10 annual verifications for web and digital tools

Hello Marketers,

Once a year, I schedule a general audit of all the digital tools I manage, in addition to updating and releasing annual statistics.

While it's important to keep an eye on a website's stats daily when your job involves being in web platforms all day long, this is not the case for all marketing workers, freelancers or SMEs who need to focus on their customers' demands.

Of course, like a car requiring maintenance, a website and the digital tools that support it, such as apps, social media, and administrative documents, must go through annual maintenance.

I suggest planning annual audits according to your request peaks, like before your busiest sales. This article will help you by giving you tips, my 10 web audit tips to optimize your site.

Note: As a result of significant updates to Google's search tool, affecting website SEO, this article was updated on April 16, 2024.

MusicScore: I wrote this paper while listening to the Best of from the Pet Shop Boys. I suggest listening to their hit Opportunities while reading! A little time back to the 1980s.

Listen to the MusicScores complete list on YouTube! Enjoy the Music At Work!

Like a game of hopscotch, website checks and audits are easy to do; child's play! I couldn't help but take this image of the game painted in the alley of my old neighborhood in Notre-Dane-de-Grâce, Montreal. Maybe you recognize it? #Oxford Les Ruelles Vertes.

Easy-to-perform checks

I will provide you a summary of the annual audits I conduct in the form of a Top 10.

I classified everything according to the importance algorithms of the search tools give to their reading of website.

For the most part, I use the apps from the CMS, and I do it all with my phone in my spare time, no matter where I am.

The TOP 10 Web Checks

This summary will help most companies and communications teams with their digital tools and SEO. These actions help your virtual presence and reduce your investments in promotions and advertising in the medium and long term.

Reviewing the popular annual content

We're talking about checking the most popular web pages on your website, the veracity of your information pages, the description texts of your social media and apps.

Take advantage of this reading tour to standardize your content, update the vocabulary with new technical terms in your profession and new popular expressions and word clicks.

About, history, team presentation, and contact pages are very important incentives on a website, for visitors, and for search tools. Make sure updating them regularly (once or twice a year). The update can only be a change of image with a new description, the adjustment of the opening time, or other. The important thing is to show the search tools that these pages are alive, and not forgotten and untouched for 2 years.

Click and correct all internal and external links

Checking and correcting internal and external links

Are all the links in your main pages and most popular articles still functional? Are your email headers and signatures, subscription banners, and partner ads leading to an active page?

On the editors' side, for your source links, it often happens that the displayed third-party sites we promote in articles and web pages change their links without warning us and our sources, now with a faulty link, affect negatively the SEO of our site. Also, make sure to transfer your readers and visitors to sites that are reliable as sources. Ex, is the site secured with an https at the beginning of their address?

The Web page & Paragraphs Titles

We are talking here about the editorial content of your web pages that are highlighted by Headers (h1, h2 and h3). SEO suggests using a single H1 tag title per page, such as a newspaper article; the H2 headings introducing each section of the article and the H3 headings are extra, announcing a paragraph.

I suggest reading back these titles and introduce your main keywords, because vocabulary, especially in areas that use new technology, is changing quickly.

Tip: I suggest you subscribe to the Office québécois de la langue française newsletter. In addition to updating the vocabulary of your tools, often a social post of the new terms of the year in your field will be popular and shared.

However, while the emphasis on headings is very important now, Google's recent report of April 24 suggests search tools will study the overall content of a page in the near future, and move away from the importance of headings, allowing for the return of personalized and slightly funkier headlines, as before.

Alt texts from your popular images

Often the texts that accompany our images are used in many more places than we thought.

I once had a fictitious image of an invoice as an example in an article that came up in Google search results my mistake. It's quite annoying, especially when you see the whole thing in the company of a client, and he sees your fictious price!

Take the opportunity to read the alternative and accompanying texts to the images and adjust everything quickly by unchecking the images in the settings that should not appear in the search results.

Also, I always pay attention to the name and professional title of the people mentioned and correct the text or position.

The web page parameters

The administrative management side of your pages is just as important as the display for the visitor. Often, new sections appear in CMS settings, and they remain unused.

There are reasons why these parameters exist and have been programmed, it is better to fill them in correctly for maximum use of our digital tools.

Tips: If you don't have access to the settings of your web pages, ask your webmaster to take screenshots of the descriptions so you can review the texts. You return the corrected texts in an email and a small copy/paste from your editor will correct everything in a few minutes. That is the simplest way I do it since a long time ago, 1 hour max per year. Other companies have an excel with all the links from their site and review description annually. You attached the file in a rendezvous and reschedule for the following year. Don’t forget to stat alive in between, or put someone else in cc ;) (…a Marketer’s joke).

Advertising

Rebranding?

