credibility to trustworthy content that has stayed consistent.
The way I would look at this is actually pretty Are you happy with your current search ranking? If not, you should make some
changes to see if you can get a better result. If your ranking is good though, you might want to focus on other pages to build up your website overall, because the changes you make may end up decreasing your ranking and as the saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Why is this true? Well, I said the search bots are very sophisticated, but this is quite basic in principle. Whenever you modify the content of a page the search engines are going to re-evaluate the content. If your keywords are completely different, it’s like starting from scratch. You should really pick your keywords or phrases and then stick with them for the long haul, which is why that is such an important early decision to make.
Another thing to consider is that the rules change over time, and SEO is an ever-evolving game. When it comes to pages that haven’t changed in a two years or more, it is a good idea to re-evaluate those yourself to make sure they have stayed in line with current trends and any ways in which the search business might have changed. You don’t want to be left behind, so when I say that it is generally not important to keep these types of pages fresh please don’t take that to mean that they should be let to go stale. There is a difference between updating content for the sake of garnering more attention, and updating content that is no longer effective.
This is one of the big reasons why blogs are so important for absolutely every kind of business. You don’t want to focus entirely on your blog, but it is a very good place for experimentation and it is certainly a good place to show signs of life and activity. Every time you publish a blog post you are signaling the search engines to come and have another look at your content, with a particular focus on the post itself and anything linked from it. Each post is also a chance for you to create a whole new page with keywords and new marketing ideas you want to try out, or simply strengthen. Blog posts really call attention to your entire website, and if you can get people sharing your content through social services then the speed with which your pages are visited and revisited will always be high.