Google loves fresh unique content. 

One of the key considerations for any SEO strategy must be content. Both the quality of content and frequency of updating. The frequency is important. When Google visits your site it will check for fresh content. If your site has not been updated for some time, then Google will come back less frequently which will impact your traffic potential from natural search.

With major websites, updating hourly, we can expect to Google to index hourly or less. This is broadly how you see ‘live’ results within Google search results. 

If you don’t have access to Google Webmasters, or want to see this for another site. Try the following tups to see how often Google visits your site.

Create a Google Alert for your site or business name. Set the alert fo ‘as it happens’ and you can time the gap between publishing and alert. Over time you should start to see the gap decrease.

Working with our clients, we  can see that Google was indexing our site about a week after we updated the site. We could see this was due to a lack of fresh content. Within one week of updating the site daily, with fresh content, we decreased the indexing time to 48 hours. With continued posting of quality content we expect that time to drop.

On this site we haven’t been as active for a while which saw our indexing frequency drop substantially from a near instant update to over a week later. Again, with a simple content strategy we are seeing greater activity from Google.

Logging into Google Webmasters will also tell you the last time of crawl and more details on the results Google took from the site.  

 

Find this graph in Webmasters>Health>Index Status

 

Including more content in your site will also boost your social and link potential. 

 

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