Running a med spa is busy work. You need to manage payments, certifications, and treatments for your customers. Having the extra time for marketing might be scarce, so you want to make sure you are getting the most out of the marketing time you have. Knowing how to rank high on search engine results pages is an important part of being found by customers in your local area. This process is called SEO, or search engine optimization.
Keeping your published content fresh is a great way to keep the Google algorithm happy and rank high for your keywords. If you are looking for fresh content SEO tips for med spas, then look no further. This article is for you! We’ll help you understand what fresh content SEO means to a med spa and help you know what factors you need to be on the lookout for and how you can put a plan in place to meet your fresh content goals.
Local Ranking Factors
Local search refers to the ability of a business to be found in its local area. When someone searches “med spa near me” in your city or town, you want your listing to pop up first so that people know you are a relevant result for their search. In order to rank for those searches, you need to have a few things in place.
The first is an up-to-date and accurate Google Business Profile. This is your Google listing for your business, so you want it to be filled out completely with high-quality images, reviews, contact information, and hours of operation. However, a Google Business Profile is only part of your local ranking.
To have your content, such as web pages, blog posts, and videos, appear higher on Google search results, you need to have five important factors represented in the content. Those five factors are recency, relevancy, distance, prominence, and availability. Of those five factors, the most important for fresh content SEO is recency. Recency is another word for fresh, so having fresh content is an essential component of ranking high for local searches.
What is “Fresh” Content?
Fresh content is content that was recently published, updated, or rewritten. This type of content helps your business be found easily online, as it contributes to the local search factors that Google considers when ranking content.
Content itself can be many things, but it typically refers to your written content, such as your individual website pages or blog posts that you might publish about your business and your industry. Every page that you publish goes through a process in the Google algorithm to determine what it is, why it matters, and how relevant it is to readers. Here are some important terms to know when looking at your fresh content:
- Published: when the page was uploaded on the website
- Indexed: when the crawlers first discovered the page and added it to Google Search
- Last Crawl: when the page was last crawled by those bots
- Modified: when the last change was made to the page
The crawlers are the parts of the Google algorithm that scan through and identify every page that is published online. These crawlers are the things that will identify your page and figure out what it means and who it is written for. Learning how to improve your SEO and write in a way that resonates with the crawlers is an important part of your digital marketing strategy.
How Does Google Measure Content Freshness?
Now that you know how Google indexes pages and monitors your new publications, let’s look at how it measures content freshness. We know that fresh content matters in the local search considerations, but what specific factors is Google looking for to know that a piece of content is fresh or still needs work? Here are a few of the individual measures that you need to keep in mind as you create fresh content:
- Page Inception Date: the date it was indexed by Google
- Amount of Change to the Updated Page: large changes signal more freshness
- Number of Changes to Core Content of the Page: changes to the main body content add more freshness than adjusting the date/time tags
- Rate of Page Change: frequent changes signal more freshness
- Rate of New Page Creation: websites that add new pages more frequently may get a higher freshness score
- Freshness of Backlinks to the Page: links from sites that have high freshness scores can improve yours
While some of these factors are things you can control, like the rate of new page creation, others aren’t really something you can directly impact, like the freshness of your backlinks. That’s why having a backlinking strategy is such an important part of your content strategy. You need to get other qualified sites to link back to your pages to show Google that other businesses find your content relevant.
How Does Content Freshness Affect Your Local Rankings?
Freshness isn’t the only consideration that the Google algorithm looks at when indexing your pages. The crawlers are also looking for high-quality content that is written well, structured correctly, and has important information contained within. However, freshness is more relevant than some of the other ranking factors that Google looks at, making it that much more important to focus on.
Your freshness score will directly impact your placement in local search rankings. If there is a competing med spa in your area who is able to get a higher freshness score, odds are Google is going to rank their business profile and pages higher than yours. In order to avoid that, you need to have an aggressive strategy for content freshness so that your content SEO ranks above other businesses in your local area.
When your pages rank higher than the competition, you have better odds of getting more leads, more customers, and more sales. People tend to go with the first option or first few options on a search result page, so you don’t want your content ranking low where potential new clients can’t find it. Taking the time to focus on creating fresh content can be a major asset in your marketing performance.
How to Improve Your Freshness Score
So you know that having a high freshness score is an essential part of getting found in local searches. But what steps can you take to make sure that your freshness score is improving? Here are a few tips and tactics you can implement in your SEO strategies to ensure that you are doing all you can to rank high for fresh content.
Tip 1: Publish New Content Regularly
One of the ranking factors for fresh content is newly published content. When you publish new content regularly, the Google bots understand that you consistently put out fresh content that is relevant to your industry. That helps things move in a positive direction for your freshness ranking, as well as letting Google know that you might be a good authoritative source for new content.
Tip 2: Refresh Older Content Regularly
If you have a lot of old content on your site, go through and refresh it. Make significant changes to the content, as this is one of the important ranking factors Google looks for. If you just add a new sentence or update the date of a post, it might not be enough change to improve your freshness ranking.
Tip 3: Prioritize Content Receiving High Traffic
As you update older content, focus on the content that is receiving the best traffic. Don’t focus your time on posts that aren’t getting many views, but work to keep the pages that are bringing in new eyes at the top of the search results page.
Tip 4: Change the Publication Date After Changes are Made
You want to make sure that every time you update a page, the publication date changes. This helps the Google algorithm know that the content is fresh and new, even if it was previously published with less content or less relevant content on the page.
Tip 5: Submit to Google Through Search Console
Rather than sitting around and waiting for the crawlers to find and index your page, you can jumpstart the process by submitting new pages to Google through the Search Console. This helps your pages get indexed quickly and directly gives the page to Google when content is changed and updated.
Request a Demo of Our Business Intelligence Marketing Software
At Surefire Local, we understand how important it is for med spa owners to get the most out of their marketing platforms. That’s why we have features that allow you to view analytics to identify your high-performing content, easy publishing tools for posting new content regularly, and editing and updating tools to help you create great blog articles. Get a demo of our software today to see how Surefire Local can help your med spa business rank high on local searches and improve fresh content SEO.