Content freshness is something we talk about a lot in SEO. Google says that freshness is one of its ranking signals, but its Information retrieval based on historical data patent also indicates that freshness is more important for some types of content than others.   This micro case study in freshness arose out of a business owner’s request to look into why they weren’t ranking for their branded terms.

1. Content Freshness Case Study
Kameron Jenkins – March 2017

2. Executive Summary
Content freshness is something we talk about a lot in SEO. Google says that
freshness is one of its ranking signals, but its Information retrieval based on
historical data patent also indicates that freshness is more important for some
types of content than others.
This micro case study in freshness arose out of a business owner’s request to
look into why they weren’t ranking for their branded terms.

3. The Subject
The subject is a small business owner who runs a boutique workers’
compensation law firm in Orlando, Florida.
Our firm had designed the subject a website in 2012, but the subject had never
paid for SEO services.

4. The Problem
The subject was not ranking for their branded keywords. In fact, their domain was nowhere to be found
in the first 10 pages of organic Google search results. Personally identifiable information has been
blurred, but as you can see in the picture below, a brand query was returning Facebook, Yelp,
Yellowpages, and other directories in the organic listings, and a branded Knowledge Panel.

5. The Diagnostic
The first step in the diagnostic was to check Google Search Console to see whether there
were any manual actions against the domain, but that was not the case.

6. The Diagnostic
Used Google Search Console’s robots.txt tester to ensure that the file wasn’t blocking
Googlebot from the home page. That was not the case.

7. The Diagnostic
Next, I checked for accidental NoIndex tags placed on the home page or other key pages.
That also was not the case.

8. The Diagnostic
Next, I checked the index status of submitted URLs in Google Search Console. All but two
pages had been indexed, so we knew Google was able to crawl and index the domain.

9. The Diagnostic
Did an exact-match query on the domain name (“domain.com”) for good measure to make
sure it really was in Google’s index. Query did return the domain.

10. The Diagnostic
I opened the XML sitemap and quickly scanned the “lastmod” dates. Most of the pages
had not been touched for over two years. At this point, it looked like an issue of content
freshness. It seemed like Google was finding other results more relevant than their actual
domain because the domain was updated so infrequently. It just didn’t seem fresh or
relevant anymore.

11. The Solution
Before making any drastic changes, I opted to make small touches to the home
page including:
● Minor content tweaks
● Minor title tag and meta description tweaks
Used Fetch/Submit tool to home page and all linked pages.

12. The Results
The very next day, the same branded query returned their home page as the number one
organic result! Even minimal touches were enough to revive this stale site so its home page
could at least rank for the business’s brand name.