Even though we, as web marketers and developers, are so entrenched in the online world, we are able to understand the difficulties for businesses to keep their website up to date with not only the most recent information about important things like prices and services, but also a news feed or blog about what’s going on with the business itself. Can you imagine pumping out 1000 words every business hour about what all your business is doing? Even every day? How would you actually run your business itself?
This is a common question and compliant that we receive from businesses, especially ones trying to break into new markets or start a new venture. There’s so much competition out there for search traffic, so much competition out there for people’s attention, how on earth could anyone find the time to create enough content to keep other engaged?
Well, fear not. No one is required to publish a 1000 word blog post every day. You don’t even have to do it once a week. But, whenever you do decide to put out new content, it needs to be absolutely killer.
Within the past year, Google has changed their search result algorithm to put less of an emphasis on the recency of the information published, and a greater weight on the quality of the information. If you’re able to write one really nice article about a topic your target market is interested in, you’ll receive a greater amount of traffic for a longer period of time than if you wrote 10 mediocre posts.
Here's the thing...
Within the past year, Google has changed their search result algorithm to put less of an emphasis on the recency of the information published, and a greater weight on the quality of the information.
So, what do you do?
One note of importance is that there is also a difference, however, between bringing in traffic for the post itself, and because of the post. Search engines will put less credibility onto a website that hasn’t been updated in 5 years. We say this all the time to our clients: “Google doesn’t know about your brick and mortar store, they don’t measure your foot traffic, all they see if your digital presence. You might have 100 people in your store every hour, but if your brochure static website hasn’t changed since 2005, you won’t rank well in a search result.”
To clarify, if the message you’re communicating in the post itself is what you’re trying to accomplish, you need to spend some real, quality time and craft said post to really address your needs. It should be direct, clear, and contain plenty of targeted keywords and links to sources. However, if you’re just trying to make sure your website isn’t stale, that’s another goal entirely.
The Point
There’s nothing wrong with publishing a “Top 5 best tips” for your business. There’s nothing wrong with a short post about what you and your team did that way. But you, as a business owner, website manager, should know is that those posts should only be bridging the gap between the quality content that you publish once every month, or even 6 months. Just make sure that span isn’t too wide.
