Has your web content passed its expiry date?

It is wishful thinking to assume that once your website is launched it will just sit there happily bringing you new customers and new business opportunities.

In reality, it takes time and effort to maintain your website content in order to keep it looking fresh.

Have you ever landed on a website and thought… “hmm that looks like something from the 90’s”?

Think of websites like a high street clothing store. For example, I go into the store one day and come away with bags and bags of new clothes.

Pleased with my ‘haul’ I brag to all my friends about my new buys on Facebook and vow to fill my entire wardrobe with clothes from there from now on.

The next week, I go back to the same store, but it has all the same stuff. So I leave empty-handed.

I’m pretty disappointed, but tell myself that if I go back in a month then surely they will have something new. A month later I am really disappointed to find that the store STILL has the same stock. That’s it. I give up. I am going to another store in future.

This is (loosely) how Google works. Google takes time to crawl your website and index your pages.

Each time Google returns to reindex your site, if they find that very little has changed then they will put off re-crawling your site for a longer period of time – resulting in a dramatic drop in your search engine rankings.

The moral of the story…

You should regularly look to update and refresh the content of your website to keep Google and your visitors engaged.

Preparing a content management schedule will help you to keep track of this task and means that you don’t one day suddenly realise that your entire website is 10 years out of date. Focus on one area at a time to keep things manageable.

Another simple way to keep your website fresh is through the use of blogs or news pages. Writing an article or a blog post a week will mean that your website is constantly adding new content and keeping the crawlers and your visitors satisfied.