A 7-Point Spring Cleaning Checklist

People do spend some time tidying up their websites and marketing efforts. Yet, there always seems to be a few things they forget to clean up. Since it’s spring, here is a checklist for you to start getting your site in order:

1. Clean up your lists. This is a great time to send out an email to reactivate emails that have either never purchased from you or haven’t clicked on a link in one of your emails in a while.

2. Verify your offers. Review your popular pages to make sure your older offers align with your current offers. It may also make sense to try one of your newer offers (ebooks, white papers, sales, etc.) to your inactive list.

3. Update your autoresponder emails (thank you for your order, request for information, etc). Take a look at these emails and try to rewrite them in a friendlier tone. Add social media profile links into the email.

4. Update your thank you pages. There are many cool things you can do on your thank you page. Everything from embedding a thank you-style video that offers extra value to social media sharing options, as well as additional offers. Try something.

5. Check for broken and expired links. Use the following tools:

• Screaming Frog SEO Spider
• Google Webmaster Tools Crawl Errors
• WordPress Broken Link Checker Plugin
• Majestic SEO

6. Tags and pixels.

• Ensure your tags are working properly/data is being passed correctly.
  • Take inventory of existing and intended tag implementations and carefully assess all use cases and which tags should be active. Visit all key pages of your site and use your browser QA tool of choice, such as Firebug, Ghostery, and WASP, to confirm all tags are executing as they should.
• Ensure your tags are loading in the best order.
  • Async when you can. All tags that can be loaded asynchronously, should be. Place async tags higher in the page to maximize data collection without risk of page interference.
  • Sync when you have to. Some tags must be loaded synchronously. Place sync tags at the bottom of the page to prevent a tag error from blocking the page.
  • Confirm that any tag dependencies are being met. For example, if an event-tracking tag in an analytics tool calls a library, the library tag must fire first.
• Remove unnecessary tags, make tags “lighter,” and ensure they’re updated.
  • Make sure you’re not “over-tagging.” Evaluate your analytics planning and remove tags that are collecting improper or unused data, or feeding data into a system you no longer use.
  • Make your existing tags more lightweight by removing redundant utility code from tag markup or adjust the way the tag is called.
  • Vendors will make changes to their tags and release new versions over time. Site owners should have a system in place to document and manage tag versioning and updates.

Thanks to the folks at TagMan for these tips.

7. Update your social profiles. Make sure bios, links, photos, and videos are up to date. Use tools like ManageFlitter.com to clean up your Twitter followers, etc.

Bonus: If you had an extra 5 percent marketing budget, what would you experiment with? Find it by cutting your worst performing efforts.

Image on home page via Shutterstock.