How often should I update the content on my pages?

[Lauren1689]

I have started dropping on my rankings - due to lack of time after having a baby. I'm still managing to blog but I'm wondering if I update the content on my pages will that help?

All my Meta tags and page descriptions were updated over a year ago - do I need to update these too?

We were ranking in the top spots for a good few years, but we're slowly falling Please give me any advice to keep us from falling even further.

I have claimed all my listings, and try to add new links once a month. I share my blog to all social sites and work hard to get Google reviews, we have 53 which is higher than any of our competitors.

Any other ideas? Have I missed something that Google is looking for nowadays? Many thanks

[Invite_Them_Home]

Hi Lauren;

First of all, congratulations on the birth of you child!  You now have at least two babies that need love and feeding

To answer your question on how often to update your content, the answer is, it depends.  This is a question that I get all the time, and happen to have done a blog post on last month.  Here it is, and I hope it is helpful.  I find that lots of time folks don't know what to post as much as how often.

https://invitethemhome.com/how-often-should-you-update-your-content/

If you have any questions or comments let me know and I will try to help.

Take care,

Herb

[Casey_Bryan]

Congrats on the little one Lauren! Time is always a factor!

To be honest with you, I’m regularly updating and tweaking old content to get better results. Whether it’s a simple title tag change or adding more content to the page as I‘ve realised website visitors will benefit from the extra info.

Is your traffic also dropping? If so it might be worth investigating the following:

• New competitors in the SERPs

• Are featured snippets now showing for your key terms? If so you may need to review your structured data (Moz recenrly did a great 3 part Whiteboard Friday series on these)

I‘d also highly recommend watching/reading the below resources:

- https://neilpatel.com/blog/#p-59557

- https://moz.com/blog/seo-rankings-drop-guide

I hope this somewhat helps. Goodluck Lauren

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

Great advice here, I'm with casey on constant updating and that's a solid article from Herb.

But for me you're asking the wrong question.  Sure updating content is great but you should really be testing it.  So test meta descriptions, H1's and other elements using a tool (there's this great keyword tool I believe it's called MOZ lol - lots of chat about that lately - they've really made some great changes.)

But in the interests of openness I also use SEM Rush and GOOGLE  that's the best keyword tool out there.  Just get googling and see what sorts of articles are overtaking you and model them and make better versions.

Having a young kid (congrats) means you're tired and creativity is really hard when you're tired and stressed - even for very creative people.  So model the articles of others and use the keyword suggestions and volumes as a guide.

But always be testing and tweaking.  Add just a paragraph and revisit and change up some words and phrases and keep it fresh. Use the date in the Meta Description.  CTR in the SERPS is really important and If I see 2018 up there i'm going to click on it.

Don't just add '2018' to everything though because google will catch you out. you actually need to add some contemporary stuff in there and it will revitalise and refresh the content.

Also remember that there have been lots of changes at google lately. So your drop in traffic might be external ranking factors bumping other sites up because google can understand them better and is better able to get good user feedback from Chrome.

Also be granular about it. Ask yourself of each article, "does this answer the question?" Is it up to date and is it correctly optimised using the keywords that are coming up in your research.

The best SEO tool in the world is the 100 billion neurons sitting on your shoulders.  Use that tool first and foremost