Spring Cleaning Your Online Presence

When you first design your website or set up social media accounts, you put a lot of effort into making sure they are accurate, effective and provide both value for your potential customers as well as being optimized for search engine ranking. It doesn’t take long though for the site and your accounts to get clogged up with old material, redundant links and content that is past its sell-by date. It’s good practice to schedule a check and clear-out on a regular basis to make sure there’s nothing online that could be damaging the effectiveness of your website, so plan a quarterly program of systematic checks to keep everything looking fresh, current and unclogged.

Website basics

Have a look at all the time-sensitive material such as ads for forthcoming events or calls to buy a new product. You don’t want ads for events that have passed, or have headlines that say your book is out next month when it was in fact published two months ago. Check all your contact details and company information is up to date, and that your “about us” is an accurate reflection of where you are now. It’s not very impressive for customers if your phone number was changed and not updated on every page of the website, or your company information features staff who have now left the business. If you have enabled comments on your site, have you been checking and responding to them? Visitors will be impressed if you have replied to comments, but if they have been ignored you won’t win any fans.

Website next stages

It’s a good idea to routinely check that links and online forms are all working correctly. If they aren’t, you may not realise unless someone tells you, and most people simply won’t bother to pursue a dead link or form that won’t accept their details. You could be losing business and affecting your reputation if these elements aren’t fixed, so it’s important to make sure they are functioning correctly. You can also perform a backlink cleanup, where you remove backlinks that are of poor quality or that have been posted on your site without your permission. This can be quite a complicated process, so bring in some expert help if you can’t manage it on your own.

Social media

Are you making use of all the social media accounts you’ve got? If you tend to use one or two and the others are being neglected, then either look at ways you can start getting value from the underused accounts or delete them. It’s better to have fewer accounts than some that aren’t being used, as anyone clicking through will not be impressed if there’s nothing of value at the other end. Make sure you’ve responded to posts and messages, and check any linking buttons from your website to make sure they are current and performing correctly.

These are some basic checks you need to undertake regularly, that will ensure your website is up to date, functioning properly, and presents itself as well-maintained. These are all critical factors in attracting visitors and converting them to customers, so don’t get left behind; get checking instead.