Since your website doubles as an untiring brand ambassador, your content must always be fresh, engaging, and relevant. Peppering your pages with attention-grabbing and compelling content entices readers to browse your offerings and engage with your brand.
Your brand may suffer if your online presence stagnates and no longer resonates with your target audience. It may lead to low engagement and conversion, eroding your bottom line.
At Express Writers, our crack shot can breathe new life into your website by making the existing content more compelling, persuasive, and well-aligned with your marketing goals. Dig in as we share our top 8 signs your website is due for a content update.
Outdated Information
Do you add the year to your blog post titles? If so, have you updated them to read the year 2024? Now is the best time to spruce up your content, including updating the year, before the holidays kick off in earnest.
Blog posts with an updated year in the title command more attention
Including the current year in your headings helps build the reader’s trust. It reassures them the content is current and up to date. Retaining outdated information on the website can mislead visitors and harm your credibility.
Outdated information may also erode readers’ trust and dampen your brand authority. It also means a failed opportunity to portray current capabilities, offerings, and thought leadership. That may create the impression that you’re out of touch with the latest trends and innovations, dissuading prospects from engaging with your brand.
Dropping Traffic and Engagement
Does a cursory look at your analytics paint a dull picture? Dropping organic traffic and engagement may indicate that your website no longer resonates with your audience.
Audience interests and preferences change over time. You must adapt your content strategy to evolve along with the changing landscape. Visitors are unlikely to engage with your website if the content doesn’t align with their interests.
When information becomes stale, it loses its appeal. You’re likely to disappoint visitors searching for fresh, valuable information. They may quickly decamp to the competition, saddling you with a massive drop in organic traffic and engagement.
A content update shows that you’re attuned to your audience’s needs and helps you demonstrate thought leadership. It keeps your content fresh and engaging while encouraging repeat visits.
Poor Search Engine Rankings
While Google has been on a roll this year, there could be more to your poor search ranking than wild algorithm updates. See, Google is on a mission to connect web users with the most helpful, most relevant content. Did you know the top three sites on Google search results get over 54% of the search traffic?
Your website will likely get no visitors if it’s not the first page of the search results.
Google uses various metrics, including tracking user engagement metrics, to accomplish this feat.
If your content doesn’t resonate with the target audience, Google picks up on it. Consequently, your website may experience a dramatic drop from the top of the search engine results.
A content update may help your website demonstrate topical authority, match user intent, and capture the reader’s attention. If you do a meticulous job, you can regain your lost rankings and even outrank your most fierce competitors. Peppering your website with quality content also helps you build a healthy and natural backlink profile.
High Bounce Rates
If you notice a high bounce rate on your website, chances are your content doesn’t capture the reader’s interest. Bounce rate is a metric that captures the number of visitors leaving your website after viewing only one page.
Visitors will likely click away if the content doesn’t address their needs or fill their search query. Poorly written, difficult to read, and visually unappealing content is a sure turn-off.
When web visitors consistently click on your website only to quickly return to the search results, it hurts your search ranking. Google interprets such behavior as user dissatisfaction due to poor content, so your site isn’t worthy of a top spot in the search results.
Updating your content can help you reduce spiking bounce rates and entice visitors to linger on your website. It’s a proven way to enhance user experience, increase dwell time, and build subject matter expertise.
Low Click-Through Rates
When your content ranks high on the SERPs but the click-through rate is abysmal, you may need to refine your content. It indicates that you’re targeting and ranking for the right keywords, but your content doesn’t resonate with your target audience.
Featured snippets drive click-through rates.
Visitors can see your content on the search results but fail to click through to your website. Your content isn’t compelling enough to capture their interest and attention or lacks crucial elements.
It’s possible that your titles and meta descriptions aren’t compelling, descriptive, or relevant. Visitors won’t click on your content if these elements aren’t enticing or accurately reflect the page’s content.
Your click-through rate may also suffer if your pages lack or have poorly optimized snippets. Featured and rich snippets help your site stand out in the SERPs and attract clicks.
A content update can help you optimize these elements to help you capture more clicks and drive more visitors to your web pages.
You’re not Converting Leads
Are you driving thousands of visitors to your offers, but conversion is dismal at best? A low conversion rate may indicate a disconnect between your content and audience needs. Ideally, your content should drive visitors to fill out a form, join your mailing list, or purchase a product.
Website conversion rates in different verticals.
While the average website conversion rate is 2% to 5%, the rates vary wildly between industries. The best e-commerce sites convert 6.25% of their visitors, while top-tier financial websites have conversion rates of almost 25%. Typically, you should gauge your site’s performance against your industry’s rates.
A content update can help boost your conversion rates if they fall below the industry standards. Your conversion rates may suffer if you don’t have your buyer persona down to pat. A poorly designed buyer persona can lead you to create content that doesn’t address your target audience’s needs, pain points, and challenges.
Refining your buyer persona to reflect your audience’s desires and aspirations enables you to tighten your content strategy to align with them. You can then update your content to make it more compelling and persuasive. You can update weak and ineffective calls-to-action (CTA) and guide visitors to take specific actions.
You’re not Making Sales
Your website is in dire need of a content update if you’re not making sales. While several factors could be responsible for low sales, a poor content strategy is a likely culprit.
Your strategy must demonstrate a keen understanding of your audience and their buying journey. The use of a sales funnel lets you categorize buyers into buying stages and target each buyer stage with laser-targeted messages addressing their specific buying needs.
A content update can help you reconfigure your content to make it more sales-oriented without coming off as “salesy.” You can broaden your content strategy to target the five levels of awareness and ensure consistent sales.
Switching to this approach gives you an edge by capturing and nurturing prospects from the outset. It saves you the hassle of battling competitors for the small portion of the market ready to buy.
Your Pages aren’t Ranking
A 2023 study by Ahref found only 3.45% of the online content is visible in the search results. The shocking results mean that 96.55% of the internet content is invisible. Worse still, about 2% of the pages receive less than ten visitors monthly.
Over 96% of online content amounts to wasted efforts.
You should consider a content update if a significant portion of your web pages isn’t visible on the search results. A website audit can help you identify your poor performer for closer inspection. You can then zero in and address the most glaring problems likely to lead to poor ranking results. Your pages may rank poorly on the search results if they don’t match the search intent, target keywords with no search volume, or have no backlinks.
Working with an expert service can help you address these problems and increase your site’s online visibility while building brand authority.
Breathe New Life into Your Website with Write Express
Today’s online visitors are picky and short on time—you only have a short window to capture their attention and entice them to visit your website. The subject matter experts at Express Writers have mastered the art of crafting persuasive and compelling content. From blog posts to web content, email newsletters to white papers, our professional writers provide custom content that suits your needs. Contact us today, and we’ll help you create sizzling content that dazzles your readers and outpaces the competition.
