Keeping your website up to date is a constant thing. You need to update your website content regularly otherwise you run the risk of losing visitors.

But how often is regular?

And what does “update” really mean?

Regular means really regular.

At an absolute minimum, I’d say you need a fresh piece of content on your website at least once a month.

And ideally a lot more frequently than that.

A recent study by Hubspot they found companies that blogged (added website content) at least 15 times a month got 5 times more traffic than those companies that allowed their website to gather virtual dust and didn’t update it.

15 times per month is an average of every other day.

Or daily every weekday with Friday’s off for good behaviour.

That’s a lot of website content to add.

And I’d strongly suggest that you do add new content rather than just meddle with old content by adding a couple of words here and there.

For a lot of people, that sounds like a scary thought.

After all, what can you write about every time?

Where can you find at least 180 new things to write about each and every year?

And it is generally write about stuff.

Sure, videos work and attract traffic. But Google/YouTube struggle to make sense of videos and you need to help them along with good titles and long descriptions.

If you’ve ever looked the automatic transcriptions that YouTube creates, you’ll know that voice recognition on the kind of industrial scale that YouTube are using has a long way to go before it could be described as accurate.

Sure it’s quicker than a human could transcribe but a lot of the transcriptions read as though they’ve been written by someone who doesn’t understand the speaker’s native tongue.

The ones I’ve looked at for my videos are gibberish in places and I have to listen to the video itself to make any meaningful corrections – I can’t just guess from the automatic job that’s been done.

Which means that Google & YouTube often haven’t got a clue about what’s being said in a video. Which, in turn, means they don’t know what you were talking about.

As far as the scary thought of at least 180 new pieces of content each and every year, that’s only really scary if you had to sit down and create it all at once.

In practice, it’s 15 to 30 minutes typing to create a new page on your website.

Sure, initially it may take you longer but it’s like anything you work at, you get better over time.

When I first started adding content to my websites years ago, I’d spend a lot longer than I currently do.

Which isn’t to say that my writing has got less informative.

If anything, I think it’s got more informative.

What it does mean is that I’m less critical about what I write.

I don’t care about keyword density or SEOing my content.

Most of the time I don’t add an image – partly because I can’t come up with a relevant image (what would you use to illustrate this page?) and partly because I don’t think it adds much to what I’m writing about.

If I was selling physical products then adding an image would be easy. So if that’s your website, go for it.

But essentially I write for my readers, not the search engines.

So I write much as I’d speak.

Explaining things as they crop up and going off at tangents every now and then. Because that’s what I tend to do in real life conversations – good things often come out of those diversions.

If you really can’t come up with content for your website, you could always employ a ghostwriter.

Just be aware that they will never know as much about your product or service as you do. But it’s better than doing nothing.

So, enough reading, get writing!