Publishing and SEO: best practices for digital experiences and CMS
Having full control over content publishing is good, but do you know how to make the best use of it for SEO purposes?
Written by Vegard Ottervig on
Planning and scheduling content in your CMS enables you to have a steady flow of offerings toward your readers and clients, making the experience predictable and more enjoyable. It is nice to have the ability to schedule content at a time when nobody in your team is working, but when your readers are thirsting.
Your readers’ content consuming pleasure is not the only issue to be aware about when it comes to publishing, however. There are also some considerations due to search engine optimization (SEO). Here are a couple of quick tips to get you into the thinking.
Seasoned means trust
Search engines like Google tend to trust seasoned content more than “untested” pages. If seasoned web pages also have a nice visitor rate, little loading time, and fulfills technical requirements such as uptime and uncluttered code, this will contribute to the website’s standing at the search engines, and thus be prioritized in the search results.
When maintaining content you should therefore have this timely aspect in mind: Google & co value websites and web pages with a long track record, as they think these are validated as more trustworthy and valuable. Think of it as branding: People tend to trust familiar brands more than newcomers.
See also: Supercharge your site with Next.js and headless CMS »
Old and fresh at the same time
Let’s say you have a recurring digital project or marketing activity, e.g. a yearly report about the financial sector outlook. This financial sector outlook has a dedicated web page where you can read about this year’s key findings and download the report. This page and its URL now build trust with Google.
Why would you want to throw this trust away the next year with a completely new page and URL? Keep the URL, but update the contents of the page. In that way, search engines can see that the URL is both tenured and fresh, rating it higher on the results page.
Read more: The skills you need to build successful digital experiences »
SEO is a complex animal with many myths and experts rushing in to tell you what to do. But one thing is sure: People trust what they know from beforehand, and search engines like Google do the same—they trust pages with a long and safe track record. Keep your published works and your URLs, but update and re-publish the content to keep it fresh and evergreen.
First published 12 September 2018, updated 5 August 2022.
