My computer has seen a lot of me over the past few months of quarantine. Between working from home, looking up information on COVID-19, and online browsing and shopping, I have been on a lot of websites in the last ten weeks! Something I have looked for on every site I have visited has been a notice about the pandemic. While I rarely read these notices or click on the button to learn more about any given business’s coronavirus plan, it is a good indicator to me that the website is legitimate and is something I am looking for. No, I am not looking to read paragraph after paragraph about social distancing or minimized capacity; rather, the COVID-19 notices let me know that the company has recently updated their website and is therefore not an outdated, irrelevant site that somehow made its way into my search results. Without noticing, most Internet users do the exact same thing I do: they gauge their own interest and the relevance of a site by checking to see if the content is old or new.
Part of successful SEO is updated, relevant content on your website. This is important during a pandemic and during “normal” times. While your site visitors likely do want to know if COVID-19 has impacted your hours, shipping or production schedule, or daily operations, 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.