Content Maintenance
Photo by Andrew Neel
Why Content Maintenance Matters
By Robin Anderson
The work you put into planning, creating, editing, and promoting new content is time consuming. Thoughtful planning helps to increase the likelihood of your content being viewed and visitor engagement. Oftentimes, once a new blog or indepth content piece is posted, the social media to promote it is short-term, then the content is designated as a ‘resource’ on your website.
In the meantime, your business evolves. New products, new competition, new insights from your customers can easily take a blog post and date it rather quickly. Maintenance is simply one of the areas that oftentimes is completely unaccounted for in planning, and budgeting. Don’t let that content creation energy go to waste. Regularly review or audit your content, to ensure it stays up to date.
“The ultimate purpose of content maintenance is to help organizations use content to grow their engagement with audiences in a sustainable way.”
While evergreening your content can take some of the pressure off of constant new content creation, sometimes it is necessary to revise and update messaging on your website, and content within your blogs due to new business conditions.
Content Maintenance Considerations
Messaging
Based on how your business is doing, from time-to-time, you may have to update your core messaging, much of which resides on your website. Take into account new feedback from your customers - the insights into their pain, the key words that they use to talk about this problem - and how successful you are at solving that very problem. Doing so will help you increase the chances of connecting with them. Your customer insights may also include bonus solutions your product provides solving additional problems you hadn’t even considered. Take a look at the questions your customers ask combined with your answers to incorporate that into your messaging and to create additional informative content such as a blog.
Product Content
As your business grows, your business environment changes. Your product gets updated with new capabilities. Don’t let your past business conditions misrepresent your product or business as it stands today. When you update your product, make sure the descriptions provided on your website evolves as the updates happen. Remove all old, not relevant, outdated content. This is more than an opportunity to highlight your new product. Update this information and associated keywords will help to continue to increase your SEO for search.
Blogs
Your blogs may explain in detail how to do more with your product - they may include a Thought Leadership piece that positions you as a leader in the industry, or Best Practices with how to strategically plan for events that may occur requiring use of your product. All of which are helpful to your customers. But only so much. If your positioning, your competition, or the industry evolves, you will need to update the content so that it reflects that.
Competition
If your product truly solves the pain of a customer, even if you are the first to the finish line, you will eventually attract competition. Everyone will try to build a better mousetrap. For you, that means monitoring and updating your content to continually communicate the advantages your product provides in solving the problem over your competition. For example, many Enterprise Companies write White Papers for complex solutions for companies. These can be very beneficial in understanding how the product is integrated into their system or works with their systems. As your product evolves, and as the competition landscape changes, it will be imperative that you continually differentiate your company from the rest of competition through content.
Imagery/Graphics
Sometimes you need a refresh. Just as design for the very clothes you wear changes, so does the style of company communications. This may require a complete overhaul with new branding. Othertimes, it simply means updating graphics - such as comparison charts and videos. Visitors are very visual. Keep your imagery up-to-date.
Internal links
When creating content oftentimes you may reference a topic that is informative and resides elsewhere in your site - include a link to that topic. This enables a visitor who has a deep interest to get the extensive information on your website, increasing their exposure and engagement.
Search
Google always wants fresh content. Old content not only pushes you further down in search rankings, you may even end up on page 2 of their search results. How often do you look to see what is on the next search page? While it may be easy to ignore your SEO, continually maintaining your content through updates, adding new keywords to your SEO, helps to improve your rank in search which in itself, can be a competitive advantage.
ChatGPT
If you find your content style is ‘flat’, consider using ChatGPT to liven up what you already have. I don’t recommend using ChatGPT to create your content, use it to boost the style and tone of your content to better fit your target audience.
A Few Benefits of Refreshing Your Content
Evergreen effect
No one has endless time on their hands to continually create content. While there are justified reasons for new content, sometimes simply updating what you have is enough. That refresh doesn’t require the effort of creating new content, yet it provides you with a fresh way to repurpose and promote through social media.
Reach and engage with new customers
Updating your content gives you the opportunity to grab attention of a segment of customers that you weren’t abel to reach the first time. For some, they may have been in the very early stages of the customer’s journey, and for others, your refreshed content may use words that resonate more with them now than earlier.
Improve your SEO
Use updated keywords in new content to improve your SEO. As mentioned earlier, improving your search rankings can be a competitive advantage with a listing before your main competitors.
Make a Positive Impression for those in the Consideration Stage
Maintaining your content - retiring and removing old content, revising useful existing content will reflect positively on your business. For anyone that is doing research on products or is on the fence to buy, the accuracy and relevance of content can easily be the factor that makes them choose to buy from you.
Along with planning for new content, consider adding a section that includes how often existing content will be reviewed or audited. Create a checklist that will provide criteria to determine if it is ok as is, needs updating or should be unpublished. Set priorities for content updates. Look at your analytics as they will tell you the content that your visitors view (or care about) and what they don’t. This is considered a traffic-based approach to evaluating existing content. Popular content may generate a significant amount of demand and therefore gets prioritized over older/less often viewed pieces.
Many believe that once you create and post content you are done. Taking the time to maintain what you have, that it continues to reflect who you are, what you are doing, and how you are helping, will always have an advantage over those who are one and done. Regularly monitor and maintain your content. It is your #1 selling tool.
Need help with a content audit? Contact Us for a free 30-minute consultation.
FunFact Friday
Once upon a time there was a content platform called MySpace - one of the very first social media platforms built. Due to popularity, competition arose, primarily FaceBook. FaceBook provided a cleaner platform to share and view content. Usability was easier. And their security was superior. Due to MySpace failing to maintain their website, updating with new and improved features, users flocked to FaceBook, eventually leading to its demise.