In the fast-paced world of digital marketing, ensuring your website remains relevant, fresh, and at the forefront of search engine results is critical. One of the most effective ways to achieve this is by consistently updating your website content. However, an important question lingers: How often should you update your website content for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? Let’s dive in.

Understanding the Importance of Regular Website Updates

Before we delve into the frequency of updates, it’s essential to understand why regular content updates matter in the first place. Search engines, particularly Google, have algorithms that favour websites with fresh, updated content. These algorithms are designed to provide users with the most accurate and relevant results. Websites that regularly update their content are seen as more relevant, thereby earning a higher position in search engine results pages (SERPs).

The Ideal Frequency of Updating Website Content

A blanket answer for how often you should update your website content isn’t possible due to the varying needs and scales of different businesses. However, many SEO experts generally agree that you should aim to update your website content at least once a week. It’s important to note that “updating content” doesn’t always mean creating new blog posts or pages, but can also involve revising existing content to ensure its relevance, adding new information, or even changing the website’s visual design.

Website Content – Quality Over Quantity

While frequency is important, it should never come at the expense of quality. High-quality, engaging content that provides value to users will always outshine content churned out for the sake of maintaining a posting schedule. Search engines prioritize quality content that engages users, as this indicates the website’s relevance and usefulness.

So, before rushing to meet a strict update schedule, ensure your content is thoroughly researched, well-written, and tailored to your target audience. Remember, content updates should be meaningful, not just cosmetic.

Regularly Auditing Your Website Content

An effective strategy to maintain the relevance and freshness of your website content is performing regular content audits. A content audit involves evaluating your website’s existing content to identify outdated or irrelevant pieces that need updating or deletion.

By conducting audits, you can maintain the quality of your content, ensure relevance, identify gaps in your content strategy, and create a schedule for updating old posts or creating new ones. The frequency of audits depends on the size and nature of your website, but aiming for a bi-annual or annual audit is usually a good starting point.

Experimenting and Monitoring

The process of finding the perfect updating frequency for your website requires experimenting and monitoring your website’s performance. Use SEO tools like Google Analytics to understand how your content updates affect your website’s traffic and rankings.

Remember that SEO is a long-term strategy, and it may take time to see significant results. Don’t be disheartened if immediate changes aren’t evident. Patience, consistency, and adapting your strategy based on performance data are key.

Conclusion

Updating website content regularly is an integral part of SEO, helping you maintain your site’s relevance and visibility in search engine results. However, the frequency of updates depends on your specific needs, your capacity to produce high-quality content, and your target audience’s demands. Never compromise quality for quantity, and remember to conduct regular audits of your website content. The process might require patience and persistence, but the payoff in improved SEO rankings will be well worth the effort.

Remember: SEO isn’t a one-size-fits-all game. Keep experimenting, keep learning, and most importantly, keep your content fresh, relevant, and engaging!

It’s no secret that attracting and retaining customers is essential to your company’s survival as a business owner.

The evolution of the internet has changed the dynamic between businesses and customers. Consumers are no longer limited to one small geographic region to purchase their products and services. Combined with the wealth of information available at their fingertips, businesses are selling to customers who are better equipped to make informed purchase decisions.

The response from business owners has been to track, analyze, and predict future consumer behaviour through the use of statistical tools and data collection. The use of this data to predict and adapt to the changing marketplace is known as analytics.

What is Analytics?

It is anything that uses mathematics, statistics, predictive modelling, and machine learning techniques to find meaningful patterns and information in the recorded data.

Analytics has been used for some time; however, the level of sophistication of the tools used today vastly exceeds what was once available in the marketplace.

When you Google a product only to notice advertisements for it following you around on other platforms.
When you receive personalized offers in email form pertaining to a product you regularly purchase.

As a small business owner, it’s not necessary to understand the math behind analytics to make use of it. The following tips will show you how it can be used as a powerful business tool.

Understand the Behaviour of Each Demographic

By tracking the behaviour of each customer demographic, you will get a better sense of who your customers are. Analytics will show you exactly what each demographic purchases, when they purchase it, and what marketing strategies they respond strongest to.

Formulate and Adjust Marketing Strategies

Analytics is merely a tool. It arms you with a statistical break down of information to help you make better-informed decisions. While it seems only logical for business owners to track their customer’s behaviours, many are unaware of the most basic details of their desired target audience.

With analytics, you can understand the effect each decision you make has on your overall performance. This is vital for new businesses who have yet to establish a reliable clientele.

Do you need help setting up a Google Analytics account or deciphering the vast amount of information? Longevity Graphics can help!

Are you thinking about starting a business in Port Coquitlam? We’ve gathered some resources to help you get started.

Visit the City of Port Coquitlam Website

The City of Port Coquitlam website is a great place to begin when thinking about starting a business in Port Coquitlam. The website has many resources that will help you, prior to ‘opening your doors’. Click here to visit the City of Port Coquitlam’s Starting a Business page.

