Why Content Maintenance Has Become Just as Important as the Strategy Itself (New Product Announcement)
This is a guest blog by John G., Authority Writer and Content Strategist at Express Writers.
Most people understand that successful content marketing requires high-quality content. Without this essential ingredient, your “marketing” won’t move the needle one bit.
Unfortunately, many marketers stop at creating high-quality content. They hit “publish” and move on to the next project.
At Express Writers, we are constantly updating our published content because we know that keeping it relevant and competitive is just as important as creating it in the first place. That’s why we’ve recently begun doing the same thing for clients with our new Content Maintenance Strategy service, which ensures their content never goes stale. Check out our new Content Strategy Maintenance service here (click the Options to see it).
Introducing Our New Service: Content Strategy Maintenance
Subscribe to a monthly fee (no contract, cancel anytime) to have our Content Strategist set up ongoing tracking and keyword research every month, and check in on your rankings. We’ll build a report, look at your keywords, and discuss how you can improve your content strategy. Our new service includes a short call every month to discuss potential SEO and content opportunities with our lead Content Strategist, and we’ll use SEMrush to build and track monthly reports on your content rankings. Cancel anytime: we’ll send you a bill every month at the same time to order.
To find the new service, go to Content Strategy, then click on the menu under Options, and look for the second option:
The second option is our new service, Content Strategy Maintenance.
You might be asking, why should I care about maintaining my content?
Good question.
Why Ongoing Content Maintenance Is Essential to Successful Marketing: 6 Critical Reasons
While there’s no substitute for well-written content about relevant topics that helps readers take action toward achieving their goals, maintaining that content has become just as important.
Here are six reasons why you must regularly review your content with an eye for how it can be improved if you want to see a consistent ROI.
1. You’ve Received Helpful Feedback from Your Customers
Successful content isn’t just about attracting people to your site. It should also start them on the path toward becoming actual customers.
Once your content begins delivering those leads, you’ll gain helpful insights from many of them about how your content could be improved.
Look at the questions you receive most often. Think about the pain points you constantly need to overcome. This is easy to do if you have on-site chat or if you get contact forms.
Here’s one question we received from a repeat customer that sparked an idea for an upcoming blog topic from Julia:
Do you have popular posts where you can address these? That will make it much easier to convert more leads without doing more work.
2. Google Wants to Offer Its Users Fresh Content
Google only wants to show its users search results for content that is fresh and relevant. If your post contains advice that has become outdated or fails to reflect new information on the topic, Google knows users will quickly look elsewhere for help.
Google’s fondness for freshness goes back almost a decade, yet the vast majority of companies still misinterpret this requirement to mean that they must regularly produce completely new content. While new posts deserve a spot in your strategy, updating old ones is usually the more cost-effective way of keeping Google happy.
3. Competitors Are Catching Up to You
The joy I felt the first time I put a client’s site on the first page of Google was eventually overtaken by a sense of dread when, months later, their main competitor joined us.
It felt like in the movies, when the captain of a ship looks through his telescope to see a pirate flag coming over the horizon.
No!
On the high seas of SEO, there are going to be times when enemy ships begin catching up with you. That’s when you should immediately update your content to create a comfortable amount of distance.
Aside from the obvious benefits of doing this, feel free to take some pleasure in the fact that your competitor has clearly spent a lot of time and money creating content to close the gap and, now, because of your vigilance, all of that effort will not go to waste.
4. Improved Domain Authority Means Greater Opportunities for Keywords
“Domain authority” remains a controversial topic, but it does seem as though Google “trusts” established sites more than new ones and, thus, makes it easier for those trustworthy sites to rank for high-traffic keywords.
That’s why, over time, you can get more ambitious about the keywords you target. When beginners start with content marketing, one of the biggest rookie mistakes they make is to go after keywords that see massive amounts of traffic but also attract lots of competition. At the beginning, ranking for those competitive keywords just isn’t possible.
However, as your rankings begin to climb for less-competitive keywords, it makes sense to look at those that were previously out-of-reach. That’s because you’ve built a certain amount of “trust” with Google and now have more opportunities to rank.
Don’t stick with the same set of keywords you originally identified. Ongoing research will show you when it’s possible to post content aimed at greater and/or more qualified traffic.
5. High-Ranking Webpages Are Good for Internal Links
In my experience, the most overlooked opportunity to improve your SEO is with internal linking.
Literally, all you have to do is include a link from one of your pages to another. It couldn’t be easier to do, yet it will help increase exposure across your entire site.
Better still, if you have a post on the first SERP of Google, it’s also an effortless way to pass along some of that “link juice” to other pages.
When I look over a client’s content and see that one of their posts is performing well, I immediately think about how I can leverage that achievement further.
So, for example, if I did a Content Strategy Maintenance report and found that my client had reached the first page for a keyword, I’d either:
- Think of a new piece to do that we could link to from the ranking piece
- Find a preexisting, relevant piece that’s struggling and link to it from the ranking one
Either way, I’m taking full advantage of one page’s SEO success to help rank another for my client while simultaneously making it easier for their current leads to find new content.
6. Content Marketing Requires a Long-Term Perspective
Everyone loves the idea of a quick win – a blog that, upon publishing, hits Google’s first page right away.
While that certainly can happen – especially after you build up that aforementioned “trust” – successful content marketing requires a long-term perspective.
Part of this means regularly checking back on your efforts to see where greater opportunities now lie and where you need to do some work to improve past posts.
Prioritize Content Maintenance for the Highest Possible ROI: Introducing Our New Content Strategy Service at Express Writers
Creating high-quality content will always be the cornerstone of a successful content marketing campaign.
However, it’s just as important that you maximize your ROI from each piece by maintaining it, as well. Otherwise, at best, you’ll see limited success before it’s back to the drawing board to create more content, which will only have the same short-term result.
At Express Writers, we’ve created a new service – Content Strategy Maintenance – to ensure our clients receive the most from each post without having to take the time every month to go over everything themselves.
Instead, our content strategists will review your strategy and identify which posts need to be updated and where new keyword — and topic — opportunities exist. By doing so, you’ll know that your entire content marketing strategy is continuously improving and adding value to your company.
Check out our pricing for content strategy maintenance, or send us an email about your needs.
