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How Often Should I Update Content for SEO? Free Freshness Distance Calculator

By Darren Shaw
on March 5, 2025

If you want your website to rank higher, you need to keep your content updated regularly.

According to a recent leak, Google considers content “fresh” if around 30% of it is updated. But quality also matters! Updating your content just for the sake of it won’t help if the updates don’t align with the topic or your audience’s needs.

How to keep your website content fresh and ranking

Do the following steps regularly in order to maintain the relevancy of your website:

  1. Review your website often and update outdated information.
  2. Fix errors, answer questions, and make minor tweaks regularly.
  3. Update core service pages monthly with new text, videos, or photos.
  4. Update the date on the page you are refreshing.
  5. Add new reviews and testimonials to build trust and demonstrate ongoing engagement.
  6. Share updates about your latest work or industry news to show that your business is active and current.

How often should you update your website content?

How often you update your content largely depends on the industry you’re in and the topic you’re writing about.

If you want to stay competitive in Google’s search results, you need check what your competitors are doing:

  1. Do a search for the term you want to rank for (i.e. “best laptops 2025”).
  2. Look at the top ranking pages for that term and check the dates when they were last updated.
  3. Calculate the distance between the newest and the oldest article ranking for that search term.

The third step in this process is what SEOs call calculating the “freshness distance”, a concept coined by Ross Hudgens, and it gives you an idea of how frequently you need to update your content in order to rank well for a specific term.

The only problem with this is that manually scrolling through the results, noting the dates down, figuring out which the newest and oldest pages are, and doing math is annoying, especially if you need to do it for a number of search terms.

This is why I built a free tool to do it all for you. It’s called the Freshness Distance Calculator, and it makes ranking your pages organically infinitely easier. Plus, it looks rad if I do say so myself ðŸ”¥ Check it out:

P.S. Try using the Konami code on the Freshness Distance Calculator page. You’re welcome.

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