Why Fresh Content is King with SEO | Marketing Mix Episode #16

Sarah: Hey, hey! Good morning. All right. Is your website a dead entity? Do you know what that means? If you don't know that answer, you need to keep watching.

Glyna: Good morning!

Sarah: Good morning. How are you doing?

Glyna: I'm good! This sounds like a very serious topic.

Sarah: I know, dead entity ...dun dun dun!

Glyna: Yeah, it's like dun dun dun!... All right. Well, welcome to Marketing Mix everybody. Every week we have different segments highlighting different types of digital marketing topics, and we try to mix it up a little bit for you. You just never know.

Sarah: You never know. We never know, but it's always good at all the time.

Glyna: Oh, it is. It's a can't miss.

Sarah: Yeah, yeah. Okay. Guys, as always, you want to make sure that you subscribe to our YouTube channel. And the reason why? We constantly are updating it with fresh, new videos to help you with all things marketing. Don't forget that we go live on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, and you want to also like or follow our pages on LinkedIn and Instagram. And of course, there's our awesome podcast Marketing and a Mic.

Glyna: Yeah! We've got so much going on, but it's fun. So much fun.

Sarah: Yes! Yes, yes, yes. Okay. When is the last time that you've updated or added new content to your website? And we want to be clear that we're not talking about making small little updates or changes or tweaks or security updates, or things like that to your existing pages. We're talking about adding fresh content. This is so important to your overall SEO. If there is one thing that we talk about a lot, it is SEO because we are drilling it that it is so important. Anybody familiar with SEO is familiar with the famous phrase that Bill Gates coined in the '90s, which is "Content is King". But for us and in today's world, "Fresh Content is King". That's what we're going to touch on today.

Glyna: I'm so impressed that you knew who actually came up with that phrase originally. I didn't.

Sarah: I didn't know it off the top of my head, I'll be honest. I had homework.

Glyna: I was like, "Wow, Sarah's bringing the knowledge today."

Sarah: I feel like fact-checking, is that right?

Glyna: I love it! I love it. Well, you may be asking yourself, "Okay, content, I've heard of content." Fresh content may be a new term, but it's exactly what it sounds like. Anything new and fresh that you add to your website, whether it's something you've written or images or video. Pretty much anything that you add to your website.

Sarah: Yeah. It's kind of all forms of media, really. A lot of ways to add new content ... I do want to say from a human standpoint, fresh content is really helpful because it brings visitors and it keeps them coming back to your website, because you're adding more and more stuff that they're looking for. It also can attract new visitors that may have not looked or sought out your business before. But because you're keeping that fresh content and putting it out there, it's attracting new visitors. There's a lot of ways to add. One of the most common is blogs, and blog posts are so helpful. If your website does not have fresh blogs, get on that today. It really is so helpful. Videos. Videos are extremely important. Pictures, especially when optimized. That's very, very, very key. Adding new web pages, social media feeds, online reviews. If you've got those online reviews going, connect them through your website. It's great. Adding new content, it just helps your website target a wider range of keywords. Fresh content and fresh pages create new links, which new links to your website are very helpful and it's essential to SEO. All of those things: reviews, web pages, social media feeds, pictures, videos, blog posts. I'm sure you could expand on that more with all the importance of that fresh content.

Glyna: Well, yeah. Going back to the blog post thing, I don't know if we've mentioned this before, but we probably have. Thinking about the dead entity part of it, if you have a blog and you don't have any blog posts on it, it really doesn't look good overall anyway. You want to keep it fresh and keep new blog posts coming at least once a month on that. Social media feeds, it's great to have your Facebook feed or your Twitter feed on there. I was going to show you something real quick that is one of my new favorite things and the new way of getting fresh content here. We come to our website. Let's see. Can you see it? Yeah, there we go. Scroll down to the bottom. We have a feed coming on our website all the time when people leave us new reviews. Every time someone leaves us a review, whether it's on Google or Facebook, it automatically populates on the website, which in turn serves as new content. If you look at the whole page, which I think is really cool ... Is it going to let me show you? Yeah. Again, all of these are live feeds. Get rid of my little chat girl here.

Sarah: Look at all those five-star reviews!

Glyna: I just wanted to show some bling today!

Sarah: Yeah! It's good to have reviews, but to have a lot of five-star reviews, even better.

Glyna: We try. We work really hard for those, that is for sure. But anyway, that's a good kind of sneaky way to get some new content. Let's put a review feed on your WordPress site. That's one of my new favorite things, and we try to do that for everybody that we build a website for, just to make sure that they are getting new stuff out there all of the time.

