There is no ambiguity about the fact that your business website constantly needs new content. Zillions of articles and blog posts have been written so far trying to explain marketers and business owners why they should have content publishing as one of the main marketing tools. You may already be focusing lots of effort on creating content for your website.
But do you really know why your business website needs fresh content on an ongoing basis? You may have a basic idea. Most of the people see fresh content as a doorway to better search engine rankings. Yes, sure, your rankings can tremendously improve if you go on publishing valuable and quality content on your website, but most confuse it with increasing the overall keyword density. With the latest Hummingbird update Google no longer just focuses on the keywords. It ranks your pages for the real meaning they contain, the real value they deliver. Keywords matter, but not that much. It is the essence of the content that you publish. So the conventional wisdom behind constantly publishing fresh content stands defeated to a great extent.
Listed below are 20 reasons why your business website needs fresh content.
- Give people a reason to visit your website repeatedly: People don’t do business with you on their first visit, especially when you are not a known brand or personality. You need to create a rapport and for that you need to encourage people to come to your website as frequently as possible. How do you achieve that? By constantly providing them the content they seek. May it be information, may it be humor, may it be useful tips and tricks, whatever, your fresh content should be able to draw them to your website again and again.
- Educate your visitors: Educating them doesn’t mean raising their literacy level, it means they should be able to learn as much as possible about products and services you are offering them so that they can make an educated decision. This way they feel empowered. They don’t want your marketing message thrust down upon their throats. They want to make their own decision. When they buy from you, it should be their decision, not your constant prompting. This can only happen if you properly educate them. After that, even if they are not happy with your product or service, they won’t hold a grudge against you.
- Keep your visitors informed: Fresh content on an ongoing basis keeps your visitors informed. They know when you are making changes to your offerings. When you launch new products or services, they instantly get to know about them. In case some new developments are happening within your organization and you would like to share them with your business, this can be a good content publishing opportunity.
- Generate content for your newsletter: You don’t need to separately create content for your newsletter – I hope you are publishing a regular newsletter for your business. Once you have built yourself a nice mailing list, you can always send the highlights – they can be weekly highlights or monthly highlights – with these highlights linking back to the actual webpages, articles and blog posts on your website.
- Establish your authority: What is authority, especially in the business world? It’s not just having the knowledge of your field, but also the ability to share your knowledge in such a manner that it is also useful to people who have access to that knowledge. They should be able to use that knowledge for the betterment of their business as well as personal lives. Only then they see you as an authority figure and once they begin to see you as an authority figure, they begin to trust you and when they begin to trust you, they don’t hesitate before doing business with you.
- Generate direct traffic from social media: Although you may decide to follow your own pattern, the conventional wisdom says that there should be a 70-30 ratio when you post content on social media and social networking websites. Of all the links that you post, 70% should come from other websites publishing valuable content that you would like to share with your friends and followers, and 30% should come from your own blog and website. There are many websites that get more traffic from Facebook and Twitter than from Google and other search engines.
- Create content targeting different devices: People may be accessing your content using their computers, laptops, LCD TVs, tablets and mobile phones. One way is to scale your existing content according to the screen being used at that particular moment. Another way is creating multiple versions (without duplicating) for different devices. You don’t need to create unique content for every device under the sun, but you can definitely create content for computers, laptops and TVs on one hand and tablets and phones on the other.
- Develop community around your brand: When people repeatedly come across your content – on your own website/blog or on other social media websites – a vibrant exchange of ideas takes place and when you share your opinions through your content, people too like to share their opinions regarding your content. When they regularly start talking about your content in general and your brand in particular a community begins to develop around your brand.
- Target different groups: Often it is not possible to target all prospective groups through a single page or blog post. For instance, as a content writer I would like to target as many niche businesses as possible because every business that wants to sell needs compelling content, which I can provide. So why not create pages and blog posts targeting web designers (who may need content for themselves as well as their own clients), SEO marketing experts who want to use content as an SEO tool, hospitality industry, lawyers and attorneys, accountants, interior decorators, and so on. They can all use my content writing services and I can create specialized pages for them. You can achieve the same for your business and different niche groups you cater to.
