How your website is like my lawn

I’m not going to pretend that this title has SEO best practices in mind.  It doesn’t.  I like it anyway. I bought a house last year and for the first time I have a lawn. Now, I’ll be honest: I haven’t given much thought to the lawn at all….until this spring. It is overrun with weeds and there are entire sections where the grass has just refused to grow – it is so bad that professionals needed to be called in and the verdict was not good. The entire lawn needs to be re-seeded. I was left reeling.  This is going to be a major project and then I got on a call with a new client. And guess what?

Their website: It is like my lawn

They let it go. They didn’t pay much attention to it.  Someone was giving it the yearly once-over and they thought that’s all that they needed.  They had a blog -it got stale, it lost focus, it received flashes of brilliance but mostly it was ignored and walked over. There entire site needs to be re-seeded.

So there are two action items from today’s blog post.

ACTION #1 – Periodic Re-Seeding

In your calendar right now block off 40 minutes in the next week to read the content on your 4 most FREQUENTLY visited pages.  Make sure that it is:

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  1. Accurate and current.  You’re probably thinking this is just a crazy idea that it is NOT accurate and current.  Read it.  Gasp and then just look forward.
  2. Readable.  When you’re writing your content in your text editor of choice it can seem like a breeze to read. But when you get to your site you’ll notice things you missed like your paragraphs being so long that your eyes started to lose focus.
  3. Converting. These are your very best pages.  What are they doing for your business?  Do they link directly to your sale page?  Do they give an interested party ANY good next step?  Make sure it does.

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Depending on the amount of content, the number of visitors and what you need to accomplish from your website you’ll want to look at your best pages at least once a month and schedule in time to look at the other pages too.

Action #2 – What’s your Website for anyway?

I challenge you to look at what your website is for.  I know this might SEEM obvious – but it really isn’t – and yes, my lawn inspired this part too.  I have a lot of lawn options.  I could install turf, sod, I could do nothing, throw rocks down, did you know you can moss an entire lawn?  It’s true.  There are lots of ways to cover your acreage. Same thing goes for your site.  Perhaps you do not need 800 pages of research on your site – perhaps you need eight pages that actually say SOMETHING.  So think about what your website is for and really look at your top four pages and see how those most popular pages support your website’s purpose. If they don’t, take some time and really revamp them in such a way that they advance the ultimate purpose you’d like the site to serve.