Sarah: Yeah.

Glyna: All those things are very important. Let's see. All right, we have ways to add new content. And then fresh content, things to keep in mind.

Sarah: Yeah. You don't want your website to turn into a dead entity, and that kind of just means that there's really nothing going on. You want to keep it updated with fresh stuff, and that's just so important. When it's a dead entity. It's just dead in the water. Nothing's going on. No activity. Doesn't help your visitors, and it certainly doesn't help for SEO. Shoot for updating it two to three times a week. That's a really, really good goal to kind of keep in mind, is to do two to three times a week. And the content needs to be relevant. That's another reason why these fresh blogs are so important. If your last blog was 2017, it's probably not going to be as relevant anymore. It needs to be relevant to what your business is offering. So whatever's going on in your business, put it out there. Keep it fresh for your visitors. The content needs to be of high quality and useful to consumers. And this is really important. You don't want to just put out, "I got to get something out there so let's just plug in all of our keywords or whatever we got to do."

Glyna: Yeah.

Sarah: It can't be garbage. It's got to be high-quality content. We've said this before. These search engines, they're not dumb-dumbs. They are on it. They know what to look for so there's really not a lot of shortcuts to it. You just really got to make sure that by doing the right thing, putting out fresh, useful, relevant content, they really do reward you for it. Because you are providing useful information that they can easily connect to the visitors who are searching for it.

Glyna: Yep, exactly. I understand it's a big project to get a website up. It seems like after you've got that prep project done, the last thing you want to think of is doing more to your website. I know a lot of us are guilty ... Well, not us because we're turning content all the time, but I know a lot of people are guilty of just leaving that website out there and never touching it again. And that is not helping you at all for the search engines. Let's move along. Fresh content, why does it matter? Sarah has touched on this a few times. Again, we love our SEO and we totally believe if you don't have SEO and you're not driving traffic to your website, then you're really missing out on a huge piece of business and new business. Why does it matter? The number one reason is that search engines love it. We'll say it again. Especially Google, they love, love, love fresh content. Fresh content equals frequent indexing, which we'll get into in just a second to talk about what that means exactly. Google actually has what they call a freshness factor in their algorithm. They will actually prioritize sites that have new, fresh content over sites that don't. So again, it's all about getting your rankings as high as you can. Playing the Google game, playing the search engine game, and these are just really important things to keep track of when you're trying to do that.

Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. It's very powerful when leveraged correctly. Again, that's what we talk about, kind of doing it the right way with relevant and useful information and putting it out there regularly. It helps you kind of gain that trust and authority with search engines, because the more you're kind of following the rules and putting stuff out there and keeping up that relevant information, it is, it's like a trust factor. They look at it as you are a good source of information. You are a trustworthy source of information. Because of that, they're going to be more willing to rank you higher and put you in front of those people that are searching for your type of content, your type of business, or your type of product or service. It's incredibly important for so many reasons, but yeah. Again, you want to get into the good graces of those search engines because once you're out, it's really hard to get back in. It's like Fight Club.

Glyna: You're exactly right. It's really hard to get the rankings up. If you lose them, it's 10 times harder to get them back. You're exactly right, so it helps position you as a resource. That's what your website should do anyway. Make it look like that you're the expert in your field, and you have to keep bringing up new things to show people, "Hey, we know this and we know this and we offer this." So you have to keep churning. It also educates the search engines about your website. Again, you mention keywords. When people are looking for those keywords, they know, "Oh, I know Fusion One Marketing has those keywords and they do those things." So again, we're preaching that SEO as always, but it's so important.

Sarah: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And again, it's kind of twofold. Fresh content, we talked about why does it matter so much. Your viewers and your audience like it. It's trust on two ends: trust with the search engines and trust with your viewers. And just like what you touched on, Glyna. When you're regularly putting out useful information, you're gaining a lot of trust to your viewers because they're like, "Hey, I need this information. They're consistently providing fresh, relevant stuff." And then attracts a larger audience, and I think we've touched on this a couple of shows ago. There's a lot of ... So many things I'm like, "I don't know what date it was, but I know we talked about it." There's a lot of different forms of media and content that you could put out there, whether it be videos, whether it be even podcasts. All that kind of stuff is just such good content, and it's linking you back to your website. We've talked about how that attracts a larger audience. Everybody kind of digests information differently. Some people, they're looking for blogs. Some people are looking for videos. Whatever it is, but you're putting yourself out there. You're just expanding your audience. You'll get more subscribers. It's just all-around good, good, good.

