How often do you update your content? Just because you are following an SEO guidebook does not mean you are already doing well. If you are getting fewer leads, it could be because you have been hit by Google’s freshness update.
Lean Oilfield, a B2B digital marketing agency, explains it.
What is freshness?
Google may look simple and feel easy to use, but its back-end is complex. Take, for instance, how it ranks indexed pages. It uses different factors, and one of these is freshness. It simply refers to how “recent” the content is.
Under this, the search engine uses three types of monitoring. These include frequent updates, wherein information changes very fast. However, the event itself does not occur often. A good example is a release of a new tech product like the iPhone X.
It usually starts out as rumors, and over the course of a few months, you will hear information such as its specs and release dates.
What do you aim for?
Google does not stop there, however. The competition is really on which page appears as the top result or at least on the first page. To make sure those that get these spots are worthy, the site then correlates the freshness score with other data such as an increase in search volume and social media mentions.
Of course, it matters how relevant your content is to the query (questions asked by Internet users), so you also need to use the keywords strategically. Why does this even matter? It matters because it affects your position in the search results. More than 70 percent of the clicks go to the pages found on the first page.
What can you do?
The freshness update does not mean you need to come up with new content every time. It encourages you to give newer information, especially since over 450 billion queries are unique. In other words, more people are asking questions that have never been asked before.
However, looking for content or data to add is time-consuming, and doing that while still applying the best SEO practices is daunting. In the end, small businesses can still get the best return on their investment if they collaborate with reputable SEO companies.
