Stay Up-To-Date Before You Update
I was doing research for an article, and I came across a blog that I could tell was on an affiliate website. I could also tell that the person who owned this site did not do any research before updating this particular article that I came across. What I was looking for was information on a merger between two companies that had happened in 2020. What I found was an article comparing the two companies in 2021.
This is one of the quickest ways to lose your audience. Knowing that these two companies had merged in 2020, it was obvious that this person had not done their research, but simply updated the date on their article to make it look current. Instantly knowing that this blog post was completely irrelevant, I immediately clicked the back button. Why would I want to even look at anything else on this website when the first thing that I looked at was outdated and incorrect information?
When doing reviews, you simply can’t update the year and leave everything
else the same. In today’s fast-paced world that we live in, technology is always changing, apps are constantly being updated, mergers are taking place. Businesses that were thriving just a few years ago have went under and now cease to exist.
Many people update their websites at the beginning of the year. Please remember when updating to take the time to at least verify that companies are still in business, and take a few extra minutes to scan through your blogs before you update them to make sure the information that you provide is still relevant.
If you keep this in mind when updating your websites, you’ll keep your audience engaged longer, and keep them coming back for more.🙂
Recent Comments
13
That’s a critical piece of advice and I’m glad you shared it. Going through my websites after a huge layoff and found a lot of outdated material.
I have my hands full but I’m glad I read this article as it assures me to get it done for this new year.
Thanks for sharing
Depending on how many blogs you have, this can be time-consuming, but as my experience has shown, it is well worth it to keep your site relevant, and to keep people coming back.
You're doing exactly what everyone should do, and hopefully this coming year will bring you much success! 🙂
Wow, Cynthia! You speak very true words here, my friend! Cursory research would have showed that person that the two companies merged!
Nice catch, and corresponding post!
Happy 2022!
Jeff
It was very obvious what the site owner did. You can't compare two different companies when one was bought out by the other.
A simple check would have caught this error. It doesn't take much more than a few minutes, and it can have a huge effect on a site's reliability.
That's really great advice, Cynthia.
Relevance is probably the single most important factor in retaining a visitor.
If, as you say, you lose credibility from the get-go, why should they stay on your site?
Exactly. It's so easy to just update the year. To keep your site relevant, your content needs to be relevant.
See more comments
In Jay's class on what to do going into the new year, he stated that you should not update the date of a post. Just put in a header of the date the information was last updated.
Updating a post in this fashion without updating the content will drive many people away as it did you.
John
I missed that class, but this is a great example of why you don't want to update a post in this manner.