You know you the importance of updating web content, but sometimes it feels like a big undertaking. It doesn't have to be. You can improve your site and blog performance with a few simple activities that don't take a lot of resources (of any kind).
Add one or more of them to make your blog and web pages more engaging and effective while also supporting organic and paid search. Bonus: Planned correctly, any of these is suitable for interns or outsourcing.
1. Refresh existing posts and pages
Don't let your great content suffer from benign neglect! Update content regularly. Identify your highest-performing posts and pages and spruce them up. Ditto for evergreen and seasonal content. Historical optimization is a smart way to keep those performing assets performing with an incremental resource investment. There are a lot of ways to refresh. Here's what we include in our content updating service:
- Tighten writing and update search terms
- Enhance lists and add/update contextual and crosslinks
- Upgrade title tags, meta descriptions and excerpts
- Add new photos and videos with alt and descriptive text
- Create <200-character Tweets and LinkedIn statuses with zero-click visuals
Bonus: Refresh and re-promote low-performing posts on high-value topics, too! If the topics are important to your audience, they deserve to be optimized and promoted again, if not only social (though why not?) at least in round-ups, FAQs and blog posts.
2. Create round-up posts for seasonal content and highly relevant subjects
Round-ups are kind of like pillar pages. They collect a lot of relevant data in one place. But they don't have to be exhaustively detailed like a pillar page. Start by identifying 5 or 6 posts covering different aspects of the same topic, or addressing the same audience (like family caregivers or CHROs). Refresh those posts, write short summaries (a great way to try out ChatGPT, btw) and link back to them. Here's a recent example from our blog:
3. Write descriptive copy for all images and videos on your site and blog
Improve your digital accessibility by adding alt and descriptive text to all visual content. Keep it simple, describing the elements of the image that are vital to visualizing and contextualizing it. You've got about 125 characters and you can include key words if they're relevant. The National Park Service is the best at this.
4. Build FAQs from "people also asked" prompts for high-relevance topics
FAQ pages and posts help readers gather information and make decisions. They also show what you/your company knows and does, and makes the search bots really happy. Your sales team can tell you the questions they get from prospects, so start with those. Then go further by searching on a few terms and look for the box of People Also Asked. Instant questions from real people searching for real information! Your FAQs should include search terms, crosslinks to relevant copy on your site/blog, and visual content, too. Bonus: Identify questions you can use for new or refreshed H1s and subheads.
5. Review auto-fill suggestions and related searches for new blog topics and new or refreshed H1s and subheads
This info is great inspiration for refreshed and new H1s and subheads. It's also great in text for keyword density. Bonus: You may also surface ideas for new content here (that you can add to an existing round-up and crosslink to from other pages and posts!)
Use these low-drag activities to boost blog and site performance with better discoverability, relevance and time on site.