The Importance of Updating Your Website For Ranking in Google

There has been many times we have customers asking us why they need to send recent updates, recent projects, offers, news and company news to us and we thought we’d write an article on this to give you the low down on why updating your website is not only important for keeping your customers up to date on your services and news, but also so your website can rank higher in the Google search results too.

Here we give you our top 5 reasons you need to keep your website updated so that you can gain the edge over your competitors, so grab and brew and read on, this will give you valuable insight into how to make your digital marketing work for your business in the long term.

1 – Stay Relevant

Relevance is Google’s buzz word since their first Panda update back in 2017, you can read the full article here on what Panda is from Search Engine Journal. Panda was all about being relevant and your ensuring that thin content and low value content was devalued and good compelling content was rewarded. There are many signals that contribute to this, but one of them is making sure your content is relevant and informative so that the user would be more likely to share that content. This in turn then would ensure that the traffic hitting your website is getting the correct information they need to make an informed decision about whether they want to pick up the phone to call, email or to drive engagement in your article.

You can see how Designer Drives updates their website with recent projects and news to rank high for their keywords.

Staying relevant means as your business changes, you need to keep your website updated too, its the window into your world so you’ll need to ensure that the website is mirroring what your business is actually doing. There is no use in a displaying plumbing services on your website if you now only do bathrooms and wet rooms, it doesn’t make sense. So, stay relevant and keep your website updated.

2 – Google Crawls & Indexes

When you create a sitemap of your website, you submit this to Google via the Google Console (formerly Google Webmaster tools). Every 12 hours Google will crawl your website looking for new content so find ways to keep your website updated so that Google can find this new “relevant” content. So, for example, if you are a tradesman, lets say a builder and you specialise in loft conversions, you’ll want to throw a mix of different updates from posts and portfolios of recent projects. These give you a reason to update your website and perform good quality relevant digital marketing to help grow your business and audience online.

So, you could add recent loft conversion projects to your portfolio and for blog articles you could explain why loft conversions are a better choice than moving home, or the pros and cons of both so inform the customer so that they can then make an informed decision about whether actually want to go ahead with a loft conversion. Keep your website updated regularly with this and you’ll notice your website will rank for other locations and terms too making long tailed keywords more discoverable by your potential audience.

3 – Social Signals

So, you’ve just written an amazing article that you know people will want to read about, the next thing is to get this article link posted across your social media sites. This is important, Google actually crawls your social media and can determine your keywords, reviews and other conversations which holds weight as part of their overall ranking algorithm so social media is important.

So, post your articles, recent work projects and latest news to Facebook, Twitter, Google Business profile, Instagram and Linkedin and get people clicking those links to gain valuable social signals. Google will see this traffic increase and will place more authority on your website / domain for it.

4 – Design & Aesthetics

There is nothing worse than coming across a website that doesn’t load properly, is difficult to read on mobile or isn’t mobile optimised, it makes your business look bad online and you will be losing out on 70-80% of your traffic. In todays world, there is no excuse to not have a mobile optimised website, also you’ll want to rebrand your website or freshen it up every couple of years to keep the feel up to date and keep your brand on point to your customers. Google will also notice these changes in the code so its good to keep your website branding updated.

Bramble Beck Caravan Park update their design every 2 years to keep their brand on point.

5 – CMS Updates

Unless you have a bespoke website, you’ll probably be using a CMS like WordPress, Drupal, Umbraco or one of the DIY builders like Weebly, Squarespace etc. Now, this is where using a good CMS over a DIY one can make the big difference, with WordPress and other like for like CMS systems you can update plugins, add caching software to speed your website up and make server side settings to ensure your website and server and working well in tandem. With a DIY builder you won’t have access so your website will run slowly if you add more and more content and its not good if you dont have control over the server side of things. So, keeping your CMS updated is vitally important in helping your website rank high in Google and Bing.

To increase the effectiveness of your SEO efforts and boost your search engine traffic, you can just update your old content and give yourself an improved freshness score. – Neil Patel

So, here are the top 5 reasons you need to keep to your website updated in 2021, there are other factors and reasons, but these are the top 5 and if you follow this as a guide your website will be successful in driving relevant traffic, enquiries and leads. Here at Yuuzuu, we want our customers to provide us with recent news, projects and articles so that we can help them to drive good traffic and leads and keep them ahead of their competition. If you are a small business or large corporation and are a looking to expand your business, redesign your website or need some marketing consultation then speak to our team today.