Glyna: Yeah. Again, as we always talk about, your website is your main hub for everything. You need to have everything on it. You need to have access to all of your social media channels, all your videos, all your blog posts, all that stuff in one place. So, those people can come there and they can find everything they need or at least a link to it from your website. You want a lot of eyes on that. And that's, again, what fresh content will do. It helps your audience stay informed. Maybe you've got some new things coming out. You want to make sure that people see that, and then the audience engagement. It really allows you to build relationships with people and have them ... Then they can recognize your brand even more. Make sure you're branding all this stuff too. That's important. And then again, the more content you have, the more people you're going to attract. It only makes sense. It really is just common sense. And that way, they will know ... There should be no doubt when they think of Fusion One Marketing, they should know what you sell and what you provide if you are turning out that fresh content. They'll see it.

Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. So fresh content, how does it help SEO? We could go on and on about this, but we kind of just could explain it the most basic and helpful way as possible. Search engines are like web crawlers. You could call them robots or Google bots or bots, whatever term you like.

Glyna: Spiders.

Sarah: Right, little crawlers. And that's what they're doing. They're just these little high tech little programs. They're scanning the internet all day. That's what they do. They don't take a day off. That's all that they do. Nobody works harder than those little Google bots, that's for sure. So when you publish new content, you're presenting opportunities for these web crawlers essentially to come back to you. And so it's like their web. They just keep kind of coming around and saying, "Oh, okay, Fusion One just put out some more new stuff, they put out some more new stuff." And it just helps them to know that you're staying active and you're staying busy. And they like it when you're staying busy. It just shows that you've got a really strong online presence.

Glyna: Yeah, and it was kind of cool. I wish I would have brought it here with us today, but we keep track of the visitors that come to our website all the time. It even keeps track of when those bots come to your website. I think one day when I looked at it, there were like 20 or 25 things, people that had come to the website. I guess robots aren't really people or bots aren't really people, but 20 of them were Google.

Sarah: Wow.

Glyna: It was because of our fresh content; they came back and back and back. It was just amazing to see. I was like, "Okay, it's working. It's definitely working."

Sarah: It's working. Right.

Glyna: Yeah! It was so awesome. And the algorithms for the search engine engines, not just Google, your website becomes more valuable to them. I know we've mentioned that several different ways. They give you a better ranking because they view you as an authority because you're putting out all this cool content, and they're just going to give you a better ranking and that's what you want. That's the bottom line here. We want to make sure that your website can be found, and this fresh content is one of the best things that you can do and the easiest things you can do to help.

Sarah: Right. Exactly. That's what this all comes down to, is that there is an importance to this fresh content. It's not just because you just need to put more work on yourself, but it's because, "Hey, look, if you want to get seen online, you really got to do the complete recipe," as we talk about a lot. Just to recap what we had talked about, a stale website, a dead entity website. What we talk about, it's less engaging. You're going to get flat or kind of lower search engine traffic, or really none if you're not doing anything on there. You're going to get lower rankings because again, this is all about Google meeting the searcher's needs. Whatever they're searching for, Google's job is to connect them with the most relevant and current and useful information. If you don't have any of that going on on your site, Google's going to pass you by, and there go your rankings.

Glyna: Yep. You're exactly right. And recapping again, a fresh website is just the opposite of that obviously. It's very engaging. You get higher rankings and you get more traffic to your site. Again, it's all common sense, but it's something that people don't take time to think about it. You really need to have a plan for all of those things. Make sure that you're including it in your day to day business life, and thinking about how can I make fresh content. You really need to have a plan. Because, fresh content, it really equals more revenue when it comes down to the bottom line. Anyway, that's everything we kind of had today about fresh content. If this doesn't make much sense to you, as always if you want some more ideas, we can help you with that. We're great at creating content and reusing content, so we would love to help you. Just message us for a free consultation, and we would love to help any way we can. We really appreciate everyone joining us today. And I think that's a wrap, Sarah.

Sarah: Yeah, don't forget that on Friday, we've got our Biz Talk with special guest Jacob Vail with Alfa Insurance, and that's going to be a good one. We talked with him yesterday and he's a great guy. We're going to have a lot of fun.

Glyna: Yes.

Sarah: Thanks guys for tuning in, and we will catch you all next time!

Glyna: Bye!