[00:00:00] James Breese: Strength
[00:00:00] James Breese: Matters Media, Video, Print,
[00:00:04] James Breese: Podcasts.
[00:00:05] Josh Kennedy: Today's topic is why you should update and remove old website content. Now it might seem a little trivial, but it can have a huge impact on your rankings in Google, which is massively important because James, you've got an interesting stat about, uh, about Google and getting found, right?
[00:00:24] James Breese: Yep. So let's, let's say a whopping 94. 3 percent of pages. Out of roughly 2 million, don't even get a single visitor from Google. That's a, I mean, the whole of traffic, 90. 63 percent of content gets no traffic. See, this is, this
[00:00:41] Josh Kennedy: is something I said on previous, previous podcasts. I, I would have thought, um, you know, I've got a webpage, brilliant.
[00:00:49] Josh Kennedy: I'll get found. Nope. You've only got 10 percent chance, less than 10 percent chance, which is, which is crazy. Right?
[00:00:56] James Breese: Yeah, it is crazy. And people don't think about this, [00:01:00] but like
[00:01:00] James Breese: Google wants to serve up fresh content and the most relevant practical content for people. It's all about. Again, we come back to the, the doubly, you know, double eat, but essentially expertise, experience, authority, and trust.
[00:01:13] James Breese: That's how Google ranks your content to be found across the web. And it wants that expertise to be fresh and relevant and timely content. So if you have a, the best gym equipment of 2001 on your webpage, right?
[00:01:31] James Breese: It's not going to be, no one's going to find it. No one's going to bother
[00:01:34] James Breese: with it.
[00:01:34] James Breese: And. It's so,
[00:01:38] James Breese: so many people I know, not just in fitness professionals and gym owners, but I see business owners, they build a website, they leave it there and they just expect it to just work for them.
[00:01:50] James Breese: However, it takes care and effort. So let's compare this to a garden. So if you have a garden and you just leave it, just happen, right? You may have [00:02:00] spent thousands of pounds on landscaping, right? And it looks nice and pretty when they've done it, but if you don't touch it for the next year, two years, it becomes overgrown.
[00:02:09] James Breese: I don't know, Andrew's at the moment, he's in the middle of doing his garden at the moment, like, cutting back things. Josh is always working his garden.
[00:02:17] Josh Kennedy: My lawn needs, oh god no, it's full of moss. I try my
[00:02:21] Andrew Wallis: best. We had tenants in for ten years and they did nothing, even though... Uh, they'd said they had been so the garden analogy is perfect because it's gone from being this Not ultimately preeminent landscape, but it was in a decent Condition now, it's as if they you know, we've had some vagrants run
[00:02:43] James Breese: Yes,
[00:02:43] James Breese: but it's but think of it like that though, but that's exactly what happens in your website You've got to serve timely content.
[00:02:49] James Breese: So Everyone's so worried about creating new content on it all the time, they forget to tend to their old content. So what you want to do is have content [00:03:00] on there that's timely, fresh, and relevant, and you want to see and update it constantly and consistently. Now, go ahead.
[00:03:09] Josh Kennedy: So, even if you've got new and up to date content, if you've got too much old content, that will still make a massive difference.
[00:03:16] Josh Kennedy: Yeah,
[00:03:16] James Breese: so if you have lots of old content too, You've got to work out is, are people going to and visit it in the first place? Now, good example of this, in the summer of 2024, for people to listen to the future, we did a massive cult. We deleted 300 pages from Strength Matters. 300 pages, right, of old podcast stuff, old things here, because
[00:03:36] James Breese: it was just, it was weeding.
[00:03:38] James Breese: We were just doing a spring clean, like a, like de weeding everything because no one was going to it. No one was going to it. It was just absolutely ridiculous.
[00:03:48] James Breese: So we had to address that and do it. Now what we did because of that is it ended up tripling our traffic to the website in less than three months.
[00:03:57] James Breese: So we went from 30, 000 visits a month up to 90, [00:04:00] 000 visits because the content we had on it now It was in the clear indicators to Google saying that we are someone who cares about the content. We want to make sure it's, it's relevant and timely for people and it's useful. So Google saw this and they bumped us all up the rankings accordingly.
[00:04:16] James Breese: So we, we not only deleted content, we also went back to old blogs that were getting traffic. We looked at the stats and Google Analytics. And we saw that content that was being visited, we improved it, we made
[00:04:29] James Breese: it better, more readable. So what happened? They got pushed up the
[00:04:32] James Breese: rankings. So the moral of the story is that everyone focuses on creating new content, and if you have no content already, yes, you need to do it.
[00:04:39] James Breese: But you need to create content that people want to read, that's enjoyable, but also stuff that you can go back and easily update on a regular basis, because it then helps with your ranking on Google and showcases your expertise, authority, and trust. And the experience for everybody when they're finding new content across Google, that's really important, really [00:05:00] important.
[00:05:01] Josh Kennedy: Andrew, what's your experience with this?
[00:05:03] Andrew Wallis: Um, my experience, I guess, in, I'll switch this round and put my personal trainer hat on, was when I first started, as we all, you know, we're keen to get clients. So, you know, we're the client to everyone, we can help. Anyone and everyone that wants, um, to get fit and healthy.
