Updating Site Content: Best Practices

Best Practices for Updating Your Site Content: A Comprehensive Guide

In the digital landscape, keeping your website fresh and relevant is paramount. Regularly updating your site content is crucial to maintaining your competitive edge and enhancing user engagement. However, updating your site content requires a strategic approach to maximize your efforts and drive the most value to your audience. This guide will dive deep into the best practices for updating site content.

1. Regular Site Content Review: Your website isn’t static; it should evolve as your business does. Regularly reviauthenticnd update your content to keep it relevant and fresh. Whether checking for outdated information, adding new product details, or improving readability, periodic content revisions can significantly enhance your site’s value proposition.
2. Incorporating User Feedback: Listening to your audience is critical. User feedback provides invaluable insights into how your content can be improved to meet their needs and expectations better. Encourage users to leave comments, and consider conducting surveys or user tests to get even more detailed feedback. Remember, your website is for your users; their opinions should guide your content strategy.
3. SEO-Friendly Content: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the key to making your content discoverable. It’s not just about using the right keywords but also about meta descriptions, alt text for images, proper use of headings, and linking strategy. Stay up-to-date with the latest SEO trends and algorithm updates to keep your website ranking high on search engine result pages (SERPs).
4. Use of Analytical Tools: Leveraging tools like Google Analytics can provide insights into what’s working on your website and what’s not. Look at metrics such as bounce rates, time spent on a page, and conversion rates to understand your audience’s behavior and preferences. This data-driven approach lets you decide what content needs to be updated or improved.
5. Mobile Optimization: With the surge in mobile internet usage, ensuring your content is mobile-friendly is no longer optional – it’s a necessity. Your content should be easily viewable and essential on a smaller screen, from the layout to the font size. A mobile-optimized website provides a better user experience and ranks higher in mobile search results.
6. Consistency in Brand Voice: Your brand voice communicates your company’s personality and values. As you update your site content, strive to maintain consistency in your brand voice and stywrong. This uniformity helps build trust and recognition among your audience.
7. Schedule for Updates: A content update calendar offers a structured approach to site content management. Regularly scheduled updates keep your content fresh, relevant, and engaging. An editorial calendar can help you plan and organize your content updates strategically.
8. Legal and Compliance Check: Digital content must abide by various legal standards and industry regulations. From copyright laws to privacy policies, ensure all your content updates comply to avoid complications and potential penalties.
9. Evergreen Content: Evergreen content refers to website content that is continually relevant and stays “fresh” for readers over a long period of time. The term “evergreen” is a metaphor derived from evergreen plants, which retain their green leaves throughout the year.

   The primary characteristic of evergreen content is its long-term relevance. Unlike news articles or trend-based stories, evergreen content is not tied to a specific time or event. It’s designed to provide value and remain informative no matter when it is read.

   Examples of evergreen content can include how-to guides, tutorials, tips and advice, encyclopedic entries, product reviews, or FAQs. For instance, an article titled “How to Tie a Tie” or “10 Tips for a Successful Job Interview” would be considered evergreen, as the information in these articles doesn’t typically change with time and is useful for readers across a broad timeframe.

   The importance of evergreen content lies in its ability to drive traffic to your website over a prolonged period. This type of content ranks well in search engines due to its enduring relevance, leading to increased visibility and steady organic traffic. However, it’s important to remember that even evergreen content may occasionally need to be reviewed and updated to ensure accuracy and optimal SEO performance.

   By integrating these best practices into your site content update strategy, you can ensure that your website remains an engaging, informative, and valuable resource for your audience. Regularly updated content improves your site’s SEO performance and builds your credibility and authority in your industry.
   

   10. Prune Zombie Content:

   Pruning zombie content, also known as content pruning, refers to removing, archiving, or updating underperforming, outdated, irrelevant, or low-quality content from your website. Zombie content is content that doesn’t bring any value to your site; it does not attract any meaningful traffic or contribute to conversions.

