As SEOs, we love to talk about the need for fresh content. We argue that Google views it as a sign that the brand is actively adding value to its audience and therefore, not only should these pages themselves be indexed and drive new traffic, but they should pass a positive signal to the broader domain and every page on it.
It seems a reasonable perspective and nothing in my 11 years SEO experience has suggested anything to the contrary, so the question then is “How much?” Is a page a week enough? A page a day, perhaps?
This is a really important question. After all, time is all we have so if we need to ensure we spend it doing the right things, and content creation, when done well, is a seriously time intensive endeavour.
The answer, of course, is that it’s all dependent on the search vertical in question. If my direct competitors are creating loads of content, I’m also going to need to generate loads (in which case, perhaps there are better channels to pursue!) but if they’re quite lean on their content production, then I won’t need to do too much to gain a competitive edge.
So pick your single most important search term and open up the ten highest ranking brands, then make a note of how much content each one is producing each week. Your goal, if this is the avenue you want to go down (remember that most growth strategies are achieved by doing one thing remarkably rather than 20 things well!) is to create more content than the one currently creating the most. You should also keep in mind that with all this new content you are creating more opportunities for internal linking, so every few weeks I’d pause and check how things have changed by performing a site:domain.com “keyword” search into Google, and seeing if any of your new pages are now high up for that term. If they are, add a link from that page into the one you want to rank.
What this will mean in terms of rankings and traffic is of course impossible to predict, but it’s difficult to imagine this level of (relative) activity not meaning big things in the long term. Just remember to keep an eye on the competition so that if they notch up a gear, so do you.
Dan
