A client recently told me that she was concerned about losing her favorite posts. What’s a lost post? For this client, it could be a great post from the past. Particularly excellent blog posts from years past needed to be readily available, she felt. It took a little back and forth to find out what she meant, and I was able to help. In case you have the same problem, I’m going to share the solutions.
Finding your own favorites
If you remember the title of the post, you can easily use your website’s search function to find that post. In the case of our client, she needed to refresh her memory with data which she knew was in those bog posts.
I sometimes need to be able to send information to people — what happens to their old site when we launch a redesign, for example, or what exactly an algorithm is — and a link to a blog post is a great way to do that.
But if you don’t remember the title of your posts, finding them can be more difficult. Fortunately, you can use tags or categories to make it easy. For our client, we made a new category called “Editor’s Choice.” We added that classification to all the posts she wanted to be able to find easily, and the problem was solved.
Keeping important posts top of mind
Our client also felt concerned that people might not be able to find the most important articles. Maybe you want to make sure that your patients can easily find information about vaccination schedules or how to track their blood pressure. You can have a few articles featured on your homepage — but not your top 27. What if you feel like you want people to be sure to see the most important things frequently?
First, find out whether they are in fact seeing those articles frequently.
People don’t usually approach a website as they would a magazine. They don’t start on the cover, check out the table of contents, and then read through the articles. For the client we’re thinking of, 84% of the site visitors come to the website by asking a question at Google.com.
The screenshot below is from the analytics for our lab site. It shows that the post called “Jack and the Beanstalk Lesson Plans” has had 288 views this week. It is not shown on the homepage. “Summer Classroom Themes” is also fairly popular, especially considering that it is snowing outside. The visitors to that page this week might be in the Southern hemisphere. However, we can feel confident that those posts are being seen by a reasonable number of people.
If there are posts that we consider important but they are not being seen — for example, if the vaccination schedule only gets one visit per month — then we know that we need to work on grabbing some attention for those posts. “Superhero Writing Lessons,” for example, has had just one visit this week at our lab site. If we felt strongly that we wanted to make sure that as many people as possible saw those writing plans, we would need to update the post to make it more findable, more useful, or more appealing.
Don’t forget that social media is a great way to remind your readers of evergreen posts that aren’t getting much traffic.
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