You just launched a new and improved website. Congratulations! Whether you did it yourself or worked with a partner, a new website is always a lot of work. It’s tempting to sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labor. But the truth is, no website should ever truly be “done.”
Why not? Google never rests. It’s constantly crawling your site and making assessments. It may crawl your site as frequently as every few days, but it’s likely happening at least once a month. Those assessments impact a wide variety of performance indicators – essentially, if Google doesn’t like your website, it slowly stops showing it to people.
What Does Crawling Assess?
When Google crawls your site, it’s checking for things like the number of pages, images and videos, meta data, new content, key search terms, back linking, interlinking, server data, load times, relevancy, and more. It uses this information to assign things like domain authority, page authority, and other rankings. And those rankings decide where you show up in various organic (unpaid) search results. Since Google maintains over 90% of the market share when it comes to search, tailoring your website to Google’s metrics of success is a no-brainer.
How Does Adding New Content Help?
First, when we say “add content,” at least in this article, we’re talking about additional content or urls. Though there are times when it makes sense to simply rewrite existing pages, adding to the sitemap and creating more opportunities for relevancy is the SEO tactic we’re focusing on.
Expanding the footprint of your website, simply put, gives Google more to work with. The more pages you have, the more content you have, the more topics and keywords you cover, and the more likely Google is to rank your website highly. Though their algorithms are kept hidden from the public, the trends are easy to spot: the more content, the better your SEO ranking.
Adding additional pages also prompts Google to recrawl your site, which as we know, is how organic search rankings are assigned.
Don’t Forget Your Audience
We’ve all been on a website that hasn’t changed in years. The information is the same, the photos are the same, and there’s very little to gain from each visit. Unless you’re looking for something specific, like hours of operation, chances are you’re not visiting that website very often. Since information moves at lightning speed these days, chances are you’re not viewing a stagnant website as a very reliable source of information.
Alternatively, a website that is constantly adding articles, expanding pages, updating photos, and providing more resources for their audience is more likely to be viewed as a trustworthy authority. Not only does it indicate that you’re keeping your finger on the pulse of industry trends and customer needs, but it gives people a reason to keep coming back to your site – which means you’re top of mind whenever they need something you offer.
Longer Website Lifespans
A stagnant website goes out of date quickly. Crawling slows down, Google has nothing new to index, your rankings drop, and your audience gets tired. A website that is always evolving can add years to the overall lifespan of your site – that means incremental investments along the way save you from having to shell out bigger bucks for a total redo when your website is no longer relevant.
What Should Be Added?
Figuring out what to add to keep your website fresh and your audience (including Googlebots) engaged isn’t always easy!
There are several types of content that can be added:
- Blog articles
- Additional pages
- Expanded rich content (photos, videos, infographics, etc.)
The type that is right for you depends on where your current website is in terms of content.
Blog articles are often an easy place to start. 70% of people say they’d rather learn about a company from a blog post than an advertisement, and 71% of B2B decision makers indicate that they read blog posts on their buyer’s journey. The benefit of this type of content is that you can hyper-target for specific keywords you’d like to rank for, and the content doesn’t have to be 100% relevant to your service – in fact, this type of content is a great way to build industry authority by omitting a hard sell or CTA entirely. Putting together a content plan for blog articles can be a little daunting – check out our website content planning guide.
Additional pages are often a great option to either provide your customers with supplementary information about your company and value, or to group your products/services together in ways that will resonate with or meet the needs of different audiences. For example, the way a new homeowner is likely to engage with a list of home services is very different from the way a residential property management company might. It’s important to have content on your website that explains it both ways to ensure you capture and engage as much traffic as possible, which means more leads.
Expanded rich content is a great way to slowly build up your domain and page authority while making your site more compelling for audiences. On average, humans remember 80% of what they see, and only 20% of what they read. ⅔ of consumers have reported that a short video is their ideal way to learn about a new product. This all means that multimedia content is the best way to engage people once they’re on your site – not to mention the often-underappreciated merits of all the extra metadata opportunities.
Your Website Should Never Sit Stagnant
This all indicates that your website should never sit stagnant for very long. If you’ve taken the time to invest in a refresh or rebuild of your site, that’s a fantastic start to give you a perfect launching platform for long-term website and SEO success. But don’t stop there! By keeping your website fresh and interesting, you’re adding to its lifespan, improving your SEO (significantly), and delighting your audience/potential customers.