[00:05:22] Andrew Wallis: But as we determine who our ideal client avatar is, you know what? We, we, um, we manipulate, we focus and we create, um, content around our skill set, you know, we find our niche, you know, our market, and if we're still. If our content is still old and it's that generic vanilla, um, non topical content, then that can have an adverse effect.
[00:05:52] Andrew Wallis: So as James says, if we zero back and we start updating the older content and make it more focused on, [00:06:00] on the types of clients that we're looking to target and we're positioning it. With keywords that we can find out from Google and other tools that we know that they're searching for, then as James says, Google's going to start rewarding us for that because the content is relevant, it's timely, and it's, it's a spot on, uh, what those people are searching for.
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[00:06:58] James Breese: forward slash website [00:07:00] today. What
[00:07:02] Josh Kennedy: are some telltale signs then that content needs to be
[00:07:05] James Breese: refreshed? Well, very simply, if it's in a title, it says, you know, best shoe reviews of 2019. Or something like that. That's a good example. Okay.
[00:07:14] Josh Kennedy: That, that's an obvious one, right? That's an obvious one. Some, some
[00:07:17] James Breese: others. Others are, you go to Google Analytics, if you've got, if you've even got it set up, most people don't even have this set up, right? You've got to look at the data for this. So you may think it's a great article, but if no one's going to it and no one can find it, you're, you're going to struggle.
[00:07:31] James Breese: See, you need to write content that people can find. It's search terms that people are searching for and not what you think it is. You're going to have to earn the right to get to that stage. So the first thing is, like a straight example is, I went into all our Google Analytics, I looked at all our content, and I found all the pages that had zero traffic in the last 12 months.
[00:07:49] James Breese: Zero. Big fat zero traffic. 300 pages. 300 pages. Plus.
[00:07:55] Josh Kennedy: In 12 months. In 12 months. They've had nothing in
[00:07:57] James Breese: 12 months. So I was like, boom. And it's that old [00:08:00] podcast style, most of it was as well. So like, nope. Culling it. We're getting away from it. We're focusing now on season 7 of the episode. But new format, we're going individual podcasts every day, short bites, Monday through Friday.
[00:08:11] James Breese: It's very different. So we're now uploading these contents to get show notes and resources on the website. But that's what we're trying to do as best we possibly can. So we cleared it because we had a new avatar. We wanted better content. It looked better with a better dedicated podcast website. With a player, media, and like timestamps in it, and we focused on that.
[00:08:31] James Breese: And it was, it was, it was hard work, yes. But it showed massive intent to Google, and we got ranked accordingly. So we rank highly for a number of key search terms. However, we're now trying to target fitness business beginners and fitness website designs. We're starting that, that journey of trying to rank for those key terms.
[00:08:50] James Breese: And if you put fitness, professionalised fitness business in, we rank top. Those types of things. Yeah, so it's a big, big thing that we did. So, have [00:09:00] they gone to the website? Is it on message and brand what you're talking about now? If not, cull it. It's okay. You know, it's, it's, you know, you've probably spent a lot of time writing if you did do a blog content or something like that in the past, but it's okay to call it.
[00:09:13] James Breese: Because it's showing you're de weeding, you're getting rid of the clutter so people can find the content that's relevant to them and it's on message with your
[00:09:20] Andrew Wallis: brand, basically. Plus, I think Google are looking at it as well and seeing that you're constantly updating and revamping your website. You know, it's an active digital storefront as opposed to, as James mentioned at the start, where, you know, and I made this mistake myself, where, you know, you put the website up and sat there waiting for them to...
[00:09:43] Andrew Wallis: Where, where are, where is everyone? And all we see is the tumbleweed. Uh, but if we're, if we're active and we're, um, we're, we're, we become those gardeners and we, we keep updating and revamping things, then we'll be much more successful.
[00:09:57] Josh Kennedy: Yeah, absolutely fantastic. And the, um, [00:10:00] marketing guru that is Neil Patel suggests you can upgrade your traffic by 58%, which is huge,
[00:10:07] James Breese: isn't it?
[00:10:07] James Breese: It is
[00:10:08] Josh Kennedy: huge. Especially if you've only got that 10 percent chance of getting found.
[00:10:12] James Breese: Go on James. No, I was saying for those who want to know how often you should update it, ideal world every quarter, you know, you know, six months, but at least once a year, let's be realistic for fitness professionals and their times and what time they have going for them.
[00:10:28] James Breese: You know, you're looking at once a year minimum as a baseline. When you get really big, like one of the things that we may look at in the future now, is because our content team is growing, is that we're looking at maybe having a dedicated content updating team, to do it every, every month, maybe quarter.
[00:10:43] James Breese: So we're doing less, we're posting less, less blogs. But we're going back and updating all our old ones to make them fresh and relevant and timely. That's, that's the goal.
[00:10:52] Josh Kennedy: There we go. That is the key. So make sure you weed your website garden. Shall we put it like that? Uh, that is it for today. Please don't [00:11:00] forget to rate, review and subscribe.
[00:11:01] Josh Kennedy: And if you want to find out what's holding you back from growing your fitness business and get yourself a free website audit, go to strengthmatters. com forward slash audit.