The sun is shining, the flowers are blooming, and the weather is warming! You know what that means – it’s time for some spring cleaning!
No, this isn’t a reference to that dreaded weekend of the year where everyone plans to set aside time for dusting, vacuuming, and even selling old personal items. Instead, this is notice that now is as good an opportunity as ever to rid your web presence of all the worthless clutter floating about the cloud.
If it’s been awhile since you updated your website or social platforms, start there. That means adding new certifications, services, employees and more. Once you’ve done that, it’s time to clean it up. How exactly do you do that? In short: cut the clutter.
- Haven’t used or referenced it in the last six months? GET RID OF IT. Your website and presence need to be jam-packed with relevant information. There’s no need to still have that image promoting the 2017 Black Friday sale still waving around your site, nor is it a good idea to still have references to your old partner’s business that went under in 2016 scattered throughout your “about us” page. Take an afternoon to go through your online presence and keep things current. Doing this every six months or so will ensure that potential clients are as up-to-date as they can be.
- Try to keep the same handle on social media. Multiple accounts often lead to confusion. Unless you have subdivisions of your company that require their own social presence, there is no good reason for you to use multiple social accounts. If you have an old Facebook page that you don’t use anymore, delete it. If you’re tweeting from two different accounts in an attempt to target different demographics, consolidate. Having one social presence is less confusing for customers, makes your business easier to find, and helps to let your followers know that you’re legitimate.
- Limit your social presence. Tweeting or posting on Instagram too often can be a huge turnoff, especially just for the sake of posting. Yes, there are exceptions to the rule, like sales and special events, but, at least on average, you should not be posting on LinkedIn or Instagram multiple times per day. Updating your social accounts three and four times every day might be better than not posting at all, but finding a healthy number of posts per week (preferably anywhere between three and seven) generally yields the best results.
- Don’t overload those eblasts. Again – cut the clutter. Keep those eblasts short and sweet rather than packed with fluff and prose-like text. Doing the latter can overwhelm people; some might not even finish reading what you’ve sent, and therefore they might miss the point of your message altogether. However, keeping your daily and weekly eblasts shorter (i.e., under 150 total words) can sometimes intrigue your readers and even prompt them to visit your site.
- How full are those product and service pages? Most companies in the business of selling things tend to have pages on their website detailing the ins and outs of each product and service. This is good – and even vital if you want to win specific SEO categories, but be careful not to give too much away. You want to sell your reader enough so that they are highly interested in your product, not so much that they know all they need to before running off to your competitors with details on what you can offer without ever giving you the chance to explain. Finding a good middle-ground for these pages can be tricky, but that is precisely what the most successful businesses in the industry are able to do.
This spring, do yourself a favor and see if there are any areas in which you can cut back web-wise. It isn’t always easy, nor is it fun, but finding those perfect rations can be the difference between a prosperous and unsatisfying web presence.