Spring means not only a time to enjoy the fresh air, but also a time to think about the traditions of spring cleaning.
If it helps reduce stress in your home (and other areas of your life) and eliminate waste, why doesn’t it help your website?
Over time, you may add items to your home, fill your closets, and change rooms to meet emerging needs.
The home you live in today may not be the same as the home you moved into years ago.
This can also be said to be your website.
Many website owners tend to add content without removing content that is no longer needed.
Create pages to accommodate events, marketing plans, and other activities.
Then they are often forgotten.
While you may not see or remember this, searchers may stumble upon it and make a bad first impression of your site.
Preventative maintenance for your site
Site cleaning made life easier for three different parties.
A clean website allows you to traverse your admin section and view content without sifting through tons of URLs.
Your users will also feel comfortable visiting your website because the content they want will be more accessible.
Finally, we must do what we can to appease crawling search engines.
Search engines can view your site faster (aside from loading speed considerations) if you only provide essential content.
this is not a Comprehensive website maintenance plan. Instead, these few activities should be easy enough to do quickly and make your site cleaner.
I promised you only three steps, so here it is.
1. Assess the work at hand
The first step in our cleanup process is to take a comprehensive look at each website page.
A web analytics tool such as screaming frog Provides an organized list view of all website URLs.
Next, sort out the export area to reduce the pages we don’t need to see.
Depending on the nature of your website, this may include non-HTML pages, redirect pageand non-indexed pages.
You might find yourself finding something surprising.
These can include:
- Tons of old newsletters, blog posts, etc.
- Outdated resource content.
- Unintentional page duplication based on technical issues.
- Legacy pages created just for ranking considerations, aka “old school SEO”.
- Irrelevant pages, for example, staff author or bio content.
This exercise is a great way to see the back-end view of your website and can often reveal possible technical issues.
2. Clean up debris
Now, you may look like you have a clean website.
However, this is also a good time to see how your content is performing.
Your current list of site URLs all appear to be valid, informative pages, but do they need to exist?
Some of our spring cleaning exercises eased our confusion around site management, but let’s take a moment to help the crawler bot out of the woods.
exist Google Analyticslook at your website page views over the past few years to determine what your visitors want to see on your website.
The reason for the 12-month review is that industry and behavioral seasonality can lead to a surge in demand for content.
Image via Google Analytics, March 2022Take a look at the bottom right corner.
It can be surprising how many pages in a year are driving page views for your site.
You may see abnormal parameter generation due to ads, but you may also notice that some of your perceived “valid” content is not highly consumed.
This view may seem a little daunting, but pause for a moment to begin your sorting.
Perform the export and prepare to look for a few key areas.
We want to look at content with only a few annual page views and user behavior.
Pay close attention to pages with high exit rates.
This may be due to bad design layout or lack of internal navigation. It may also indicate that content needs to be updated or retired.
3. Scan the page
So far, we’ve only focused on URLs.
Now that we’ve cleaned up unnoticed content waste and less valuable content, let’s see how to clean up the content area of a website page.
We’ve cleaned out our long-forgotten closets, but it’s time to take a look at what’s on the “living room floor” of your most visited website pages.
For this, we’ll rely on heatmap tools like CrazyEgg or my favorite, LuckyOrange.
In our previous exercise, we reviewed site pageviews based on counts.
First, look at the most visited pages.
Pay special attention to the exit rate column, which is an important indicator of poor page performance.
Under the considered page, Review user behavior Learn where click behavior displays page regional preferences.
By looking at the content of mouse activity, click activity, and scroll depth, you can gain insight into where the user’s attention is on the page.
Some sites are still affected by age-old SEO tactics that are extremely lengthy.
While we’ve worked hard to remove full-page content, you’re probably mature enough to clean up the content areas of your site’s pages.
In Screaming Frog, you can also sort URLs by word count.
This can help you understand where your long-form content is on your site.
all clear
Through site content audits, some Content removaland a few touches, you’ve now completed what could be the annual tradition of cleaning your site.
A website should be the functional connection between you and your online audience.
Eliminating unnecessary content makes you a happier webmaster, provides a clear path for your audience, and makes it easier for search engines to crawl your site.
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Featured image: Comaniciu Dan/Shutterstock
