High-quality content is one of the most important aspects of a successful SEO strategy. The more relevant your content is to searchers, the higher you are likely to rank. One aspect of providing high-quality and relevant content is content freshness. We explore the role content freshness plays in improving your rankings.
What is content freshness?
Content freshness refers to a piece of content that is either recently published or updated. Whether it’s a blog post, video, infographic, or case study, content freshness plays a crucial role in delivering SEO strategies that improve search engine rankings.
However, one of the biggest misconceptions around content freshness is that it refers to content recently published or ensuring a schedule of frequently published content. However, this is not entirely true.
Content freshness focuses more on creating and publishing content that is relevant and dynamic to current trends or information. As such, the content should seek to reflect new insights, update data, or evolve perspectives.
It’s important to remember that content freshness is less about how new a piece of content is, but more about timeliness and relevance. Content that stays fresh and relevant over a long period is called evergreen content.
However, in the instance of trending topics or current news, ensuring new content that is relevant to timely search queries is also important. That’s because search engines will favour more recent content in search results over older content.
What are the benefits of content freshness?
There are several benefits of fresh content, both for improving your SEO performance and delighting your target users. Here are some of the major benefits you can gain from content freshness:
- Publishing more up-to-date content encourages search engine crawlers to crawl your site more frequently.
- Timely, high-quality content often provides a better user experience.
- Ensures your content is more relevant to changing trends, research, data, or perspectives.
- More likely to rank higher for search queries that demand fresh content.
- Showcases to users and search engines that your website is still active.
- Target more keywords to improve ranking potential for a wider variety of search terms.
- More opportunities to gain high-quality backlinks to your site.
- Can help improve your website’s authority.
How does Google determine content freshness?
It’s important to understand how search engines estimate the freshness of content. Fortunately, there are several indicators Google will use for this purpose:
- The date the page was first indexed by Google.
- How much of the content changed after updating a page.
- The number of changes to the page’s core content.
- How often the page is updated.
- How often new pages are published.
- Backlinks from sites with a high freshness score.
Is content freshness a ranking factor?
Something that will often crop up with content freshness is whether it’s a ranking factor or not. While relevance to the search query, usability, content quality and more are used to rank search results, content freshness can also be used for certain queries.
Not every search query will be affected by content freshness. Instead, the factors that influence search rankings will differ depending on each search. As such, content freshness will matter for certain search queries or content.
Time-sensitive queries or content will be heavily influenced by content freshness as a ranking factor. Examples of content include:
- News articles
- Reports or statistics that will date quickly
- Content on a current or passing trend
- Latest fashion and clothing trends
- Reviews of the latest technology releases
This principle of Google favouring fresh content for specific search queries is known as Query Deserves Freshness (QDF). This ensures Google can deliver the most relevant and up-to-date information to ensure search results are relevant to the user’s query.
Tips for publishing and updating content for freshness
Whether it’s creating new content or updating existing content, following these tips can ensure your content satisfies users and search engines.
Quality over quantity
One of the first tips for publishing and updating content for freshness is to choose quality over quantity. No matter how many pieces of content you publish, if the content isn’t considered to be high-quality, it won’t rank highly.
Google values higher-quality content over quantity. As such, a website that publishes 50 pieces of thin content in a month will not perform as well as a website that publishes 5 relevant and helpful pieces of content.
High-quality content is crucial to an SEO strategy if you want to rank highly and drive organic traffic. The content you create should provide value to users by addressing their questions, pain points, or problems.
By spending the time to regularly create higher-quality content, your website’s authority will also improve. Establishing your authority and credibility is a sure way to improve your SEO performance and ensure users will keep coming back.
To create high-quality content, you should consider the following:
- Understand your customers by creating buyer personas.
- Improve the readability to make it easier for users to understand.
- Tailor content to the buyer’s journey and search intent.
- Ensure your content is trustworthy and credible.
- Pick the right content type.
- Measure performance.
Update content with regular updates
Content freshness is extremely important for time-sensitive topics. As such, ensuring you update time-sensitive content with regular updates is vital for content freshness. This may range from news articles, product reviews, lists, and event listings.
How often you need to make updates to content will entirely depend on the topic and your niche. For example, a page listing top UK universities may only change once a year whereas a page detailing significant Google updates will update several times a year.
Monitor content performance
One of the best ways to decide whether your content needs updating is by monitoring its performance. While making updates to evergreen content is rarely necessary, there are instances where it can be.
If a page sees a decline in rankings and organic traffic, making updates to the content can ensure it remains relevant. Any pages that are continually losing ranking positions will benefit most from being updated.
Don’t make superfluous updates
However, the changes you make to content are important if you want to improve its ranking potential. Making superfluous updates in an attempt to manipulate search rankings seldom works. This involves making small insignificant changes, such as changing the publication date.
It is much better to spend the time making beneficial changes to one or two pages as opposed to small, superfluous changes on 10 pages. To make sure the changes you make are beneficial, consider these ideas:
- Replace inaccurate or outdated information with more up-to-date information.
- Add new perspectives, developments, statistics, or details that provide a different insight into the topic.
- Act on user feedback to improve your content and make it more valuable.
- Change the content to align more with the search intent.
Keep updated with trends and developments
Keeping up-to-date with trends and developments is another tip for publishing and updating content for freshness. By keeping updated, you can identify any content that has or will be outdated.
Then, you can make necessary updates to ensure no drop in ranking potential. Some examples of how you can keep yourself updated with trends and developments include news, social media, industry journals, newsletters, and Google Trends.
Set a content calendar schedule
One last tip for publishing and updating content for freshness is setting a content calendar schedule. This makes it much easier to organise content creation for time-sensitive topics or queries.
A content calendar is one of the most effective ways to manage fresh content. These will typically indicate the content to create, when it will be published, who will create or update the content, and where the content will be promoted.
This makes it much easier to ensure you regularly publish fresh content throughout the year, while also helping to increase your marketing efforts. You can use the free content calendar template from HubSpot to get started.
Content freshness is important for ensuring your content remains relevant and valuable to users. Taking the time to create or update high-quality content will ensure you not only benefit from better-ranking potential but also provide better value to your readers.