Week Twelve: Don’t Let Things Stay The Same

Google likes FRESH – and that means re-doing things from time to time

Okay so every page of your website has been written with unique, relevant, keyword rich and engaging content and you’ve upload web-optimised images to keep load-times down. Those pages are done, right?

If only.

Google really favours blogs or news, sites where the homepage has newly updated content all the time. For businesses who have homepages that don’t require updating very often, it’s easy to start slowly slipping down the ranks if Google thinks your site is ‘stale’. Having frequent blog posts will be the best way to combat that, but you’ll also need to periodically update your main pages – Home and About Us. You don’t need to re-write everything, but once every 3 months change the phrasing slightly for some of your pages. If you write 3 or 4 slightly different versions of the same paragraph, you can rotate them throughout the year. Google will forget what your site looked like 6 or 9 months ago, so you can go back to a previous version. Bust out your thesaurus and think about how to write the same thing in a different way. Update your images at the same time.

Best practice is to do this once every 3 months, so set a reminder on your calendar or phone and replace certain sections 3 months from now. This isn’t a major ranking factor, so if you’re really happy with how you’ve written your home page don’t feel like you HAVE to keep changing it, but a lot of SEO is making tiny changes that cumulatively make a difference – and the difference between ranking 1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4th can make all the difference to your business.

Don’t worry about re-writing your blogs, just focus on your top 2 or 3 visited pages.