Managing a website nowadays isn’t as easy as it once was. With millions of sites now listed in search engines, the competition is fierce, and it’s growing by the day. However, by identifying areas where your competitors are slacking with their SEO skills, you can gain an advantage and rise to the top of the heap.
One important yet overlooked way of staying competitive is by regularly updating your website. If you’re not already doing this, then you’re most likely missing out on a huge chunk of regular visitors that could otherwise be coming to your site.
An update every 2-3 years just simply won’t cut it. You should be updating more regularly than your competitors if you expect your website to perform better than theirs. With that said, here are the top five reasons why keeping your site updated is so important.
Improved SEO Rankings
The first and most important reason for updating your site is so that it can maintain high SEO rankings. Search Engines, such as Google, want to deliver new and relevant content in the results to those who use their search engines.
If your site goes dormant and you stop posting for a while, search engines may treat your site as an outdated one. This means that your competitors might start outranking you in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). While the existing content on your site, in some cases, may not need to be updated, the site itself should have new content posted on a regular basis.
The SEO benefits that come from updating your site include:
- Gain more regular visitors organically from search engines when they find your site more easily.
- Outrank competitors’ sites by providing fresher content, which helps your site zoom past others in the search results.
- Gain recognition as an authoritative source within your industry when others find your site on the first page of search results for many topics.
First Impressions
When users visit your site for the first time, they will often notice if your site is one that updates regularly. If a visitor doesn’t find any fresh content on your site, this can create a bad first impression, and it can affect your bounce rate.
The bounce rate is a measurement of how many users leave your site after viewing just one page instead of continuing on to look at other pages. If a user is immediately met with a directory of old content, they’re less likely to explore other pages and more likely to exit immediately.
Not only does this lead to less visitor traffic throughout your site, but search engines can see your bounce rate as well, so it may affect your site’s rankings as well.
Maintaining Relevance
Updating your site regularly also means keeping up with the newest trends relating to both your website’s functionality and its content. Every now and then, you should update technology features on your site to compete with other sites and to keep your site user friendly.
For example, some forms of HTML, Javascript, WordPress plug-ins, PHP, or other web technologies get discontinued every few years. This means that the coding behind the scenes of your website should be updated so that your site’s content can be read more easily by search engine algorithms.
Regarding your site’s content itself, this should also be updated if you have information based on outdated trends or technologies. Having evergreen content, which is content that doesn’t become outdated, is ideal. But there’s a good chance you have content that isn’t quite evergreen and might need a spruce up.
This is often the case when there’s a call to action on a page about a particular product or service that has changed over time. The call to action would then need to be updated to reflect this change.
Increase Returning Visitors
As a website owner, your overall goal should be focused on growing your site. While having a great SEO ranking is important for receiving new visitors to your site, it’s your returning visitors that will give your site the most stability.
Even if you’re gaining more and more new visitors, it’s better if you can retain them and keep the old ones coming back. That’s why you need to make regular website updates so that your visitors have a reason to return. By doing so, you’re giving your site more exponential growth over time and the stability it needs to continue growing quickly.
Gain More Backlinks
One major benefit of updating your site that’s often overlooked by website owners is the opportunity to gain more backlinks. Ever since Google began using backlinks as one metric for gauging a site’s importance, website owners have understood how crucial these links are to the success of their sites.
Combine that with the rise of social media over the past decade, and it’s easy to see how fresh content translates into more backlinks. People using social media are more likely to share links with others when they come across content that is fresh and still relevant.
The benefits of gaining more backlinks to your site include:
- More visitors can find your site through backlinks posted on referral sites.
- Receive an increase in SEO ranking based on high-quality backlinks.
- Greater resale value if you should ever decide to sell your site to another party.
Free Consultation
While updating your site is only one of many SEO techniques you can benefit from, it’s arguably one of the most important ones. If you’re ready to jumpstart your website’s SEO into high gear, we can help. Contact us today for a free consultation and we’ll be happy to discuss all our options with you.