Ever perform a web search and get annoyed because you couldn’t quite find what you were looking for? Or to make matters worse, you click on a search result only to find that the site content has absolutely nothing to do with your actual search query?
It’s frustrating.
And that’s a quick way to lose readers…
Great content is supposed to engage, inform and persuade. When you have bad content, people come, look and leave. And they rarely come back. Especially if you have a poor user experience… Meaning that your content is difficult to navigate, or it’s outdated.
What’s the solution? Perform a website audit and ask yourself the following:
- First, what’s there? What are the most important pages on your website? Where do you want site visitors to go once they land on your website? What do you want them to do on each of those pages? What action do you want them to take? Are you making that clear?
- Is it any good? First, is the content directly tied to your business objectives? Are you providing content that meets your customers needs? Then, is there any content that needs updating?
Update things that need updating. And get rid of anything that doesn’t fulfill your site visitors’ needs. If it isn’t helpful, and tied specifically to your business objectives, it probably isn’t necessary.
Image credit: logos / 123RF Stock Photo
Ahhh… how difficult it is to kill our little darlings. But you’re right. Those posts might have been useful (or not) once upon a time. I could probably stand to delete 50% of my content right now.
Off the the drawer board! (Or is that the executioner’s stand?)
I think it’s a perfect opportunity to recycle some of that old, but still useful evergreen content!
But also, clean up the clutter from navigation items (and the like) that aren’t necessary or very useful for your intended audience.
Agreed. I think what I need most is to block out a good 10-15 minutes of strategy time each day because that would greatly help with the high level decision making.
There is a lot of benefit in just doing… but I think I need to pull it back a little.
My mantra is going to be focus, focus, focus! 🙂
Useless contents also kill our websites, in terms of SEO. Google want fresh, useful and deep content which keep the readers on your site. Not to kick them away with crappy promotion 🙂