- Establish yourself as an expert: Would you like to do business with a novice or an expert? Of course if you are looking for professional services that really perform well for your business, you go for an expert. But how do you know if a person is an expert? When he or she repeatedly shares his or her knowledge and experience with you. As a professional content writer I should have lots of things to say about content writing, whether it’s about writing content for my clients or about writing on various topics and for various mediums. I should be able to tell you what sort of content performs well for my clients. Through my writings I should be able to differentiate between lousy content and quality content. The more I share with you, the more you appreciate my content and use it to improve your own content on your website and blog, the greater is my impact as an expert content writer. This can be applied to any field.
- Create link building opportunities: Although according to the latest grapevine your page rank may no longer depend on the number of quality links coming to your website, links still matter. They help search engines decide how valuable your content is. This is especially true in the times of social media where individual endorsements are preferred over algorithmic ratings. In fact this is a reason why more and more search engines are incorporating social media and social networking updates into their generic search result pages. Anyway, people are not going to link to you unless they find value in what you have published. You need to provide lots of quality content on an ongoing basis so that they have a greater choice.
- Encourage engagement on social networking websites: You can interact with people without posting content from your own website and blog but then you are always talking about other people. Engagement maybe there but this engagement may not lead people to anywhere. On the other hand, if you post content from your own website or blog and if people talk about your content and then you interact with them, the engagement level is totally different.
- Show your visitors that one thing or another is always happening at your business: You publish content on your business website primarily for two reasons: to educate your visitors about your products and services and to inform them of the latest developments happening at your end. Launching a new product or service? Opening a new branch in a different city or in a different country? Attending or hosting a business conference? Releasing an upgrade of your product? Doing some charity work? Just hired a great talent? Added a new section to your website? You can share all these things on your website so that people know that there is always something cooking up in your company or organization – in a positive manner.
- Get your employees involved: Encouraging your employees to create content and publish it regularly on your website or blog is a great way to keep them motivated and charged up. When they can articulate themselves they feel more a part of the entire process. It also shows your visitors that your workforce is communicative and full of ideas.
- Give search engines more content to crawl and index: The search engines love to crawl and index new content. The more you publish, with greater frequency they visit your website. The added benefit of this is, you set a pattern in such a manner that whenever you add something really useful that you think should be indexed and ranked as soon as possible, it is done. I have personally seen blog posts appearing in Google within a few minutes of their publishing. Publish fresh content on your website as much as possible to make search engine crawlers more and more greedy.
- Attract traffic for longtail keywords: The Hummingbird Google update has rendered targeted keyword optimization redundant. It is more about longtail keywords – complete sentences and phrases, just the way we speak, rather than just keywords. Create lots of content that provides answers to questions your prospective customers and clients have. For instance, if somebody searches for “where can I find a competent content writer for my web design company?” he or she should be able to find my website. This is the way people normally talk to each other.
- Give people a reason to spend more time on your website: The longer they stay, the greater is the chance of them doing business with you. You need to engage your visitors with interactive and useful content. This can be achieved by adhering to a uniform quality standard. If you like this blog post, and if you find it useful, then you will think, hey, this website may have more content that I can use and apply on my own website. What happens? You stay longer on the website. Some of you may even think, well, if this guy knows so much about content writing and content marketing, I might as well hire him for writing content for my own website.
- Cover every possible keyword in your niche, legitimately: Keywords of late may seem to be losing their sheen, especially after the Hummingbird update, they still do matter. There are many people who are still going to use your keywords. For instance, there are people who are still going to use terms like “content writer” and “web writer” to look for the services I provide. Continuously publishing fresh content gives you an opportunity to cover all the necessary keywords belonging to your niche.
- Create an ultimate information resource: Create an information resource for yourself as well as for your visitors. As you work on various projects you will go on learning new things and gaining experience, and in the hub of various activities, many things may slip out of your mind. Not if you record them on your blog or on your website. You can always keep coming back to your content and check out how you handled a particular situation a couple of years ago.
- Create material for your book: The guys at 37 Signals created a book out of their blog posts. Why not? You have already compiled so much information and you have already received feedback from your ardent followers, why not compile that information, based on all that positive feedback that you have obtained, into a book? Even if you don’t want to sell that book, you can offer it for free to your visitors. You can ask them to subscribe to your email updates in lieu of downloading your book.
These are some compelling reasons why your business website needs fresh content on an ongoing basis. Can you think of more reasons? Do share your opinion in the comments section.
A quick note for people who may have already read a blog post titled “15 Reasons Your Business Website Needs Fresh Content” – a scraper website had hijacked that blog post. So I deleted that blog post, rewrote, added five more reasons and published it again.