Time flies by! And businesses can evolve and change so much over time. It is vital to review and revamp your website content regularly to avoid it becoming stale and damaging your search engine rankings.
Your website is likely to be incredibly important to drive sales, so it should always be relevant, exciting and new. One of the best ways to keep on top of this is to make it a regular task to review and refresh your website content.
Why Review Your Content?
You have spent time and money on your website, you are happy with how it looks and performs, and it is getting you a steady stream of enquiries. So why would you want to spend more time reviewing pages and pages of content?
Well, your website needs fresh and up-to-date content constantly so that it drives traffic, engages your audience and ranks high on search engine results. Search engines, such as Google, will change their algorithms and roll out updates several times a year. It’s important to understand what they are looking for in order for your website to tick their boxes.
- Having out-of-date or incorrect information on your website can damage your credibility
- Brand new content can improve your search engine rankings
- Well-written, engaging content will improve your user experience and enquiry levels
- Removing redundant pages and trimming back can improve your carbon footprint
- Constantly refreshing your website will help keep up to date with algorithms and updates
- Having hundreds of pages can slow your website loading speed
- Your competitors could overtake you
Just like re-reading your old diary, you may stumble upon content that sounded great at the time, but now seems cringe-worthy! This type of content should be removed or re-written to avoid any damage to your brand. Your writing style will develop over time. Maybe you used a copywriter some time ago that just doesn’t fit with your business voice now.
In this blog we will take a look at:
- What content should be removed altogether
- What can be re-used in other forms to help with your marketing
- Where refreshing your content can help
- What content you must absolutely keep
Every business is different, so the review and content clean up will be different for everyone.
What Should You REMOVE?
Any content that is out-of-date, irrelevant, or incorrect should be removed ASAP. This could include prices that are no longer correct, members of the team that have left, past events etc. If you have a blog on your website, regularly review it to take down any content that’s no longer relevant. For example, are you still hosting blogs about lockdowns or the pandemic? Or pages about Christmas?
If you have pages with very poor or no engagement (you can get this information from your website stats or Google Analytics) then you could consider removing those pages altogether.
What Should You RE-USE?
Content that is performing well on your website can be repurposed into other forms. For example, you are a law firm that has an article on divorce that receives hundreds of hits month-on-month or results in leads / enquiries, you could repurpose this into another article on the same topic to generate even more interactions. It could be re-shared on your social media, configured into a series of posts, adverts, a press release, case study or video. If you have a piece of content that is performing well, be sure to squeeze the most out of it.
What Should You REFRESH?
Any content that is receiving a good amount of traffic but is not quite hitting the sweet spot of attracting enquiries could do with some refreshing. It might be some blogs that are good content, but just need a few tweaks to make them relevant again.
Any website pages that have been sitting stagnant for a while or have not been updated in some time should be on your list to review. Even if it is just adding in a new paragraph, re-ordering or inserting some backlinks.
What Should You KEEP?
Your core pages that always have high levels of traffic, engagement, conversions and a low bounce rate should be kept. Any pages that you know are fully optimised, do not require any updates and are performing well shouldn’t be removed.
Take Action
This might seem like a daunting task. Especially if you are not confident in using the back-end of your website or are not sure how to obtain the data you need to make these decisions.
Tip: Don’t do it all at once!
This be a really time-consuming job. You’re likely to become word-blind or lack inspiration if you are spending days on end deep in your website pages. It can damage your search engine position if you make changes to every page of your website at once, as Google has to re-trawl the pages.
Instead, divide your website into manageable sections and diarise to review one of these sections each month. For example, January – review your blog page, February – review your home/main pages, March – review your team page etc.
Put together an action plan and diarise it as a task to make sure that reviewing your content isn’t left on the backburner. It is easy to be too busy looking forward to remember to look back.
Please get in touch to discuss your website, content plan or any other marketing tools that you are keen to explore and need expert opinions on…