It’s that time of year again! You’re reaching to the back of your closet for a mop and your yellow rubber gloves, ready to tackle your spring cleaning to-do-list. However, if you’re a business owner or content marketer, you’ll need to add another section to your list — no mop or gloves necessary! Because just like you clean and organize your home to feel reenergized for the Spring season, you should also “clean up” your content to refresh your marketing strategy.

When you clean your home you may find lost items that you had forgotten about, get an idea for a new home project, and maybe even make a plan for tackling your daily household chores. Similarly, by taking a fresh look at your content calendar and SEO strategy, you might catch a mistake, spark an idea for a campaign, and overall be more proactive with your content strategy.

1. Update your content inventory

A content inventory is a list of all the content on your site including text, images, documents, and applications. Content inventories serve as references when migrating or restructuring websites, list out and help visualize all the content you have, and provide information for web content audits, making them crucial to your business. It’s important to evaluate your content inventory routinely so you know what is on the site, if it is located properly, and whether content is up-to-date.

Your content inventory should include the following raw data for each asset:

  • Unique Content ID
  • Title
  • URL
  • File Format (HTML, PDF, DOC, TXT…)
  • Author or Provider
  • Physical location (in the content management system, on the server, etc)
  • Meta Description
  • Meta Keywords
  • Categories/ Tags
  • Dates (created, revised, accessed)

Having an up-to-date content inventory onhand during website migrations or redesigns, or even just for routine SEO optimizations will make your job a lot easier. Your future self will thank you!

2. Prune your old content

You won’t need your pruning shears for this chore! Pruning your old content means trimming away blogs, landing pages, and other pages that aren’t earning the organic traffic they were created to attract. To do this you can either remove the page from the site or “no index” the page so Google’s web crawlers won’t even look at it.

You can also prune your old social media content. If you scroll through your social media pages and notice a shift in content, you might want to consider deleting posts that aren’t clean, are inconsistent, or misrepresent your brand. You may not think this step is worth your time, but you would be shocked by how many consumers scroll to the bottom of Instagram and Facebook accounts. If they see inconsistent branding, poor-quality images, or irrelevant or outdated posts, they may lose trust in your company.

3. Evaluate your content calendar

Do you have a content calendar planned for the year? If not, now’s a great time to make one! If you already have a content calendar but have fallen behind on planned content, evaluating your calendar can help you get back on track. It also gives you the chance to double-check that you didn’t overlook any upcoming holidays or important dates.

Evaluating your content calendar is also an opportunity for you to improve upon or make additions to your current calendar. How can you make the process easier and more efficient for your team? Do you have a column where you designate a copywriter for each post? Or one for the publish date? By taking these steps to improve your content calendar and posting process, you can avoid miscommunication and potential content errors.

4. Review your SEO strategy

When’s the last time you reviewed your SEO strategy? Have you added any new tags lately? Remember, every time you make content edits to your website it impacts on your SEO rankings, so it’s important to take some time to evaluate your website performance throughout the year. By using tools like Google Search Console and Semrush you can identify underperforming pages and resolve errors like duplicate tags or meta descriptions. After evaluating your performance, you can make a strategy to optimize your SEO with fresh content and optimized keywords.

5. Perform a Google Analytics audit

A Google Analytics audit or “health check” is one of the best ways to ensure that you can trust your data. When performing a Google Analytics audit, you should ask yourself the following questions:

  • Does it collect what we need?
  • Can we trust this data?
  • Where are the holes?
  • Is there anything that can be fixed?
  • Is anything broken?
  • What reports should be avoided?
  • Is our data collection aligned with our business goals?

If you have inaccurate data, and you’re trying to make decisions based on that data, then you’re going to be making bad decisions. Inaccurate data leads to inaccurate decisions. Make sure that you’re making the right content marketing decisions by adding a Google Analytics audit to your Spring cleaning checklist!

Work With Us

By following these spring cleaning steps, you’ll have plenty of fresh content, SEO improvements, and social channels to factor into your content marketing strategy. However, if you need some extra hands to help you tackle your spring cleaning to-do list, contact us! Our team of experts at Agency 102 are ready to help you.