Content builds the web

“The freshness of the content plays a bigger role in answering queries.” Google.

Hopefully, you’ve realised by now that the only way to rank well in organic search engine results is by raising standards: staying relevant and publishing fresh content.

This includes keeping your website up-to-date and involves two key areas: clean code and content. Your website needs to be designed and built to certain standards (W3C), this ensures it loads fast and is easy to navigate; links should be working, and your site should still be alive and not in the graveyard of a billion unkempt websites.

But, how exactly do search engines decide if your website is up-to-date and relevant?

Search engines have hundreds of billions of web pages to sort through and use a complex army of algorithms and people to do it.

“Our goal is always to provide you the most useful and relevant information.” Google.

Without content, no matter how eye-catching a website is, it’s useless, like a car without an engine. Publishing fresh, useful content which adds value to users is what impacts results the most. Decades on and nothing much has changed.

Creating awesome blog posts screams we’re here!

All website owners need to do (besides producing great products or being an authority in their field) is to publish content frequently. If not, there are few other ways to let the search engine world know you’re open for business – if there’s no digital activity.

Almost all successful businesses have a blog

This is why all successful businesses have a blog section displaying anything from corporate news-related pieces to list articles called things like 3 Ways To Drive Traffic and Increase Sales.

How a blog really works, from an SEO angle

Blogs work because they are one of only a handful of ways a website can stay up-to-date. Other aspects of a website typically remain static (About and Service pages). Same or similar products can be sold by thousands of other vendors, and simply listing something like an iPhone is too ambiguous, paying for a sponsored advert will cost.

An example of how a content marketing blog post works

But publishing a post about what features make an iPhone or Android device so amazing delivers useful information, makes you an authority on the subject, drives organic results, increases sales and, for example, can help e-commerce sites wanting a shot at the Amazon monopoly.

With all this in mind, it leaves one major question on every website owner’s lips: how often do I need to publish new blog posts?

It depends on the purpose of your website, and your specific industry. Factors could include who you’re competing with and how often they publish – if you’re equally matched in product and quality, share similar locations, and have sites running to the same standards, it may well be whoever publishes the most quality content most frequently wins.

The reason here is that when everything else is fairly matched, the engines will be narrowed down to ranking who’s the most up-to-date, based on nothing more than the last date your site was actively delivering content to its readers. Of course, there are other factors, and I will keep you up-to-date with as much as possible here on the blog, wink.

It often boils down to a business’s capacity to produce content, without compromising on quality.

Here’s what to do, for starters:

If you want to generate more organic traffic and beat the competition, you need to know what your competitors are doing better (and worse) than you and take it from there.

For example, major publications like the news-fuelled Huffington Post publish a new post every minute or less, 365 days a year. Whereas, a small business could survive by publishing just a few times per week or less, depending on its goal. What’s yours?