How Often Should You Clean Up Your Website Content | EP 495

How Often Should You Clean Up Your Website Content

1. C lean up and optimize your content for search engines once a year, once every 18 months. 00:40
2. SEO benefits. 02:00
3. Put a plan in place to review websites periodically.04:23

Read the full episode transcript below:

00:21 David Blackmon: Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of WP The Podcast, brought to you by WP Gears. I’m David Blackmon.

00:35 Tim Strifler: I’m Tim Strifler.

00:36 David Blackmon: Today we’re going to talk about how often you should clean up your website content, and that means pages, posts, blog posts. It is something that is important to do, especially if you’re a content marketer, and you’re producing content. Once a year, once every 18 months, it’s probably a good idea to go in and clean up and optimize your content for search engines so that you can be found more easily and ready-able. I don’t know why ready-able was in my brain Tim but ready-able.

01:14 Tim Strifler: Yeah, no, this is something that I think gets overlooked a lot. A lot of times when you have a website whether you’re an online business, or you just have a website for your physical business or service business, you kind of look at stuff on the internet being a once and done type of thing. You create your services page, you publish it, you’re done, you move on. You create a blog post, you write, spend a lot of time on it, and then you publish it and done, and then you move onto the next thing. I know that’s the case for me. When you’re a small business, you tend to you’re wearing a lot of different hats, you’re doing a lot of different things, you’re always moving onto the next thing. Once you check something off of your list, you tend to not think about it ever again.

01:57 Tim Strifler: There’s a lot of benefits with SEO to refresh your content, clean it up, fix it, add to it, make it better. Yeah that’s kind of the idea here, or at least I think that’s the idea here. David, this was your topic.

02:10 David Blackmon: Absolutely yeah. I just think it’s important that kind of like you said, it’s not a set it and forget it. I think that it’s important to go back and optimize okay. What do you do? Once you launch your new web design business and you’re ticking along, and I know that it’s hard when you’re working on clients’ projects to think about this kind of stuff, but once it’s out there, it’s indexed, you want to find out how are your pages ranking and stuff. How are they stacking up to your competitors and down? Ultimately, organic traffic to your website can be a very, very beneficial thing for your company for the long run, because it can generate leads in clients. If someone is searching in your local area for website designers, you want to find out “How is my services pages ranking? How is my website ranking?” When you go in and take a look at this stuff in analytics, and you see how much traffic is coming, where are the entry points to your website and stuff, you’re going to start to see what’s your highest traffic pages and stuff.

03:21 David Blackmon: Then if you can use some of the SEO tools out there to find to kind of take a look at your competitors and even your own site to see how you’re ranking, then that’s when you really, really take it to the next level and stuff. You can come in and say, “Okay my competitor A is over here, and he’s ranking really well. His services page is killing it. He’s getting a lot more traffic. He ranks higher for the keyword website designers” for example. You can go ahead and take a look at his content and see “Okay what’s he doing? Oh he’s got 2000 words on his service page. I’ve only got 500, so let me go ahead and update this page and stuff.” There’s just subtle little things that you can do to help your business long term if you do these types of things. Again, when you’re in the weeds working on clients’ websites, it’s hard to think about all these other things that you could be doing to improve your web design business.

04:23 David Blackmon: You know what? If you do put a plan in place to take a look at these things periodically and try to help and optimize them, they can really help your business in the long run.

04:36 Tim Strifler: Definitely. I think having that mindset of continuous improvement, continuously refining your website, when you’re an online business or you’re a web design business, a lot of times your website is your store front. You don’t have a physical location, and so that represents you. You want to constantly be making it better. Obviously you don’t want to refine it, update it just for the sake of updating it. You want to make sure you’re updating it for a reason, you’re making it better, you’re adding value, you’re making the content more thorough. Yeah I mean it’s not hard to do. You can always add to it and as David mentioned, make it longer so yeah.

05:17 David Blackmon: Well tomorrow we’ve got another great topic for you, why you should clean up your email list. Tim, until tomorrow we’ll see you then.

05:28 Tim Strifler: Take care, bye-bye.