Here’s the thing: Even the greatest of content will eventually stop getting visitors and slowly be forgotten. Unless you adapt your website content and keep it relevant to your audience.
There are no ‘but’, ‘wrong’, or ‘won’t happen’, because let’s face it, even if you hold the first position in SERPs (search engine result pages), it is only until someone else writes a more relevant, better, and in-depth content. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, here’s how to keep your website content relevant.
Create Evergreen Content
Creating an evergreen content should be a number one priority in your blog strategy. This type of content does not follow trends, and therefore doesn’t have a short life span, and is easy to update. Evergreen content should be able to retain its value for years before requiring an update. As its relevance remains long after its publication date, it is wise to create as much evergreen content as possible. Granted creating evergreen content might be easier for some industries than others, but try to go back to basics, and think what are the building blocks that rarely change.
How to create evergreen content?
Start with the analysis of the field you are writing about. Then ask yourself the following:
What are the core topics that relate to your industry field?
Upon answering the question, write down possible topics you can write about and evaluate them. Are they adhering to the current trends or they are some of the ‘classics’ you can get back to five years from now and still learn something new? If so, keep them. If not, then consider them as topics with a shorter shelf life.
The second question you should ask yourself is: What are the adjacent topics to my core ones?
Here, try to expand your horizons by including topics that indirectly relate to the core of your business. Think in terms of ‘if a person googles about building websites, then they’ll surely wonder about branding and vice versa.’ The objective is to think of all the topics that your customer/visitor might be interested in and lead them to the core of your business – service or product(s). Keep in mind that although these topics could follow some trends, they should be classified as material that has a long shelf life.
Before you go to the next step. You should check to see if the topics you’ve selected hold any interest to your audience. How do you check if your audience is interested in the topics related to your business?
Turn to Google, Reddit, Quora, Alexa ask and alike and search your topics. Do people write/ask about them? How interested are they in the selected topics?
Once you’ve put down all the relevant topics you should write about, and categorised them in two groups – core and relevant, it is time to optimise your content!
Optimise Your Website Content
An important step in prolonging the longevity of your content is to optimise it. Content that is optimised for relevant keywords has a higher chance of showing up on search engine page results (SERPs). That much is clear. But how do you optimise your content?
You can optimise your content by following these steps:
- Do keyword research. Opt for long-tail keywords.
- Write an excellent piece. You’ll get nowhere unless your content answers the questions people have. Write with authority and in a tone that your audience expects and likes.
- Your introduction should prompt readers to continue reading. In other words, no notification can distract them from reading. Also, you have included a key phrase in the introduction.
- Write an intriguing headline. Include the chosen keyword.
- Repeat your keyword in subheadlines and throughout the text, but only where relevant.
- Do not overstuff your text with keywords.
- Your content has actionable steps and provides in-depth information.
- You have included images and engaging videos. With alt tags and image/video file name containing a selected keyword.
- Your meta description is helpful and makes a person click on your title when scrolling through SERPs.
- End with a compellable call to action.
At last: Make sure your content is of value to your target audience. This means that after reading your article, not only does the reader feel as if all the questions have been answered, and they have all the information necessary. But they are willing to share the information with others. And don’t forget to let your authentic personal brand voice seep through your text.
Interlinking Your Website Content is Important
We are all aware that content, especially the one published in your blog section, gets quickly buried underneath new content. One way of keeping the old your articles on your readers’ radars is to interlink it. Why you should do this?
Interlinking your content is a strategy whereby you subtly steer the readers/visitors toward additional content you’ve created. You can do this by hyperlinking relevant words that relate to a piece you’ve already written. In this way, you are encouraging visitors to keep reading through your website.
A word of caution: make sure you are not interlinking one too many articles, as this might prove to be counterproductive. If there are too many hyperlinks throughout the text, readers might be put off, or find it hard to keep the focus on the text, as there are too many information you are turning them to.
Update or Replace Your Website Content
This one should be a no brainer. When interlinking your content, you need to make sure that the content you are referring your readers to is relevant. Otherwise, your readers will get a wrong impression of your expertise and authority in the field. With old content, you really have two options. The first one is to update the content until it becomes obsolete. The second approach is to replace the old content that has become outdated or obsolete.
A word of advice is to keep a list of the content you have on your website and update it gradually. We know this is a lot of strenuous work ad might clash with your publishing efforts. So at least make sure you update the content that receives the most attention and those that you interlink in your new articles.
Repurpose Your Website Content
You’ve noticed that certain content performs really well and generates a lot of visits on your website. First of all – congratulations! Second of all, it’s time to repurpose it!
Repurposing your website content really means using the content that performs well for other platforms on which you are present. Let’s say you are present on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and you have a newsletter. On LinkedIn, you might post the link to the article. While for Instagram you’ll create knowledge cards and feature them as a carousel. For newsletter, you’ll do a quick summary of the main points and link your article for those who want more in-depth information. When it comes to YouTube, you’ll perhaps create a short script and create an awesome informative video. In either case, you’ll adjust your content to the manner in which the information is presented on each selected platform.
How do you know which piece of content is performing well?
There are a few things to look into in order to determine if your content is performing well. Most of these things you’ll get from Google Analytics. However, for those who want more information on where their visitors click and exactly how far they read, heat map software will help them figure that out. Here are some things to consider in order to see if your content is performing well:
- Average reading time. The higher, the better. For those who opt-out of heat map software solutions, average reading time can approximately point out how far your readers have read your article.
- A number of unique visits. This tells you how many people have clicked on the link and began reading the article.
- A number of visits. Counts people who have visited the same page more than once.
- Bounce rate. The lower the percentage, the better.
- Page depth or pages per session indicates the average number of pages visited by a user within a session. Of course, the higher the better.
A final piece of advice: no matter your tactic in keeping your website content relevant, one of the most important takeaways is to be vigilant about the type of content you publish. Internet is a vast field of resources and you don’t want to be a jack of all trades, master of none. Choose a topic and stick with it.
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