Auditing and Updating Key Pages on Your Blog

Welcome to the ProBlogger Podcast episode 14 and day 14 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. Today, we’re talking about updating some key pages on your blog. It’s so easy for pages to get out of date that can have some real costs to you and your blog. That’s what today’s challenge is. You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/14. Also, don’t forget you can get the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Workbook at a 50% discount. Details of that are also at problogger.com/podcast/workbook. Let’s get into today’s episode.

Hi, this is Darren from ProBlogger and welcome to day 14 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. Today, we have a challenge for you to update a key page or post on your blog. This is an activity that many bloggers who have been blogging even for just a little while could benefit from. Over time, it’s really easy for key pages and posts on our blogs to become dated or even obsolete. I’ve done this exercise many times before. I don’t think there’s been a time I’ve done it where I haven’t discovered something that was either broken, factually incorrect, potentially embarrassing, or simply holding my blog back in some way. You could do it on any number of pages on your blog.

Let me just quickly run through a few suggested ones. Just choose one for today but add any of these that you think you might need to update to a list and then you can work through them over the coming weeks. The first one is probably your homepage. It’s the most important page on your blog in many regards because it’s usually the most visited page that you have. I think last time I looked around 20% of ProBlogger readers hit the homepage on their first visit. It’s an important page to look at. We could do a whole heap of things on the homepage and you could spend a lot of time tweaking and overhauling it. But today, at least just do an audit.

What first impressions does a moderator have on your blog? Do they know what your blog is about when they first land on it? That’s a really important question. Is it easy to navigate? What are their eyes drawn to on that front page? What do people naturally want to do first when they’re there? Look at the sidebar on your page if you’ve got one on your homepage. Is it cluttered? Is there anything there that could be distracting, dated, or broken? Could it do with a bit of a spring clean? What about the navigation? Is it easy to understand? Is it clear? Is it easy to use? Are there any elements that are hidden, broken, or not quite fitting into the page? Lastly, do you have any calls to action on your homepage? What do you want people to do when they’re on your homepage? Is it obvious that you’re calling them to do that?

That’s one page that you could do. There’s probably a whole heap of others. The next one and probably the most important is your About page. Most blogs have an About page or at least most blog themes come with one, whether you set it up or not, is another question. Often, people set up their About page and then it becomes a bit dated containing information that’s not relevant anymore.

On the ProBlogger About page, I tell my story. Periodically, I have to go into it and update it because my story evolves. There are parts of the story that perhaps aren’t as important to emphasize anymore and other parts that have happened since I updated. So, I need to keep updating that page. It’s a really key page on most blogs because it’s one of the first places that a new one really goes to learn more about you and to make a decision about whether they’ll subscribe, follow, or keep coming back. It’s a place where you can build credibility or destroy it. It’s also a place where advertisers, PRs, other bloggers, potential collaborators might go as well. You really want to keep it up to date.

There are a few mistakes that bloggers make on their About page. (1) Not having one at all. I think it’s probably a good thing to have one. (2) Not updating it at all and just letting it be the default About page that comes with your blog’s template. I’ve seen many of those. They’re empty pages and say something like this needs to be updated or has some Latin text in it. (3) Letting it date. Give it a proofread. Is there any information that needs to be added?

Another page you might want to update is your sales pages. If you have an ebook or a course that you’re selling, are they still up to date? Are the shopping carts working? It’s amazing how many are broken and that could be weeks or months before you realize. Are there any things that you can do to tweak it? Could you add a testimonial? Could you update the design? Could you give some extra screenshots? Could you answer some frequently asked questions that you get from potential customers onto that page? Is anything broken? A good spell-check helps as well.

Your contact page might be another page that you want to give a once over. It’s amazing how many blogs don’t have one. If you don’t, maybe it’s time to add one. Is it working if you have a contact form on there? Sometimes those forms break. Are the emails getting through? We’re testing that one. Are your contact details on that page up to date?

The last type of page that you should build into your monthly workflow is what high-traffic post do you have that you could update? Most older blogs have at least one or two, if not more, posts in their archives that get significantly more traffic than others. Even my wife’s blog which is relatively new has three or four posts that do really well in comparison to other archive posts. These are really important posts to go back to from time to time because they’re important gateway points into your blog.

The problem is that most people hit these posts, hit the back button, and never come back again. This is a wasted opportunity. What you might want to do today is identify the top posts in your archives. Often they’re getting search engine traffic as their main source of traffic. Do a search and find them and then think about how I could update them to make those posts a little bit stickier to get people viewing a few extra pages or maybe to subscribe or follow me in social media.

Firstly, I’d be asking are their posts up-to-date? Do they have the best quality content that they could? The better you can make those posts, the bigger impression you’re making upon those first-time readers. Then, how can I get people to view other pages from those posts? Could I add some links to further reading at the end of the post, perhaps add a section for the reading, or even better, perhaps is to link throughout the posts to further reading? As you mentioned, certain words that you’ve written about elsewhere. Link them. Get people onto a second page. And then think about what calls to action could I add to this page? It might be, “Subscribe to my newsletter, follow me on Facebook, share this post,” or it could even be, “Buy this product,” if you have a product that’s highly relevant to the content on that page.

The last thing that probably worth doing if you’re getting some search traffic to that page already is to think about how you could get some more, how could you optimize that page so that you rank even higher in Google. It might be worth doing a little bit of search engine optimization on that page. You might want to think about the keywords that you use and increase the frequency of use of those keywords a little bit. It might be worth linking to that page from other pages on your blog. Do a bit of research on SEO and you’ll come up with a few things that you might be able to tweak that raise you from third or fourth to first in search engine results.

There’s a whole heap of other pages that you could update. I would suggest you go through your navigation bar and just see any key page that you link. You might have an advertiser page, an archives page, a subscribe page, or any number of others. Gradually move through them one by one and update them as you can. It’s probably worth scheduling in your diary once a month to look at those pages just to give them a once over and see how they’re going.

Check out the show notes on problogger.com/podcast/14. Today, I have summarized what we’ve gone through but I also included some further reading, particularly relevant for those of you wanting to update your About page today. I’ve given you some tips on doing that. Also for those of you who are going to spend some time today looking at hot posts on your blog. I’ve got a link there that tells you how to find those posts, but also, some things that you might want to do there to increase reader engagement, get people reading more pages, and just updating them in different ways.

You can get those show notes at problogger.com/podcast/14. Again, please subscribe to our newsletter at problogger.com/podcast/subscribe and you’ll get an update every time we update this podcast. Hope you found today’s challenge useful. I’d love to hear what you thought on the show notes and I will see you tomorrow on day 15. We’re almost halfway of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog.