Should You Rewrite Your Web Copy? Or Hit Delete?
Do you look at photos of yourself from high school and think, “My hair! What was I thinking?”
Yup. Me too. In fact, a photo of 1980’s Heather — complete with BIG perm and beret — was on the screen during my AWAI Bootcamp presentation.
(The conference organizers asked for old photos, and that’s the best one I had. Here it is, for reference. Feel free to laugh.):
I bring this up because, sometimes, we look at old blog pages and think, “Man, that’s not a good post, at all. What was I thinking?”
For instance…
— You may not have realized that keyphrase stuffing is bad, so you excessively repeated the same keyphrases.
— Some pages may be super-short and read less like an authoritative article and more like, “I wrote this in five minutes.”
— Or, you may have accepted a guest post that wasn’t so great.
Maybe these pages are lurking on your site, and you’ve forgotten all about them. Or, maybe you land on them from time to time and think, “I should do something about this post.”
But you don’t, because you don’t know what “do something” means.
Heck, even Google disagrees on what you should do. Here’s a great post from Search Engine Roundtable outlining Google’s mixed messages.
(Mixed messages from Google? Never! HAHAHAHAHA!)
Like your high-school hair, you’ve got to do something about those posts.
Here’s what to do:
Get in the habit of keeping a list of “bad” pages so you can deal with them later.
I don’t know about you, but I’ll look at a not-so-great post, cringe, think, “I should fix this,” and immediately forget about it. Maintaining a living document will help you build fixing (or deleting) pages into your editorial calendar.
Does the page have good information that wouldn’t take long to update/fix? Fix it.
You can strip out the keyphrase stuffing, update your data, and turn the so-so paragraphs into copywriting gold. You can freshen up the header image, too. (I’m doing this with my old blog posts now.) Easy.
Is it a super-short page that’s poorly written? Trash it.
Let’s face it: writing a new article would probably take less time. As my father used to say, “You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”
Is it a poorly-written guest post? Let it go.
Sure, you can ask the original author to revise it for you. But will they say yes — or even respond to your email? Doubtful. Feel free to send this content to the great beyond.
Does the article have some bright spots, but you don’t have time to revise it right now?
Keep it — unless those bright spots are few and far between. Sometimes, a few minor fixes (for instance, a new opening paragraph or new subheadlines) can help. You can always revisit the post when you have more time.
And yes, my freelancing friends. Helping clients evaluate and fix content is a possible new profit center! Go for it!
What do you do when you see bad content on your site?
Cover your eyes and scream, “I can’t see you!”? Immediately click away? Wonder what you were thinking back then? Leave a comment and let me know!
