5 Things To Do To Make Your Blog More User Friendly (and improve SEO as a bonus)
Spring cleaning is in the air, and as we sweep away the cobwebs of winter, it’s a good time to have a look at your business blog. I’ve been working with some new clients to review and assess their blogs. It helps to have an objective opinion, someone who is skilled in identifying what would resonate with your desired client. If you have more than 5 years of blog content, you should start reviewing what’s there. Dumping old, irrelevant content will speed up your website, making it easier for users to find what they need. As an added bonus, cleaning up your blog and removing dated or unpopular content will help improve your SEO, as web crawlers won’t get hung on pages and pages of blogs no one sees.
Here are five things you can do right now to make your blog better.
- Dump anything with a date. Things to do in <insert city name> this weekend should be the first posts you delete, followed by seasonal events, festivals and one-time specials or deals.
- Delete posts that announce new programs, new rules, government incentives, or policy changes. These kinds of things change frequently and might not be useful a few years after you wrote the blog.
- Check posts for broken links, missing videos or images.
- Quickly review blog posts related to trends to ensure they are still relevant. Remove dead references (brass for home decor, for instance). Consider re-vamping these posts labelled “Trends” and keep the elements or ideas that are classic and can stand the test of time.
- If you can, take a look at your stats. Can high performing posts be rejuvenated? What made them popular in the first place is something that likely can be repeated. On the flip side, anything that has zero views should probably be archived. While you may be tempted to repurpose it, hold off. If it didn’t resonate with readers the first time, it won’t resonate when you post it anew.
And here’s a bonus tip: If you don’t have a search function in your blog, ADD ONE. If someone reads something you shared and is curious about another topic you may have written about, make it easy to find. Nobody has the time — or the desire — to click through pages and pages of content.
If you need someone to take this task off your plate, send me an email. For a flat rate, I’ll review your blog and make recommendation for changes, deletions and updates. If you want someone to handle re-writes, I can certainly help with that as well. Just send me an email, and we can start the conversation.