Fresh content is a cornerstone of search engine optimization. New or updated blog posts, original images, videos, and other types of fresh content can help improve your site’s search engine ranking, especially with the rollout of Google’s Helpful Content Update (yes, that’s it’s name). These fresh content SEO tips for chiropractors can help your practice rank higher and drive more qualified leads to your website.
What Is Fresh Content SEO?
Google values websites that are frequently updated with new content because it signals to search engine algorithms that your website is relevant, authoritative, and trustworthy.
Today’s web users trust information from brands more when they find evidence that brands are staying up-to-date with current trends and topics – especially brands that provide medical products and services or are otherwise affiliated with the healthcare industry.
When ranking a page for content freshness, search engines typically evaluate the following:
- How recent the content is
- How relevant it is
- How prominent the establishment is
- How far away from the user the establishment is
- The availability of products and services to the user
Google’s algorithms proactively look for websites that have consistently fresh content and rank new or refreshed pages higher than old, stale pages. By routinely adding fresh content to your website, you can boost your site’s appeal both to search engines and real people.
How Does Content Freshness Impact Local Search Rankings?
Content freshness is one of the key factors that drive local search rankings. When people search for a business or other establishment near them, they want to see content on their website and social media profiles that is relevant, current and trustworthy.
They want to know that the company dedicates resources to making sure their online presence is as robust as their physical one. Search engines know this, and if a business’s content is stale, it will likely rank lower in local search results and drive fewer visitors to your site.
Similarly, businesses that continually update their content can improve their local search rankings by standing out from other similar providers in their area. Publishing fresh content and regularly updating your existing pages will help ensure that you are showing relevant information to your potential patients.
How Does Google Measure Content Freshness?
Nobody knows exactly what Google looks for or what it rewards or penalizes, especially considering that the search engine’s algorithms are constantly being changed or updated. But over time and with lots of trial and error, SEO and content marketing experts have developed a list of things Google analyzes in order to determine where to rank a page.
There are many things that Google takes into account when determining how up-to-date or “fresh” a chiropractor’s website is. The following factors and more are evaluated to decide how often, how much, and how well a website is updated or refreshed:
- Publish date – When a page was originally published to the website
- Index or page inception date – When a page was first crawled or indexed by Google
- Date of last site crawl – When Google performed the most recent site crawl
- Date last modified – When the page was last edited or changed
- Amount of change – Whether changes made to a page were significant or minor
- Number of changes – How many changes were made to a website page
- Rate of change – How often changes are made to pages on your website
- Page creation rate – How often you add new pages to your website
- Backlink freshness – The freshness score of websites that link back to yours also impacts your freshness score
Top Fresh Content SEO Tips For Chiropractors
Now that you know how important it is to keep the content on your website up-to-date and relevant to today’s users, you need to put ideas into action. While the thought of constantly updating your website might seem intimidating, especially when you barely have time as it is, there are a few simple tips you can use to get started:
1. Frequently Publish New Evergreen Content
Evergreen content is copy that stays relevant for years or even decades. This type of content is important for building your brand as a chiropractor and can also help rank your website for valuable search terms. Make sure you’re adding new core content often – ideally, more frequently than your local competitors.
Good examples of evergreen content for chiropractors include educational blog posts explaining common conditions or ailments, in-depth guides to common chiropractic treatments like spinal adjustments, expert interviews, or infographics on how to do different stretches or exercises for pain relief at home.
2. Refresh Your Old Pages With New Content
If you’ve been practicing for a while, you’ve probably published dozens of blog posts and website pages. These pages may rank well, but they may also be out-of-date. Search engines like Google don’t reward pages that haven’t been updated in years or ones that are full of incorrect information.
You can publish new content on existing pages by updating your blog posts with new, relevant keywords in your niche, adding new content to pages that already rank well, or posting new images and videos on existing pages.
3. Prioritize Refreshing Content On Pages Getting More Traffic
If you have pages on your website that already receive a lot of organic traffic, it’s important to prioritize them ahead of pages that may not be getting views when you’re updating content. For example, if you have a page on spinal adjustments that gets 3,000 views a day, you should make this page longer or add images and video before you add content to a page only getting 200 daily views.
4. Change Page Publication Dates When You Make Updates
When you make changes to original, published content, you should manually change the publication date to reflect the most recent update. This will help Google know that your content is being updated often. But make sure you’re actually updating the content on the page – the algorithms are smart enough to know when a publication date has been changed but the content on the page has not.
5. Update Titles & Meta Descriptions
While you’re editing your published content, also make sure to update the title and meta description. These are important factors in search engine rankings and appear next to your website URL in search engine results.
Your page titles and meta descriptions do some heavy lifting – not only are they a major SEO ranking factor, but they’re also responsible for enticing users to click through to your site. If written poorly, users are unlikely to engage. If poorly optimized, search engines won’t rank the page as highly. It’s a fine balance that requires consistent tweaking to achieve.
6. Target New Semantic & Related Keywords
You should also be targeting new, related keywords in your updated content to help you rank higher for more search terms and drive more traffic to your site. Semantic keywords are phrases that have similar meanings or are frequently related to each other, even if the target keyword isn’t being used.
For example, the words tennis shoes and sneakers are the same. Even though the term sneakers doesn’t contain the word shoe, Google understands that the words are related and that websites using the term tennis shoes can also be shown to users searching for the term sneakers. There are many different ways to discover new keywords in your niche, like Google’s keyword research tool. You can also think about things that are naturally related, like neck pain and whiplash.
Search for your keywords like a user normally would and look at what populates in the “People also ask” section of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) list for ideas on new content to add or keywords to cover. The “Related searches” section at the bottom of the list can also be helpful.
7. Resubmit Your Sitemap to Google
A sitemap is a document that contains a map of your website’s pages and content and is used by search engines to find and index your site. While users can find your sitemap, they usually don’t go looking for it, so this is one area where you can strictly optimize for search algorithms.
If you make updates to your website, you should resubmit your sitemap to Google instead of waiting for search bots to find and crawl your site. Eventually, they will and will catalog the updates with Google, but you can speed this process along by manually resubmitting your new sitemap.
8. Book a Demo of Surefire Local’s Business Intelligence Marketing Software
Staying on top of local search algorithm changes is difficult, especially when you’re a busy chiropractor that sees patients all day in your office. You don’t always have time to break away from doing adjustments to check your page rankings or write new content for old pages. Surefire Local’s business intelligence marketing software can help you identify areas of improvement and guide your local marketing strategy for maximum results. Schedule a demo and learn how we can help your practice attract more local clientele by calling (703) 884-8442.