In the virtual edition, where images are standards in publishing, it is often seen to rebrand and promote again. While you're in the settings of your popular web pages, take the opportunity to visit the visuals section for social media sharing and assess if an update is necessary.

Maybe a rebranding of the original visuals can allow for a new campaign of your product? At the bottom of this paper, before the conclusion, a Rebranding Section explains and shows social promotions examples for a year 'long campaign.

Image size: This is also the perfect time to evaluate the greatness of your visuals and prepare new image dimensions to adapt to the new social media of the day. Google now requires a transfer image that is at least 1200 pixels wide, did you know?

Another tip? Share your articles privately to your own email to test your sharing images and thus easily have your publication to share in networking in your mobile at any time. It's better than a business card, I promise!

Update publishing schedule

Finally, if you decide to go on a new tour to promote your popular pages, prepare your publishing times well and space out your renewed campaigns between your news content campaigns.

There are all kinds of reasons to republish your best posts, such as weekly #TBT souvenir posts, or a reminder to complement current events, or follow-up articles for product or service launches as a first anniversary.

If you are not sure how to publish your content, I invite you to follow the accounts of your favorite journalists on social media and study their way of doing things, you will learn a lot this way. Personally, I prefer X, which reminds me of old Newswires.

Double-check sources

For content writers and producers, members of the media, and journalists, consider double-checking your popular article sources, their links, and whether veracity is still in place or needs adjustment. Maybe a new source, with current content, would be in order?

Updating tags and labels for items or products and services

For web publishers who use ranking categories and tags for their articles, consider updating the vocabulary of your tags and perhaps grouping categories that haven't been used for a long time, resulting in search results that are not interesting to the visitor.

Page Link Verification & Social Link Customization

Links to web pages, blog or magazine articles, or social media pages can be customized as needed. However, when customizing a link, you must be vigilant and think about where a visitor will land who clicks on the initial link from an old share, perhaps a redirect link from the original link will be necessary.

Also, if you're customizing the link of your company page on LinkedIn, for example, go and indicate the new link of your LinkedIn page on all your digital tools, which will still have the old link scheduled. Not everything is programmed by magic yet.

The rebranding

I'll end this article by talking about the year-round content rotation with the use of this article as an example.

The article Top 10 Audits was written in November 2023 to highlight the annual audits on the W+M website and to encourage the W+M webmaster service. During the month of November and December 2023, the promotion of the article was carried out with the main visual of the hopscotch game image through an announcement post on social media, which became a Meta targeted advertisement until the end of December 2023.

In January 2024, a change to the introductory text was made, changing the content from year-end audits to New Year audits to start 2024. This change has been notified by search tools who now see this content as new. To promote this, a second promotional campaign of 10 square images, which can be used on all social media, was launched for the next 10 weeks, unveiling one of the top 10 position weekly and ensuring a promotion for spring 2024. A META promotion campaign has also been launched with the gallery of the 10 images in paid publication using the same META audience as the December 2023 ad, with performance-enhancing adjustments.

At the end of March 2024, when the 10 individual campaigns were published on social media and the META ad was completed, the 10 images were added to the article and a readjustment of the introductory text was made in order to remove all notions of time in the text, so that the reader can read the article no matter at the beginning of the year or at the end of the year. A new general promotion becomes possible year-round. This readjustment of the webpage once again reactivates the novelty for the search tools. Note that each week, the image of each position could have been published during the spring in the article.

On April 16 2024, following a Google update that affects website SEO, the entire content of the article was adjusted. A new promotion of the article announcing the update is possible. A video was created using the 10 images from the individual ads to announce the whole thing for the rest of the year with updated content from the Google release.

Note, since 30-second to one-minute videos tend to be introduced to new listeners on social media, and this article has been seen by subscribers since last winter, a one-minute clip version is now online that will promote the article for the rest of the year to new readers. If a META promotion is used, it will take the same audience as the previous two campaigns, with adjustments.

This is how I give a long life to the most read articles of the W+M Services; since October 2018 for some articles that have been updated yearly since, giving the article 1000’s views now and a perfect reputation. Note that I index in search tools the link of the article for every new release, just to make sure.

Conclusion

Thank you for your time and I invite you to share this article with your marketing and communications teams. That's why I'm writing this marketing blog, to help businesses, SMEs, startups, and self-employed workers with their digital tools and websites.

To receive W+M articles by email, subscribe in the footer link.

Best,

Jeff

What is a Webmaster?

Webmaster or Web Editor

Today, tools and applications customize the display according to the tastes of each visitor. Advanced management tools and pre-built platforms also lighten the task of website editing. The profession of webmaster for many companies no longer requires a full-time position annually, without being complemented by social media projects and management, and other related tasks. This explains the dexterity of webmasters, who are used to performing several services.

That's how I decided to launch W+M, the service for creating and managing digital tools for companies.

W+M SERVICES

Advertising