Get to know the area… and your competition

If you don’t already live in Port Coquitlam or the Tri-Cities area, it is a good idea to spend some time in the city. This will allow you to get a sense of the successful businesses that are currently operating in the area – including businesses that you will be in competition with. If your business is going to have a store front, you can use this time to search out potential areas for your business to operate.

Create a Website and Social Media Pages

If you’re thinking about starting a business in 2016 – you MUST have a website and social media pages. There is a vast amount of competing businesses in Port Coquitlam and the surrounding areas.

In order to be discovered by potential customers online, you must have an experienced, knowledgeable online marketing company who will be able to optimize your website and social media pages for optimal rankings.

Your online marketing company should be able to:

Help your website gain top position in search result lists
Perform keyword research to discover vital search combinations for your business
Perform meta and title tag development
Establish HTML code optimization
Perform inbound link building

If this sounds like something that you will need help with, contact Longevity Graphics for a FREE 1-Hour Consultation. We specialize in working with local clients and helping them rank for their industry specific keywords.

Are you considering outsourcing your website design?

Below are some Pro’s and Con’s of hiring a local web designer vs. outsourcing your web design.

Pro’s of hiring a local web designer:

Personalized, one-on-one service
It’s easy to get in contact with your web designer if you have any questions
You know exactly who will be working on the design of your website and social media pages

Con’s of hiring a local web designer:

Well, we sure can’t think of any con’s!

Additional Resources

Sign up your business on the Shop PoCo BIZ Directory; Click Here
Join the Port Coquitlam Business Improvement Association (BIA); Click Here
Join the Tri-Cities Chamber of Commerce; Click Here
Contact Longevity Graphics for a FREE 1-Hour Consultation to learn about the online marketing services they offer; Click Here

Responsive Web Design
Responsive web design is the newest online craze.

Nearly every new client of ours asks us if we can build them a responsive website, and we don’t blame them. With the sheer number of different media that can access the internet in today’s society, it is important to have a website that can be accessed by users on their computers, phones and iPad alike.

A large chunk of traffic is generated through hand held devices and if a business or website owner does not have a site that is compatible with all media, then they will be losing out on business.

What is responsive web design?

A website that has been built using responsive web design will be able to operate on any device that can access the internet, without losing its form and becoming unusable.

Previously, the only way to enable mobile access to a site was to create a specific mobile site; this technique has merit, but responsive web design is a visually appealing alternative.

Adaptable To the Device

Web designers are currently plagued by the constant invention of new mobile devices. Every year new technology is created that is no longer compatible with their previous work. Responsive web design solves this problem by creating a malleable page format that simply conforms to the screen size of any new device. This way designers don’t have to constantly go back and make changes to their mobile sites because responsive websites can do the adaptation themselves.

One feature of responsive web design is that it works across all platforms, while separate mobile sites need to be tweaked for different devices. A mobile site will not perform the same way in Google chrome as it will in Safari, and for novice developers this can be troublesome to deal with.

However, if you can create user friendly mobile sites, they will often be more aesthetically pleasing because they won’t be adapting their screen size.

So, How Does Responsive Web Design Work?

The way that responsive web design works, is the screen literally grows and shrinks depending on the screen it is being used on. This is fantastic technology because the website literally knows what it is being viewed on, and behaved accordingly.

The drawback to a responsive website is that sometimes a website might expand or shrink in a way that doesn’t line up with your vision for your website.

Who Needs Responsive Web Site Design?

When thinking about adding a responsive design to a site that currently doesn’t support mobile devices, or is using a mobile site that they want to switch over, it’s important to look at the individual’s business model:

If you look at your analytics, do the figures show that the site is attracting mobile users?
If the site is already working well on mobile with solid conversion rates, then maybe the client doesn’t need a responsive web site after all.
Other factors to consider are how the site looks aesthetically when viewed on a mobile device. If the site completely loses shape and becomes either unpleasing to look at or difficult to read, one might consider having the site redone responsively.

Success Online Coaching- A Case Study

We built a responsive site for Success Online Coaching recently, and we are proud of the results.

It was important for Success Online Coaching to have a site that could be accessed through mobile because their business model relies almost entirely on online sales. They also have an app that provides access to their website, so it was important that they had an aesthetically pleasing site for customers to navigate.

On May 22^nd, 2013, Google rolled out the Penguin 2.0 update to their search engine algorithm. Like Penguin 1.0, the update focuses on penalizing unnatural linking strategies. One difference with Penguin 2.0, however, is that it analyzes the backlinks of the internal pages as well as the home page, whereas Penguin 1.0 only analyzed the backlinks to the home page. This detail was only recently revealed by Matt Cutts when he spoke about the update on his blog. It is, effectively, a more in-depth version of Penguin 1.0, and it can cause the same problems for sites that have had black-hat or grey-hat link-building done in the past.

