Regular content is how you prove to Google that you’re updating your website consistently.

Consistency is one of the things that Google looks for. One of the ways to do that is with blogs. If you have a blog, I recommend you post a new 350-word minimum blog at least four times a month. I don’t always do this for my website – I’m like the cobbler kid who has no shoes – but it’s one of the things I do for my clients’ websites.

Service area pages are good for local service businesses. It’s not so much relevant for those who work nationally, but I’ve got a guy who does heating and air conditioning. He’s got one page on his webpage that is something like “Murphy’s Bros Heating and Air.” Then another page on his webpage is “Smyrna Heating and Air.” These local service area pages get updated with new content regularly as well.

Then homepage updates are critical, too. Google looks at the last time your homepage was updated. If it’s been a year or more, you might not even be in business any longer. So, Google’s not comfortable serving your information to their customers.

That is actually one of the ways that I look at this – Google is in business to serve information. I ask if Google is going to want to serve my client’s information to their clients, and the way that they determine that is through an algorithm. I have to make sure that all of my client’s content, keywords, links, tags, and backlinks are right for that algorithm to be comfortable with that.

You said blogs four times a month, once a week. How often should that homepage be updated? 

That’s a good question. One of the things I do is if there’s no good blog content is to update the homepage about once per month. Usually the rule of thumb is to update more than 10% of the text. So, if it’s got 1,000 words, you need to change 100 of them for it to be a legitimate update. You could even just reword what is already on the homepage.

Also, we’re not just writing for Google, we’re writing for actual people who are going to see your homepage. It has to be normal, human language in preferably short sentences. The rule of thumb is write for a third grader. Then I would update a service page, or add a service page, about once per month.