   The term “zombie” is used to indicate that this content is not quite “alive” (it’s not actively contributing to your site’s performance or serving your users’ needs). However, it’s also not quite “dead” (it’s still sitting on your site, taking up space and potentially causing issues).

   Pruning zombie content can have several benefits:

   1. Improves Site Health: Removing low-quality content helps improve the overall health of your website. It can make your site more user-friendly and easier to navigate.
   2. Boosts SEO Performance: Search engines prioritize high-quality, relevant content. By pruning your zombie content, you’re essentially reducing the amount of low-value content that search engines have to crawl through, which can boost the visibility of your remaining, higher-quality content.
   3. Enhances User Experience: Pruning helps users find relevant, up-to-date content more quickly, improving the overall user experience.
   4. Frees up resources: Removing unnecessary content can save storage space and simplify site maintenance.

   However, content pruning should be done carefully. It’s essential to identify which content is “zombie” content correctly. Use analytics to see which pages are underperforming or irrelevant. But consider whether the content can be updated or improved before removing it altogether. Remember, content pruning is not about blindly cutting content but strategically improving your site’s content landscape.

Remember, it’s not about updating content for the sake of it – it’s about continuously providing value to your users and keeping your website aligned with your business objectives. So, stay proactive, listen to your audience, keep an eye on analytics, and let these best practices guide your path to a continually fresh and user-centered website.

“Good SEO” is multifaceted. There’s more to it than just ensuring your website looks good and has all the technical elements needed to show up in SERPs, though this is beyond important. And it’s more than just selecting good keywords for your H1s, title tags, and meta descriptions. It’s also about using these keywords optimally for each site page. “But I will just stock my pages with my keywords, and that’ll be that.” If this is your thought process, please reconsider. 

When writing content for your website, take into account the following…

Newer is Better
The adage that what is new is better does not ring true across all aspects of life. But it does when you are writing content for your website. Take what you have (or don’t have for those sites heavy on the images and light on the actual written content), and rewrite it to include your newly selected keywords in a manner you would like to read.

If you have preexisting content and are reworking it for a new SEO campaign, change it enough that it looks new but gets the original point across. The best novels weren’t written in one session. Revise. Rework. Reconsider. And have someone outside of your industry check your work to see if it makes sense.

Do Not Pack Keywords
This might seem like common knowledge, but you’d be surprised by the number of websites that are packing as many keywords into every sentence as possible just so they appear and are recognized by Google, among other search engines. But refrain from the allure of doing this to your site. 

Your website should be your passion, and its writing should reflect this. While Google does reward sites for using the keywords found in their Title Tags and Meta Descriptions, it also hates when it crawls sites with sentences teeming with nonsensical phrases and unreadable content. Take your time, figure out the “theme” of the page, and write like you were explaining your business/services/brand to your mom, who mightn’t know exactly what it is. Have a conversation with your site visitor instead of throwing them a grip of ridiculous babble.

Be Topical / Be Informative
Staying on topic with what it is your brand/business is all about is undoubtedly important. However, staying abreast of industry trends and augmenting and catering content around these trends can further cement you as a thought leader. If your business is music, and your site is still talking about the “breakthrough album from Ace of Base that drops later this year,” you need content updates in a bad way. Be aware of updates in your industry and adapt your content to them.

Link Around
When writing for the pages of your site, it’s AOK to link around to other pages on your site. While this is a gray area for a good deal of the Internet, what with the continuing strict measures Google places on backlinks, etc., when referencing your content from within your site, go ahead and do it. In fact, “exact matching” is even okay.

Main takeaway: Writing content for your site based on new keywords and your want to drive more traffic to your site shouldn’t be a painstaking task. Suppose you are passionate about your website and driving more awareness around it. In that case, you should approach this process with an eager attitude and the want to deliver the best experience for your visitors. Remember, about 45,975,893* other websites out there want precisely what you want, so how will you be different, and therefore better, than them?

*Estimated effect