Does your website need to be refreshed? And if it does, how often? Before answering these questions, take a look at the following questions first:

• Is your site mobile-friendly?
• Have you checked Google Analytics?
• On that note, do you have pages with high bounce rates and low time on your site?
• Have you read your content lately?
• Have you tried A/B testing?
  (A great tool after analyzing your poorly performing pages and tried tweaking your design and content. Send half of your users back to the original page and the other half to your new test page. The results will surprise you!)

If you answered no to any of the above questions, then YES you need to refresh your website content and maybe the design. Some experts say a website should be refreshed yearly, others say every two years, however, yearly would be a sound answer to the question. Julia McCoy’s article “5 Killer Content Creation Tactics to Never, Ever Forget” is the resource for this report. So, the following are the 5 areas your website needs yearly maintenance.

CONTENT PLANNING

From Google’s list of algorithm updates to the released Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, content is still king and requires careful planning. Basic fundamentals of content planning include:

Brand knowledge – you should know your brand intimately and what it’s trying to achieve

Target personals – knowing your audience is important so you’ll know who to target your content toward

Generate ideas – ideally, a large pool of ideas will help you manage your content plan. These include blog posts, infographics, or podcasts.

Planning – like anything done well, it takes planning and organization to put all the information you just collected into an easy to find the source. Try using excel broken down into months and weeks to organize and plan your ideas. This will help you save time, produce better content, and allow for more long-term goal setting.

Segmentation – your ideas need a delivery medium that works best for your audience – find and experiment with several.

CONTENT AUDITING

Look at this task as freshening your website, much like you would do of your home in the spring. Review your content for irrelevant, unread, or stale and replace with fresh content that is sure to bring traffic to your site. Here are the steps to performing an audit:

Step #1: Create a spreadsheet with the following categories for each column:

1. URL
2. date audited
3. page title
4. page description
5. page content
6. keyword(s)
7. alt tags
8. last date updated
9. internal link(s)

Step #2: Organize the pages you audit by heading toward Google Analytics. Maneuver to the “All pages” section from the “Behavior” tab. A list of pages will appear and you’ll pull the URLs from the most popular pages first to ensure an audit of content on your most visited pages first.

Your spreadsheet goes to work now. Find the “page” column and maneuver to the button next to the page title. You’ll find the page URL which you’ll copy to your spreadsheet. Repeat this process for each page on your site.

Step #3: The Reviewing Process. Review the following sections of each page and note the findings of each assessment on your spreadsheet:

• Page URL and title: Ask yourself if your title page is exclusive and definitive; are your target keywords included in the content; is your page URL text instead of a string of numbers? Go back and fix the problems for any questions you answered “no” to. Fixing these problems will make your site appear stronger.
• Page description: Is your page description concise, easy to read, and informative? Does it read well for prospects? Does it use relevant keywords?
• Page Content: The content should be valuable, relevant, current, and helpful on every page of your site. Make sure it is free of typos, grammar mistakes and should contain at least 300 words of content.
• Keyword use: Use enough target keywords without overdoing it.
• Alt tags: Images on your pages should have a title and alt tag – which is a relevant keyword.
• Last update: Pages updated every 24 months and a page updated less frequently will help your site’s SEO when it’s been revised.
• Internal links: Pages on your site should highlight 2-3 internal links that point to content pages within your site.

SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGEMENT

The giants in advertising include social media programs Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Close to 2.1 billion people maintain social media accounts and an estimated $8.3 billion earned in advertising in 2015 lets you know that 2016 will be a big year for social media. Marketers expand their content’s reach, earn new leads, create new connections, and execute improved industry research by building and maintaining social media accounts.

Predictions are that social media will be a large priority in 2016 which means maintaining an active presence on social media. Posting and enticing users by replying to comments, presenting polls, soliciting user-generated content, and sharing content through multiple channels will increase your brand’s exposure. Create a social media account you can maintain on a regular basis (at least twice a week) because a stagnant account is worse than no content at all.

CREATING INTERACTIVE CONTENT

Interactive content enriches your relationship with your users, who want to feel involved in your content. If you are unfamiliar with interactive content, here are several types:

Assessments: Quizzes or calculators, made popular by Facebook and BuzzFeed, are used for everything from entertaining to thoughtful, marketing-focused self-evaluation. Quizzes like “What character, color, job, etc.” and assessments help your poll users gain information and ideas from your site and its content as a whole.

Infographics: These offers concentrate value to your readers by distributing a hefty amount of information in a small parcel. Infographics earn more views and more shares than any other type of content. This makes them an imaginable choice for the marketer who wants to get their feet wet with interactive content.

Idea generators: Idea generators designed with convenience and functionality in mind are perfect for readers who need a little help with generating an idea. Go to HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator where you input a bit of information and the give-and-take generator serves you with a unique, interesting idea that is yours. How’s that for interactive and invaluable?

CUSTOM LANDING PAGES

Customer landing pages, rescued by smart marketers who know that used correctly, these pages have the potential to provide a huge SEO and traffic boost for a website.

Their essential function leads users to an assigned spot outside of your website to gain information and complete the desired action. They’re essential to effective content marketing. To ensure your landing pages work to push your reader to action, remember:

Shorter is better: In the world of landing pages, the less flowery the language the higher your conversions will be. An uncluttered design with nothing but the needed information will outperform a bulky page with so many extras your reader doesn’t know where to read next.

Call To Action content rules: Wishy-washy content does not have a home on a landing page. Ensure your landing page offers high-quality text and a strong CTA. Although this step seems simple, it can increase your conversions and help readers take desired actions.

Coordinate your hyperlinks: A landing page is a one-stop-shop. If you have hyperlinks leading away from your page, offer links that lead readers into a separate and equally valuable funnel.

Make conversion obvious: Simpler is better. Within a few seconds, your readers should know what you want them to do from your landing page content. Be direct about your conversion goals:

• Want their emails? Mark the subscription box so it’s easy to use and find.
• Want them to click? Show them where to click!
• Want them to share content? Give limited options and strong reasons for doing so.

Being direct about your conversion goals helps them come true.

Make it appealing: Your landing page should look great! It’s easy to navigate, free of broken features, cohesive with our larger site design, and well-functioning and attractive. Keep it elegant and you’ll receive more conversions.

In conclusion, by using these five content tactics, you ensure receiving the most results possible from the strategy your content takes your readers. Providing useful and relevant material for your readers will increase your traffic, who will spread the word. These tips give long-lasting value for your content strategy for 2016.