Spring Cleaning: 5 Ways to Freshen Up Your Blog
Spring cleaning isn't just for your closet! Your blog can benefit from it, too.
With the arrival of spring sunshine, it's time to tidy up the musty corners of your company blog, where obsolete content has been gathering cobwebs. Spring cleaning doesn't just pertain to your closet; it lifts your blog in the search results, shortens its loading time, and increases your conversions. Here are five blog cleanup tasks to put on your to-do list for spring:
1. Remove Outdated SEO Content
Carefully audit your older content for irrelevant, spammy or misleading keywords that provide a bad user experience. For example, avoid keyword stuffing and unrelated terms simply aimed at gaming search rankings rather than helping readers.
Not only do such outdated tactics fail to boost rankings today, but they could actively hurt your site's reputation and performance. Google's algorithms catch on to manipulative optimization tricks and may issue penalties.
Instead, focus your energy on crafting content that provides genuine value to humans first while seamlessly integrating relevant keyword opportunities. Follow search intent best practices. If visitors quickly bounce because your content doesn't actually answer their queries, your pages will underperform regardless of cunning keyword plays.
Aim for articles over 1,000 words that offer comprehensively researched advice for users around your topics. Include statistics, interviews, explanatory visuals and real-world use cases.
See also: 7 SEO Content Myths Explained
2. Repurpose Evergreen Content
For evergreen posts that continue to see steady traffic, invest time into keeping the content refreshed rather than simply letting it sit unchanged for years.
Run your top evergreen posts through a plagiarism checker to catch any sites that may have stolen your content. Address duplication issues to avoid Google penalties.
Insert updated statistics and new examples that make sense for 2024. Swap outdated references. The details may change but the fundamental framework likely still provides value.
Consider expanding mega-posts into two separate, more tightly focused articles. Or add special call-out sections that branch into logical tangents to keep providing additional insight for engaged readers.
Repurposing evergreen content to stay current shows your commitment to delivering ongoing value vs capitalizing on past efforts. Showcasing your continued domain expertise also helps establish brand authority.
See also: 12 Ways to Repurpose Your Evergreen Content
3. Fix Broken Links
Rather than simply removing dead links in old content, put in the effort to replace them with working links pointing to alternative reputable resources. This improves user experience and prevents cited sources from abruptly ending in empty dead ends.
Link rot damages credibility over time if left unaddressed. Readers may doubt the accuracy and recency of information if sources disappear without updates. Proactively maintaining content prevents the erosion of hard-earned trust.
Fixing broken links also benefits site crawlability and performance in SERP rankings. Pages with high volumes of faulty links risk relegation due to perceived quality issues. Investing in link repair indirectly retains organic visibility as an added perk.
See also: 9 Ways to Increase Organic Traffic to Your Website
4. Prune Bloated Pages
Analyze your Google Analytics behavior flow reports to identify pages with extremely high exit rates and bounce rates. These underperforming pages provide red flags for potential site speed issues that hurt conversions.
Use Google's PageSpeed Insights or WebPageTest to diagnose loading performance. Test on both desktop and mobile to cover all bases. Target any page taking over 3 seconds to fully load.
Strip out unnecessary bloat like overweight images, choppy embedded video files, obtrusive ads, unused widgets and outdated features. Enable compression, caching and minification to further optimize page speed.
Every 100ms improvement directly correlates to a 1% jump in revenue metrics. Speed equals money when it comes to site performance. Trim back sluggish pages for dramatically improved bottom line gains.
5. Refresh Your Brand Messaging
While your core products and services may only evolve incrementally from year to year, brand messaging deserves consistent updates to stay feeling current.
Audit old blog posts as well as FAQ and About Us page content that shape brand perception. Update any statistics to the latest industry data. Reflect major economic, technological and cultural shifts over recent years that influence target audience world views.
References that felt relatable pre-pandemic likely feel dated today, for example. Refresh language and examples to resonate with the present zeitgeist rather than ages past. Even subtle changes go a long way in conveying an active, in-touch brand in touch with current events rather than one stuck in the past.
See also: What is A Brand Audit, Why It's Important, and How to Perform One