Reminder: SEO Deserves Freshness

May 01, 2024

There’s one aspect of SEO, that not many people (including Googlers) are talking about.

It is freshness.

Stale websites are inevitably losing rankings even if they managed to acquire strong signals years ago.

Years ago my site was getting links from NYTimes and other huge websites. These links were helping for a while but it didn’t last forever.

I have a bunch of sites I don’t have time for, and all of them are showing the same: A slow, steady loss of organic visibility.

Any website needs the following to maintain (and diversify) organic search visibility:

To put this into a more actionable context, for a medium-sized site, this could look as follows:

Monthly content updates and new content creation (2-4 fresh content pieces a month)
A quarterly linkable asset / PR campaign (which helps to acquire links and get your brand name out there on a regular basis)
An ongoing outreach and/or relationship building (which helps diversify your backlink profile and discover new link-building opportunities)

Getting linked and mentioned helps is important on many levels, not just rankings, of course.

Google is encouraged to visit your site more often and eventually it starts trusting you more.
You develop referral traffic from those links
Building a stronger brand will protect you from Google’s update.
Generative AI platforms get to know your brand and may surface you in the responses more often.

To help you out, here are a few resources:

My Wix article on updating your content. This is a long tutorial on how to update your content and create a routine around that.
Here’s how to create and promote linkable assets (and how we do it). A good linkable asset drives links for months (and often years) but it does take time to create and properly promote it.