Maintain Website Content with These 3 Tips
Maintaining your website content with updated statistics, relevant information, SEO titles and descriptions, and fresh imagery is essential to your online visibility.
Maintaining your website content - the neglected necessity
We see it all too often. A new website launches—relishing in its shiny new design with upgraded bells, whistles, and call-to-action buttons—only to be neglected for years to come, rendering it ineffective and irrelevant. A sales tool that could have been used for years if well-kept falls by the wayside because it wasn’t made a priority.
We get it. Maintaining your website content can easily become one of those “to-dos” on your list that gets pushed into next week. The truth is, the longer this goes on, the higher your website risks becoming irrelevant. Maintaining content is crucial to keeping and improving your Google search rankings, as well as ensuring you’re serving users with excellence and care.
The end of the year is the perfect time to perform a few simple steps to give your website content some much needed love.
1. Remove unneeded content
No one cares what you were doing in 2012. Don’t treat your website like a filing cabinet. Go through each page of content and ask yourself: (1) does this content support one of our key business objectives or (2) meet a user’s need? If the answer is no to both, remove the content. With a website, less is usually more. Don’t include content for the sake of including content, and focus on what your user actually NEEDS.
Pro tip: consider repurposing your old blog post content through refreshing the information to be relevant, adding new imagery, and reposting!
2. Set external links to open in a new tab
A simple fix, yet a common mistake. Anytime you include an external link on your website (a link that takes the user to a different site), make sure to edit the link to open in a new browser. This helps to keep users navigating your site, rather than kicking them off and leading them to a new one. Most every CMS platform (Wordpress, Craft, Expression Engine and dare we say it…even Wix) should all have the ability to do this. If not, it’s time to get rid of your ancient CMS platform.
3. Drive behavior
Sadly, many websites don’t provide any sort of user journey and instead lead users to various dead ends. Go through your website and for each page of content ask yourself, what do I want the user to DO with this information? You might want them to fill out a form, call you, or perhaps lead them to a different page of content. Take them on a journey (one that leads to more business for you!) instead of leading them away from your site to find a better one.
See a few examples below from some of our recent website builds:
CTA on Maple Leaf Farms website
CTA on American LandMaster website
Remember, your website doesn’t get an off season, so don’t let another new year pass by without updating your content. If you’d like an in-depth content strategy audit, we’d be happy to assist you. Send us a message and we’ll set something up!