How to Keep Your Content Up to Date – And What Happens if You Don’t

Keeping the content on your website up to date is an integral part of staying relevant. 

Constantly updating your website will not only appease your audience and visitors, but search engines, too. You worked hard to establish a following, so don’t lose it by having out-of-date content. 

Your audience appreciates fresh content, so take the time and update where it’s needed. When you neglect your content and website, expect to lose traffic and follower retention, as well. Know when your pages need updates or when you may need to start fresh in some areas. 

Keep reading for tips and tricks on updating your content for a constantly fresh site.

The value of fresh content

Fresh content not only provides quality information to your audience but new and exciting topics for them to keep up with and share. Your audience may have loved and heavily engaged with your content at the time you published it, but they move on when there’s nothing new to catch their eyes. Stay on top of new article or page ideas to always have shareable and relevant information that keeps traffic coming to your site. 

Along with fresh content is the frequency in which you post. When you build a following, the best way to retain them is with frequent updates. More frequent updates and postings give your audience a reason to come back to your site. Having constant website updates with new and exciting content keeps your followers engaged. 

Updating the content that you already have is effective, too. No need to start from scratch with the research process because you already have a decent foundation. 

Also, with URLs that already exist from pages you already created, you get to keep the backlinks, page authority and rankings you earned rather than starting over. Don’t feel you need to reinvent the wheel with content that still may be relevant but do keep it current for your audience. 

However, entirely new content may be necessary for your website’s freshness. Outdated and irrelevant content can drive away your viewers, so be careful about what you decide to keep or not to keep.

Google values fresh content, too

Google, as well as other search engines, prefer fresh content from the websites that they crawl. When you give Google new information and website updates frequently, they then crawl your website more frequently, in return. 

More crawls mean that Google is paying more attention to your site and all that you have to offer by indexing this new content, and it can help with ranking, too. 

Be sure to keep your new content of good quality, however, to better increase your chances of good ranking results. Simply adding a few new words or changing the date of the publication won’t fool anyone, so make sure your content provides good quality to your audience and is relevant to them.

What happens when you don’t have fresh content?

Providing new and fresh content on your website can positively impact your site’s performance, but on the other hand, allowing your website to have out-of-date content can drastically negatively impact your website, as well.

Without current updates, your website will potentially be viewed as dead because it’s becoming irrelevant and has nothing exciting to it anymore. Keep your website alive and always plan ways to update new content for search engines to always have something to crawl and index.

Your following base is a strong following base for a reason: they keep coming back to you because they enjoy your content. However, if you rely too heavily on that and do not update them with fresh content, you will begin to lose them as they lose interest. You don’t want to lose all of the hard work you put in to create that website traffic by not keeping your website fresh. Update your website with new and exciting content for a fresh, appealing website that won’t lose user engagement.

Tips to keep your content up to date

Now that you know why you need to keep your website updated and fresh, here are some tips and tricks on how to keep that content up to date for your audience.

Stay up-to-date with trends

Make sure you stay up-to-date with possible trends in your market and get ahead on your content. People love relevant and current content, so write about interesting and new topics that will be sure to grab people’s attention. With more attention and traffic to your website, the more likely people are to share your fresh content.

Use your resources! Set a Google alert on specific topics to stay up to date on news articles or relevant information that just dropped.

Update or archive old pages

Now comes the challenge of deciding whether to update your old pages or to just get rid of them entirely. You spent lots of time creating your content, and people greatly engaged with it, but now it’s losing traffic and you need to decide what to do.

As previously mentioned, if your page is outdated but has tons of backlinks and page authority, it may be the best choice to simply update this content rather than getting rid of it. Other sites have linked your URL to that content which drives more traffic. 

With a decent number of backlinks, your rankings and trust are already established, as well, so let’s keep that going. Update your page with new research, rewrite the content on the page to increase relevance, include new infographics or pictures/media or site and backlink to new sources, all to create new and fresh content that will make your already established following base want to come back and revisit this site.

On the other hand, a page may just be too outdated and is not worth keeping. If the topic just isn’t relevant anymore, it may be in your best interest to create a new page with entirely new content. You don’t want outdated and irrelevant content, so consider archiving or deleting these pages from your site for a fresher feel.

Put yourself in your readers’ shoes

Take a look at your website and all of your pages. Ask yourself, ‘is this still appealing? What would my followers want to see? Have I neglected any pages?’ You want to make sure your website stays fresh and engaging so that the followers that you established want to keep coming back for new updates. If your website stays the same, it may bore them, and they may end up not coming back to your site and lose traffic. Always keep your website fresh to keep the excitement alive.

So, why should you keep your content up to date?

Your audience relies on current and up-to-date content, so be sure to constantly update your website and keep it fresh. Fresh content is a great way to keep people engaged and coming back to your site and also for search engines to crawl your site even more. Having out-of-date content loses traffic and bores your audience, so avoid it at all costs.