A successful website is like a fit, healthy body: it takes a lot of sweat and tears to get into peak condition, and discipline to keep it there.
After spending countless hours collaborating with developers to build and launch your awesome, responsive new site, the last thing you want to do is leave it as-is and hope for the best. Without diligent upkeep, your site won’t be able to compete with the billions of others out there. Using the fitness analogy, it would be like training to get your body into shape for a competition and then abandoning your entire nutrition and training plan the next day, but expecting those muscles to stay ripped forever. Not going to happen.
The key factor in post-launch success is content, which is why we prefer to see websites as content hubs. New content is the not-so-secret ingredient in keeping your site visible, credible, and optimized for success. The digital strategy efforts at Forge and Smith include ensuring that our clients’ sites are set up for success with regularly published, search engine-optimized content.
Like going to the gym, sometimes coming up with new material will be the last thing you want to do, but we promise the payoff is worth it. Let’s break down the three most important reasons to maintain a disciplined content regimen.
Get Visible, Visible
Search engines like Google have computers constantly “crawling” or scanning your website along with billions of others, combing through the content. The different algorithms look at things like content quality, the number and type of keywords, tags, and how often a site is updated. What they find defines how the search engine indexes your site compared to others, and contributes to where it winds up in the page ranking – whether you appear on the first page or the last. The more often your site has new content, the more often the Googlebot will stop by to re-index it and the better chance you have at improving your ranking. Be sure you’ve got that straight: more new content means more frequent reindexing, not necessarily a higher page rank. This is where your disciplined training comes in.
Quality, Not Quantity
You could publish a few sentences every day under the guise of a blog, product, or service, but that isn’t going to improve your numbers. Frequent updates lead to frequent reindexing as mentioned, but the value your content brings to the end user is what improves your ranking. Content that informs and answers questions receives higher ranking, while poor-quality content will actually harm your ranking because users will bounce from your site and return to searching, telling Google that they didn’t find what they were looking for. The best way to climb the rankings is by producing quality content that provides value for your audience and establishes you as an authority in your industry. Leverage what you do, your services, or your professional standpoint while giving readers a reason to click through for more.
Winners Don’t Quit, Quitters Don’t Win
Now that you’re on board with producing at least 500 words of fresh content every month, make sure the words you choose are bringing the most value possible. While keywords aren’t the top factor in search engine ranking, they are still an important part of getting your site discovered by your target audience. We work with a skilled SEO specialist to ensure that all of the Forge and Smith site content (and that of our Smith-level clients) is flexing its keyword muscles for the engines through monthly performance reports and topic recommendations.
At Forge and Smith we see the value in post-launch drive, and that’s why we’re shifting our business focus away from simply providing website development and design to levels of social media, digital strategy, and content support. If your business is looking for a team of digital fitness trainers, we’ve got your back.