Penguin 2.0 basically looks for unnatural links from low-quality sites and devalues your site based on what it determines to be a black-hat link profile. It makes the assumption that you or someone working on your behalf participated in unnatural link-building strategies, such as paying for links or ‘advertorials’ (paid editorials that link back to your site). Maybe you didn’t do this unnatural link-building yourself, but a competitor has built poor-quality links to your site with the intention of getting your site penalized. This is negative SEO, and it has the same repercussions.

For more information about the Penguin 2.0 updates, check out this link.

Identifying it

So how do you know if this update has affected your website? Check your analytics data (from Google Analytics or any similar service that tracks your traffic) and look for a drop in your site traffic in late May. If you see a sudden and dramatic drop in traffic that can’t be explained by a usual seasonal trend or other logical coincidence, you’ve probably been hit by Penguin 2.0.

It’s also a good idea to examine the backlinks of your site using a site exploring tool such as those offered by SEO Moz or Majestic SEO. Using these tools, you can view the domains that link to your site, the page rank and domain rank of those domains, and the anchor text used in the links. With this information you can figure out if your link profile has the signs of an unnatural, spammy link-building strategy – backlinks from paid directories, links with exact match anchor text (keyword stuffed anchors), and high link accrual velocity (gaining backlinks in large chunks very quickly).

This can be a tedious and time-consuming process, especially for those unfamiliar with SEO and the tools that are used to analyze websites. If you don’t have the time or you find it too confusing, Longevity Graphics can help you figure out if your site has been hit by Penguin 2.0.

What to do

If it’s clear that you have a large amount of crummy backlinks, how do you proceed? The solution is straight-forward, but not necessarily easy or quick. Working from the list of your backlinks, you will need to identify the links that are hurting your rankings and deal with each accordingly. In cases where you have control over the link, like on a directory that provided you with a login to update your business profile, you should be able to delete the link altogether or alter the anchor text if that is the issue. When you do not have direct control over the link, you will have to reach out to the webmaster of the site on which your link appears and request to have your link removed.

There are sites and tools available to help you with categorizing and sorting through your backlinks. Some will even have template letters to help you with sending out link removal requests. https://www.rmoov.com/index.php https://www.removeem.com/.

Not all webmasters will be cooperative and some will even try to exploit you by asking you to pay them to remove your link. In these cases, you can consider using Google’s link disavow tool as a last resort. The tool allows you to suggest that certain links not be counted toward your site’s ranking. Matt Cutts has warned that the Disavow Tool should not be used by most sites and should only be used to clean up a “small fraction” of links after you have made multiple link removal requests on your own. He seems to be suggesting that abusing the tool could result in an additional penalty of some kind to your site.

Hopefully you will have been successful in removing the offending backlinks from your link profile. Either way, you should move forward by focusing on creating new links that follow Google’s quality guidelines and avoid unnatural link-building practices. See here for a useful link explaining what one should not do when doing link-building. Google recommends that you seek out natural links by providing useful content such as infographics or guest posts on relevant, high-quality sites.

If your livelihood has been threatened because this recent update has diminished your site’s traffic, we can help you get back on track. Recovery from Penguin 2.0 is a big job, but we are professional SEOs with a variety of experience that can help to boost your site’s rankings and recover from penalties.

Ever come across an issue and spend an enormous amount of time looking for the solution? It usually happens when I need to get a project up and running with a hard deadline that is ticking away. Hopefully this article will help others with the issue that I recently tacked.

Third party shopping carts

Third party shopping carts hosted on a different server than the one your website is hosted on can cause some issues with tracking results within Google Analytics. Without cross domain tracking setup, Google Analytics will track all of the source traffic as a referral from your website. Not very useful when you are trying to track different advertising channels and their results.

Google Developer Knowledge Base

You can try reading this article from Google. Kinda useful but not really thorough. Where do I add the code? To the main website? The shopping cart?

YouTube

I love when people make YouTube videos that solve issues. Thank you! Than you!

Here’s a youtube video that also talks about the issue. It is definitely more descriptive.

Great, here’s the code that I need to add:

_gaq.push(['_setDomainName', 'none']);
_gaq.push(['_setAllowLinker, true]);

pageTracker._setDomainName("none");
pageTracker._setAllowLinker(true);

Here’s the answer that I needed to get the cross domain tracking for Google Analytics setup correctly.

1. Where do you put the code? On the main website google analytics code or the shopping cart?

The answer is both.

Adding the code to the main site will track the traffic entering the main website and share that with the analytics data on the shopping cart.

If you have links pointing from the shopping cart back to the main site, you will also need to add the code to the shopping cart Google analytics to track the traffic entering the main website from the shopping cart.

The rest is pretty simple. Add this code:

<a href="https://www.my-example-blogsite.com/intro.html"
   onclick="pageTracker._link('https://www.my-example-blogsite.com/intro.html'); 
return false;">
   See my blog</a>

to any link that it pointing to either website (make sure to change the website urls).

Hope this helps someone else!