If you hope to see your construction business on the first page of Google, fresh and new blog content is what you need. Nothing is more effective at boosting your construction website’s SERP rankings than new and quality content development.
In this blog, we will cover what content freshness is and how it is being measured, how to know when it is time to refresh your content, and how to improve the freshness score.
What is Fresh Content in Construction?
Fresh content refers to newly published, updated, or revised content. It all applies to any form of business, especially in construction. Google and its multiple users appreciate new content because it is more likely to be relevant and accurate. Ever since the freshness algorithm update years ago, queries for trending keywords trigger Google to prioritize fresher pages with the most updated information.
Here, we identify four dates that are associated with the freshness of your construction content:
- Published: When the page was being uploaded on your website.
- Indexed: When the crawlers first discovered your page and added it to the Google search.
- Last Crawl: When your page was last crawled by those bots.
- Modified: When the last change was being made to your page.
How Does Google Measures Content Freshness?
Google evaluates the freshness of your construction blog content based on a lot of factors, including:
- Amount of change to the up-to-date page: Big changes signal more freshness
- Page inception date: The date it was being indexed by Google.
- Number of changes to the core content of the page: Changes to the core body content can add more freshness than adjusting the time/date tags.
- Rate of page change: Several changes on the page may signal more freshness.
- Freshness of the backlinks to the page: Links from the relevant sites with high freshness scores can improve yours.
Best Practices to Improve Your Freshness Score
Let’s now quickly go over the best practices and tips for integrating the freshness factor into your SEO strategy:
1. Always check the SERP
The easier way to evaluate the level of freshness of your blog content is to take a peek at the publication dates of the top results. For instance, you can check the first ten to twenty results and calculate the average. Preferably, you must give more weight to the top-ranking results within your calculation.
2. Publish new content on a regular basis
You do not always have to be publishing content on new topics. But as we discovered recently, your rate of new page creation can significantly affect your freshness score. So, make sure to publish fresh content, whether on time-sensitive or industry-related topics. Explore blog topic ideation, especially if you’re still looking for some fresh new topics to write about.
Again, focus on publishing more frequently. In fact, the more frequent you are in publishing content, the many times Google can crawl your website.
3. Update old content on a regular basis
This points out that search engines like Google cannot re-crawl every page all the time due to the great scale of new content being published every day. This results in Google crawling pages favorably based upon the rate of your content update. Always update your old blog content. Doing so improves your freshness score, making it easier for your blogs to rank.
4. Actually update your content
Changing your blog’s published date and the year in the title is standard practice. However, it does little in signaling freshness to Google. As we cited earlier, changes to the main boy of the page are way more important to Google compared to adjusting the time/date tags. So, it shows that you need to make updates to the core content of the page.
5. Submit to Google
Right after updating your core content, you might choose to resubmit your sitemap on Google Search Console. This should be your move if you wish to speed up the process of making Google re-crawl any of your updated content. Know that Google will always find the changes eventually on its own. Therefore, this is typically not worth it for small changes.
When You Should Update, Publish, or Republish New Content
Whether it makes sense to you or not to update content, so Google bot crawls your page more frequently, ranking higher usually depends on how essential freshness is on your queries.
Here is what we suggest:
- When freshness is essential – Update the page more frequently and publish new blog articles on the topics regularly to keep up with the demand.
- When freshness is essential but not critical, update the pages regularly. But if ranking begins to drop, consider revamping and republishing.
- When freshness is not essential, focus on creating the easiest and best guide on the topic.
So let’s take a closer look at these options you have when freshness is either important or crucial:
When to Update Content
Whilst Google pays more attention to significant updates, and minor updates are still important. This is primarily because the page’s freshness downgrades over time. Below are a few examples of small updates that you should be paying attention to:
- Adding in Internal Linking
- Updating platform screenshots
- Adding a new item to the list
- Make adjustments to the headings
This particular method is an excellent way to get more traffic from your blog posts that do not need necessary revisions anymore.
When to Revise and Republish Your Content
Revising outdated pages/posts and changing the published data is a very effective way to boost freshness. This becomes relevant when a particular article requires a complete overhaul to meet the visitor’s need for recent, updated blogs. This must earn you a higher freshness score compared to a simple update.
This particular method is suitable for your industry-related topics that resonate well with your target audience and existing clients long-term. Moreover, when republishing any revised articles, it is better to share them regularly on social media to boost engagement, just like any other new blog.
Pro Tip: Another great option is to combine several outdated, related articles into one updated guide and redirect all traffic to the new one. If the old pages are performing well, you do not end up losing that existing traffic, either way.
When to Publish New Content
An excellent example of topics that require fresh content is any blogs that outline and explain trends revolving around your industry. To maintain freshness for a particular topic you choose, write a whole new and fresh article each year, where you feature new trends and go through your recent developments, whether about your projects or the services you offer.
How to Know if You Need to Refresh Your Content?
There are many things you should keep in mind before knowing if you need to refresh any of your content. Keeping tabs on your performance, like engagement and traffic trends, are all crucial for understanding freshness. Below is how you will know if either you need to refresh your content or not.
- Track performance metrics. If you have a page that does not rank at the top but still attracts a good amount of clicks that result in lead visits, it signals to Google that some users consider your page very relevant and fresh enough for the query.
- Check keywords and query data. Keyword traffic volumes typically fluctuate, and not only for trending topics. Therefore, if your page traffic is down, it may also be due to recently failed keyword volume on that query.
- Look at position history. Perhaps, there is a new competition on your target keywords. In addition, one of your new pages managed to make a cut in the fresh content. We suggest that you take a closer look at the SERP position history because it can reveal if that is the case.
- Keep your eye on the clicks and impressions. Keeping a closer eye on the impressions and clicks is important, including the search queries that generate them. This can help you evaluate when to update your pages to improve freshness further.
ConstructionMarketing.io Can be Your Partner!
Content is only as valuable as crafting and planning behind it. But how much do you prioritize your content marketing campaigns? As a full-service digital marketing agency, we know the importance of the creation, strategy, distribution, evaluation, and promotion of every content marketing campaign. So, we can help you with that and we can be your partner!
ConstructionMarketing.io is a leading digital marketing agency and possesses virtually limitless marketing capabilities. We have content marketers and writers who can map out your blog posts, making sure that they are not just fresh but also engaged directly to your target audience, serving your commercial goals well.
It is our mission to create fresh and high-quality content for your target audience while optimizing for search engines. We significantly maximize the value of the overall inbound marketing efforts solely for your construction business.
Talk to us today. Let’s start evaluating your existing content and create fresh new ones!