Photo: George Washington Bridge by James Ting on Unsplash.
Today we’re posing this question: Which is better for your site—timely content or timeless content?
Is it better to have material that focuses on the hot topic of the moment, or on material that never goes out of style? Can you do both? Is there a benefit to one approach over the other? Does each have value? Is one approach better for your specific site than the other?
If you’ve read many of our posts here, you’ll recognize that we follow a particular philosophy when it comes to content creation: we believe that content should be generated to develop and showcase a business’ expertise. Good content isn’t something that can be whipped up at the snap of a finger, nor should content be tossed aside immediately after use. We’re in it for the long-term, because that’s a better approach for our clients.
This doesn’t mean that a client never asks for new content immediately…even “yesterday!” This is especially true when some topic is hot in the moment but not expected to be newsworthy for long. We try our best in these circumstances and can usually commit to delivery within 24 hours (sometimes even 12 or 6). On a case-by-case basis, this can be done. But it’s not a good habit to get into (for us or the client).
Clients have good reason to ask for this kind of content, with this kind of speed. When an event is fresh in the news, it’s more likely that internet users (and potential customers) will search for it. To take advantage of that potential flood of activity, companies want to have the right content at the right moment. They want it to be ready to receive those search results clicks when Google serves up the link. It’s a logical approach—on the surface.
There’s a problem with the deeper reality, however: search results are not typically updated quickly enough for this kind of content to be effective in the target time frame for most businesses.* That is: your new content on a hot, trending search is not being re-indexed in real time. Chances are good that even if you could get that new content in place within an hour or two, it won’t show up the way you’d like it to in search results for much longer, typically at least a few days. Investing resources into this kind of content—for “instant gratification”—probably isn’t a good strategy because the return isn’t justified in the short term. It can be justified in the long term, but that’s true without the fire-drill approach of producing that same content in a rush (with all the risks that a rush job entails, especially more potential errors).
Does this make chasing after hot, topical content a waste of time? No. A business can still take advantage of topical content if they’ve already done the work and built it into their existing knowledge base.
Here’s an example of how this can work. Say that a New York personal injury law firm which handles car crash cases wants an immediate post about a serious crash on the George Washington Bridge.** Although the time frame (“now!”) might be unreasonable, the topic is perfectly reasonable for this firm: there are around 2,000 crashes on and around the GWB each year; most are minor, but unfortunately some result in injury and there is about one fatality per year.
Rushing out a post on this specific crash will probably not result in any increase in traffic to this firm’s site. However, if the firm has previously published posts on other similar crashes, then when someone searches for this crash using relevant keywords, those older pages will have a very good chance of appearing in the results. This firm, by consistently publishing content appropriate both to its practice specialties and to interested users, will have created a form of timeless content: it’s the correct topic and will include a great deal of relevant information.
If a new post is rushed out, the search results won’t link directly to that post. But, since other similar posts exist, they might capture that traffic anyway. If the site is designed to leverage this kind of post and this kind of search, then it will also have prominent links to “other posts on this topic” and to “most recent posts.” The new post, because it was written using the same keywords, should appear conspicuously on the first list (and at the top of the second by virtue of being the most recent). Even though that post does not directly appear (yet) in search results, it will be readily accessible through them.
This is how timeless content is built: by posting on the right topics consistently (even if sometimes days or weeks after the fact). If these topics are successful in capturing user traffic at any time, they will work over all times.
It’s important to remember the goal of posts such as these: they’re not presented as news stories for the general public (although traffic from the general public is welcome and can significantly improve ranking over time—a benefit many firms overlook). These posts are there for those people who will be looking for specific information, in this case “george washington bridge crash attorney.” The site that delivers that page when a user wants it has a distinct advantage.
Developing a deep library of timeless content provides an enormous benefit to your firm over the long term. Waltham WordWorks can help you build a library of content that not only showcases your business’ expertise but also improves your search ranking. Get in touch with us today to get started.
* Google is somewhat circumspect about this, but they’ve acknowledged that re-indexing time can be highly variable: some high-traffic sites are visited daily, other sites might be crawled for re-indexing only a few times each year.
** This is a real type of client Waltham WordWorks has worked with in the past—and a real example of a type of post we’ve written.
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