Why it is important to publish fresh content regularly on your website

SEO experts and content marketers are constantly advising you to publish new, fresh content regularly on your website and blog.

Whenever this is suggested people think that a content marketer or an SEO expert is making such suggestions so that a client needs to spend more money on getting new content.

Of course, repeatedly publishing fresh content brings more money for the content writing and the content marketing company, but this is just one side of the story.

Recently a prospective client had submitted a query from my contact form and she said she found my website by first searching for the term “creating content clusters” and then further filtering the results for the last 30 days.

“Creating content clusters” is a competitive phrase and in normal search results my website doesn’t appear  even among the top 40 results on the search engine results page.

But since I have just recently published a blog post on the topic, it appears when someone filters the search results for the past 30 days, at number 2.

This made me think that having fresh content isn’t just good for your normal SEO, it also increases your chances of getting found on search engine results for the narrowed searches based on time frames. Especially when you aren’t ranking otherwise.

What if someone wants to search for web pages and blog posts published within the past 4 months? If you have published something during this period it will definitely show up.

I’m not saying you should publish regularly just because some people might be searching for information within certain date ranges, since there is an option to narrow down searches based on time frame it means there might be many people using this feature. It means there are many people looking for fresh content.

What are the benefits of publishing fresh content on your website or blog?

Even if you are not much bothered about being found by people who are looking for you within a particular date range, publishing fresh content regularly increases your chances of getting ranked higher by Google.

This is because Google prefers fresh content to stale content.

Given a choice between ranking a website that rarely publishes and ranking a website that regularly publishes and given that the quality of content being somewhat similar, Google ranks the website that publishes regularly higher.

This is because Google wants to present fresh content to its users. It looks for similar content, and if in terms of quality it finds fresh content, it chooses that content for better rankings.

Most of the search engine crawlers are designed in such a manner that they are continuously scouring the web for fresh content. They mark the websites that publish content regularly, taking note of the frequency with which the new content appears.

Then they automatically visit these websites at set intervals and if they publish new content, it is quickly crawled, indexed and ranked. This way, their content becomes visible on search engine results pages, sometimes within seconds.

This is something I have experienced personally: since I publish fresh content regularly on my blog, many of my blog posts and web pages start appearing in Google search within seconds. I’m not saying it metaphorically, my posts and pages actually start appearing within seconds.

In fact, this is one of the biggest reasons why I advise my clients to publish content regularly – to help the search engine algorithms draw up pattern of publication on their website or blog so that whenever they post something, it is quickly, almost immediately, indexed and ranked.

Another, a serious reason for publishing fresh content regularly on your website is that it gives a reason to people to visit your website repeatedly.

Normally, when someone visits your website and goes through all the present information, there is no reason for the person to come back again.

Unless you are amazon.com people are not going to buy from you on their first visit. They buy from you on their third or fourth or fifth visit. But since, you don’t give them a reason to visit your website, very soon, after having visited it once, they forget about it because there are hundreds of other such websites to attract them.

There are just two options for you: send them ineffective marketing messages by email that they very soon start redirecting to the spam folder, or you publish high-quality valuable content that informs them, educates them, or at least engages them.

Something that they appreciate.

A good thing about publishing fresh content regularly on your website is that you can then use the same content for your email campaigns and even for social media and social networking updates.

Publishing fresh content regularly should never be seen as a hassle. When you are constantly interacting, when you are constantly publishing fresh content, it shows to the people that you are active and you are eager to engage.