Nobody likes being around stagnant, swampy water. Whether it’s an algae-filled pond in the woods or a persistent puddle in someone’s backyard, stagnant water just isn’t something people seek out. This same idea applies to your website and search engines share our opinion. Why would Google have any real interest in stagnant, boring websites full of unchanged content?
For many business owners and website managers, taking the time needed to regularly update their site’s content just isn’t possible. Managing, operating, and monitoring a website is a full-time job all by itself, so it isn’t surprising that many websites don’t update their content very often, if ever. Once the content is there, it’s a permanent element for many, many websites.
On-page content isn’t a “set it and forget it” part of managing a website. Google wants the freshest, smartest, and most relevant content for its search results, and that means finding sites that are being actively managed and updated. If you want to stay at the top of results, increase engagement statistics, and generally improve your overall online presence, then you need to keep your site fresh. This is where things like evergreen content come into play.
How do You Create Evergreen Content?
For Google, there’s nothing as enticing as evergreen content, which is largely seen as information that’s always useful to searchers. Google wants to provide searchers with relevant content above all else, which means the search engine seriously values informative, well-written content from around the web. However, creating and managing evergreen content isn’t a simple task and will require real work.
Many marketers want to know what counts as evergreen content. Simply stated, it’s content that isn’t based on trends, fads, current news, or anything that might not be relevant to searchers in the future. While that’s a really broad definition, it provides some ideas behind what can be evergreen.
Blogs are often held up as a great way to regularly add new content to a site, particularly when evergreen content is the focus. Recipes, how-to guides, tutorials, educational content, and more can easily turn into highly valuable site content that steadily brings in more and more organic traffic.
Outside of a blog, marketers and site managers can create evergreen content focused on their specific industry. Look at what your customers search for or ask about, then think about how these ideas can be turned into descriptive, useful content that can stand the test of time.
Does Meta Data Need to be Updated?
Absolutely. A page’s meta data is where every search engine gains its initial understanding of the page’s intent. It’s the first point of contact with on-page elements, so if the page is struggling, then it’s time for a refresh.
Title tags and headline tags are hugely important for search engines and are the first area to review when updating a page. These two spots usually provide a short, direct explanation of the page’s topic or intent, so if you really want to impact a page’s value, try adjusting your title tags to improve rankings and relevance.
While meta descriptions don’t necessarily have true SEO value, they are massively useful for getting searchers to click onto your site. Testing different meta descriptions is a great way to help keep a page from sinking into stagnancy while finding new and effective ways to gain clicks.
Keep Your Site Flowing to Stop Stagnancy
Whether it’s your marketing and merchandising team, your copywriters, or the intern who needs the training, it’s important to have people dedicated to maintaining and refreshing your site.
CQL’s digital marketing team has years of collected experience with helping customers find the right path to success, and that includes ensuring customers manage and improve site content. Give us a call today if you’d like to learn a little more about what we can do to keep your site flowing.
