Last year, my computer saw a lot of me during quarantine. Between working from home, looking up information on COVID-19, watching Netflix after work, and online browsing and shopping, I was on a lot of websites every day! In fact, my friends and I joked that if there were FBI agents watching me through my webcam, they’d see me eating chocolate chip cookies and hitting “add to cart” over and over. With how much I visited different sites or the same one over and over, I started to get targeted advertisements that were somehow exactly what I was looking for, and I started to notice a lot more about websites, especially when their website seemed to be out of date, irrelevant, or lacking in general. While I noticed the bad, I also noticed how updated, relevant, and keyword-rich content drove traffic (and particularly my own traffic) to websites and kept visitors returning.
One part of maintaining a successful website is successful SEO. Part of successful SEO is updated, relevant content on your website. This helps search engine crawlers know to index your site frequently and move it up the search engine rankings. Customers notice this, and they probably also want to know that you keep your site up to date with products, hours, and more even when the world is not so crazy. You can help optimize your site for search engines by posting new, relevant content on your site regularly. This can be in the form of a blog, updating products, adding new snippets to information pages when things change, and keeping your home page especially relevant.
New content helps search engines to index your website, which in turn generates new visitors and therefore a higher ranking on search engine result pages. Do not wait until you have to update your website! Keep it updated regularly and see an increase in visitors and ranking.