I’m a working mom. Now, I’m not complaining, but honestly, life can get busy—and hard. Unfortunately, one of the things that begins to suffer is keeping a tidy and organized house. As my mom always said, it’s important to keep an organized house so you can find what you need when you need it. It helps to avoid anything “falling through the cracks.” That’s why I often turn to my favorite website, flylady.net. This site helps me to deal with CHAOS (Can’t Have Anyone Over Syndrome).
In the business world, your website can be much like your house. It gets neglected if you’re busy. Content can get old to the point where you don’t want anyone see it.
Today and tomorrow, Promotional Consultant Today shares these tips for spring-cleaning your website.
1. Check your links. This is probably something you’re already continuously doing, because links come and go, but it is important to check all links again (and again). We don’t have to tell you, but will anyway that a broken link equals a poor user experience. Start with external links. For example, have you linked to any outside articles lately? Make sure the links are still working, or maybe decide to remove them or update them with fresher articles.
It is just as important to ensure internal links are working, so update any that have recently changed, and remove any that may be linking to a deleted page.
2. Review analytics data and evaluate attainable objectives. In order to start out on the right foot this year, taking a look at your analytics data can help you determine where you should start, whether cleaning up content or starting new initiatives. You can learn a lot from your web analytics, including where your visitors are going on your website, where they are coming from, what pages they are landing on, what pages they are exiting from, and what type of device they are using to view your website.
Maybe your focus is making your content more mobile-friendly. Or maybe it’s updating a top exit page with more useful content so the visitors stay on the page longer. There are so many great ways to dive into analytics data and clean up or curate your content based on what you learn.
3. Gather devices and do internal user testing to see what you can improve. Depending on what content management system (CMS) or marketing automation tool you use, you might be able to view what content will look like on various devices. But what could be better than looking at your content on the actual devices themselves? Hopefully people in your company have a variety of devices (whether the latest iPhone or Samsung Galaxy) that you can use to get a lot of useful information from reviewing the content through different devices, and see if there is room for improvement. It might also be a good idea to check to see what your website and content looks like on various browsers.
4. Remove outdated content from your site. Yes, I know. You’ve been avoiding this because it takes time, but if you’re cleaning up your site, this is a must (and an obvious one). Not all content is equal. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t good at one time, it just might not be descriptive enough or relevant enough now. Or perhaps it needs a new call to action or more research. Or maybe it just really needs to move to your trash folder.
5. Clean up or remove content sitting in your CMS. Now is also the perfect time to clean up your content management system. Do you have content sitting in draft stage that’s never going to be published? Delete it! Are there old pieces of content sitting the trash folder? Hit “permanently delete.” When you have a clean digital working space, you will have an easier time finding and updating existing website content, and your team will appreciate the effort.
Source: Rachel Trampel is a content strategy specialist and content creator who loves analyzing data and numbers to learn more about the content she is creating and what she can improve on, as well as everything going on in the search engine optimization (SEO) world.
