JSL Marketing & Web Design is all about keeping tidy, keeping organized, and reminding anyone who will listen that content is king!

That is why we thought there’s no better time to clean up your website’s content than in the spring! After all, you spring clean your house, garage, car, and Facebook friend’s list – why not clean up your website’s content too?

We love creating new content, from blogs to eBooks, infographics to videos. And if you have a strong SEO strategy for the year, you’re probably creating new content on a monthly, or even weekly, basis as well.

That is part of the beauty of truly optimizing your website and SEO strategy – it’s never done! You can create, tweak, and implement different aspects every month. But that can also lead to content overload or too much that can either confuse readers, slow down your site, or become redundant and unnecessary.

To avoid this, JSL recommends a spring cleaning for your content. Check out our easy, 3-step system below!

Step One: Catalog Your Current Content

This step is much easier (and mainly superfluous) if you have a content plan implemented for the quarter or year. But because many don’t utilize a content plan in the best way, or at all, we thought including this starting step would be helpful.

However, if you want to learn how to create a solid content plan and avoid this step in the future, check out our instructions here.

Essentially, cataloging your content means going through every piece of content you have created and organizing it in some way.

We recommend organizing it in a meaningful way – not by date or in alphabetical order – but instead based on subject, purpose, and medium.

After you have your content cataloged, you can see what you have, what you lack, and maybe what you have duplicates of.

Now here, you could make your first cuts or edits, but we recommend waiting until you look over step two to know which content pieces or pages are performing the best (and which need some help, or the ax).

Step Two: Check Your Content & Page Statistics

Now that you have your content cataloged, and you know what duplicates or overlap you have, you can look into their numbers.

Here, you can look at everything from interactions, views, reads, comments, time spent on the page, tags met, etc.

Why do you need this to check your content’s stats?

Well, let’s say you have two pages that both deal with branding services you provide. One gets 10 hits per month and one gets 40. The former is ranking for no keywords, but the latter is. The former has a high bounce rate, and the latter doesn’t.

Which page do you think you should cut? Which page should you absorb into another? What content is truly helping you here?

Without the content’s statistics, you wouldn’t know which page to work on, and which to possibly get rid of.

By cataloging and then researching your content, you can know exactly which pages are performing and which are possibly stealing clicks and competing for the same keywords as other better-performing pages.

Additionally, perhaps your research will show you that you could be linking your content better. Let’s say you have an eBook, blog post, and infographic on similar topics – but they are all different mediums.

Because the topics link, you should be able to lead your readers through each of the mediums by placing an internal link and a call to action (CTA) for your readers to learn more.

Obviously, JSL loves our research, but it’s times like these when it becomes clear why.

Success comes to those who know, and those who know had to learn it from somewhere.

Make the effort to always gain knowledge. Then reap the rewards of that knowledge down the line.

Step Three: Kill Your Darlings & Make the Necessary Edits

The end game of all the above steps for your content spring cleaning – the actual cleaning part.

Make sure you have analytics backed-up reasons for all of the edits you are making – like curbing underperforming pages, content, or posts.

And though you don’t have to delete blogs or social posts which didn’t do well, you should be able to learn from them and see what might have been different about them or what might have caused their demise.

Hopefully, with that insight, you’ll know what to avoid in the future.

Content is Created to Be Seen, Make Sure Yours is Doing its Job

If creating a content plan, creating the actual content, edits, research, and pruning all seem like a lot for you to handle – you aren’t alone.

Many of our clients come to us because they just can’t do it all. They can’t manage their business while also managing their website, SEO, content, and advertisements.

Sometimes the best way to help your business is to understand that you don’t need to do it all. Sometimes delegation is more important than control.

So, if you are looking for someone to make your content the gleaming, organized, high-performing king it was meant to be, then check out our content services, or contact us today.

We won’t make you wait, we won’t make you wonder – we’ll get back to you quickly and clearly instead!

Until then, comment, share, read more, and enjoy your spring cleaning!