Whether you have a blog, corporate website or ecommerce store, updating your website on a regular basis has many benefits. The main benefit is that it’s a signal that your website or business is active and alive. In this article, we’ll have a look at other benefits that regularly updating your content, on your website, has from a digital marketing perspective.
Regular website updates are good for SEO
Search engines love content and especially new content. Long-quality posts in their index satisfy their users.
What Is Long-Form Content?
Some individuals feel that articles – which are longer than 700 words – to qualify as long-form. Others think that articles have to be more than 1 800 words to be considered long-form. In spite of the feeling of many content marketers, many readers prefer to read longer articles.
The Google bot
It is common knowledge that a website which is revised regularly is crawled more frequently. In addition, it has more pages in its index. There are also more possibilities to boost SEO by applying internal linking best practices.
The way in which Google crawls websites is by following external and internal links. This is done by using a bot called Google bot:
- This bot arrives at a website’s homepage. It starts to render the page and follows the first link. In this way, Google finds out which pages on your site cover similar subject matter.
Your blog posts will get more link value if you link to them from the homepage. This is instead of only on the category page. And Google will find new posts quicker if they’re linked to from the homepage.
The more links to a post mean more value as Google sees a page that gets lots of valuable links as more important. This means that you’ll increase the chance of that page ranking.
Regular websites updates are good for social media
If you are using social media marketing, as part of your digital marketing strategy, to promote your blog, you know that one of the most critical success factors is the content you post on your social media pages.
Often the challenges that destroy your effort is lack of content. This means that a website that is updated on a regular basis will also give you fuel for your social media promotions.
How to put together winning social media promotions
If you’re looking to gain even more traction with social promotions, here are seven tips to enhance your next social media campaign.
#1: Running a Facebook Promotion Requires an App
There has been a lot that has been written about the Facebook Promotional Guidelines and how to run a compliant promotion. The guidelines have changed. However, the most important requirement stays the same. This is that any promotion (i.e., something where a consumer enters for a chance to win a prize) on Facebook must be handled through an app. If you know what you’re doing, you could develop your own Facebook app, but you might prefer to personalise an “off-the-shelf” app by a variety of companies such as North Social, Wildfire or Strutta.
#2: Twitter Promotions Must Provide Rules Disclosure
Any contest or sweepstakes are required to give participants terms and conditions of entry. And Twitter is no exception. With only 280 characters to work with, this becomes one of the bigger challenges of running a Twitter-based promotion.
The easiest way to respond to this need is to host the rules on a separate web page. Host a landing page with all of the contest details and requirements. Direct traffic to that page as opposed to having the interaction take place within the Twitter stream.
#3: Make it Easy for Users to Share
This is the most important tip when it comes to marketing. Much of the value in a social promotion comes from the increased ease for participants to share your promotion through their social graph.
#4: Regularly Promote Your Contest
Contest organisers will often schedule a bunch of communications when a promotion launches, then fail to maintain communication throughout the campaign. Running a user-generated content promotion is a great opportunity to share content (e.g., popular or unique entries) that will drive greater engagement.
#5: Amplify Your Message Through Partners
Include sponsors and providing them with exposure in exchange for cross-promotion. Identify influencers (journalists, bloggers, etc.) who you can reach out to. Share news about your promotion with them.
#6: Prime the Pump
Any time you’re asking users to submit content into a promotion, seed the contest with a few submissions. These can be sample entries that you create which are not eligible to win. Alternatively, these could be submissions from participants who have been encouraged to enter early.
#7: Think Twice Before Relying Solely on the Court of Public Opinion
Contests which feature user-generated content often incorporate an element of public voting. It drives greater virality, with participants naturally incentivised to share their entries and voters taking an active role in the outcome.
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