Keeping Websites Fresh

Fresh is important to fruits & vegetables, laundry, ideas, and website content.

One of the great things about hotels is slipping into bed at the end of your day and feeling fresh sheets.

While glancing through a newspaper or magazine you occasionally find a headline shouting out an idea that demands to be read and explored.  You enthusiastically spend time reading and exploring. So it is with website content. 

Keeping websites fresh encourages visitors to return and improves your ranking.

There are over 175 million active websites on the Internet

Your site is competing with old and new sites for visitors. You spend time and money attracting visitors; why wouldn’t you reward them with fresh information?  Appealing layout and engaging graphics are important, but your visitor is looking for information.

It is easier to keep visitors returning than attract new ones

Marketers often say that it is less expensive to retain a customer than to attract a new one.  With the ever-increasing number of websites, it must also be true that it is easier to retain visitors than attract new ones.  Fresh content causes visitors to return.  If they see that you have something on your site that they didn’t observe before they will bookmark it and check back to see what else you may have added of interest.

Retailers bring in new products, move items around, and create unique displays to make customers want to visit their stores.  Your website, like the retail store, is selling.  It may be selling products, services or only ideas; but your website is selling.  As the retailer, keep your content attractive as you build and update your website.

Elementary teachers rearrange their rooms and add new posters to keep the interest of their students.  While it may be challenging to grab and hold the attention of 4th graders.  It is not any less essential to grab and hold the attention of your visitors.  New graphics, page layout and page placement confirmed by A/B testing should be part of your strategy as you open the door and invite your students visitors in.

Create New Reasons for your Visitor to Return

Find new reasons for prospects to come to your website.  Maybe you are already creating one or two new blogs a week.  Why not include blogs from recognized experts in your industry?  Blogs can be self-created, or they can be curated.  Curated blogs add value to you and your visitors by:

• Providing a different writing style.
• Offering a viewpoint that varies from yours.
• Choosing the best thoughts from a broad cross-section, the Internet.

Feedly is a news aggregator that compiles news feeds and can be a source for those that wish to curate some of their content.  Remember to carefully compare and contrast your views with the curated content so that you appear to be the expert.

Keeping Websites Fresh Includes Rewrites

Rewriting is a way to freshen old content. Have you reviewed content that you have written and realized that a previous publication is incomplete or (even worse) wrong? Rewriting old content allows you to update/correct what you believed earlier. This serves the interest of you and your visitor.

You can avoid the possible embarrassment of being caught with less than what you inspire to in your writing. Plus, it saves your visitor from getting incomplete or wrong information. You should make a note at the bottom of the piece saying that it was originally published in (DATE) and has been updated for accuracy and completeness.

Website with interesting content rank higher with search engines. Interesting content attracts and keeps visitors returning. A higher number of visitors improves the Google ranking of a site which improves the number of visitors, and the cycle repeats.

Humans, particularly Internet-browsing humans, have short attention spans. Interesting content increases the time we spend on a site and the frequency with which we return. Keeping content fresh is a key strategy for high performing websites.