Spring is traditionally the season when we have a good clear-out of our homes. It’s a season that embraces new beginnings and the shoots of growth in all aspects of our lives. For businesses, it marks the start of the second quarter of the year and the perfect time to spring clean website content.

Many of us have spent the last few months digging deep to get through the cold, dreary months of winter. For me, this winter has felt particularly dark and long. So it’s been a welcome relief to see the shoots of new growth as nature starts to awaken from its long winter hibernation.

Spring cleaning doesn’t just have to apply to your home. It can apply to your business too. It’s the ideal time to give your website content a good dust and refresh to make sure it reflects where your business is right now. Tired copy and out-of-date images and offers won’t entice new customers to your site. Search engines won’t want to show your site at the top of search results unless they think it’s up-to-date and open for business.

Here are five quick and easy things you can do this week to update your website and get it working hard for your business:

Home page

Have a close look at your homepage to make sure there’s no reference in the copy to winter or events like Christmas, Valentine’s, Mother’s Day, or Easter. Add in some words and phrases that reflect the season. Things like “new shoots” or “fresh start” are great ones to use for spring.

If you’ve got images on your homepage, can you change them to reflect spring? Use spring colours or flowers as a background for product images.

Spring clean your website content: product and services page

Are all of your products and services up-to-date? Make sure any expired offers are removed and that all of your images and content reflect what you’re currently offering. If you can include some spring images too, great.

Update your product photographs using spring flat lays or backgrounds to give them a lovely spring feel. And don’t forget to add in a good alt text so that the images are searchable too.

Blog posts

Plan out a blog post that links to spring. It doesn’t have to be business related, but if you have a new service or product release coming up, use that. Try and link the words you use to the season, again using things like “growth” and “new shoots”.

If you don’t have anything new coming out, talk about your favourite things to do at this time of year. Or your favourite food and places to visit. If you’re struggling with ideas, spend 10 minutes on a search engine typing in your area of business and see what’s in the news at the minute. Can you link any of the news items back to spring?

Check your links

Make sure all of your links are working. These can be internal links to different parts of your website as well as external links to other sites.

Broken links are not only frustrating for your customers, but they can adversely affect your SEO as they suggest to search engines that your website is out of date.

Guest posts

Make a list of websites you’d like to do a blog swap with. It could be a business that’s in your field, physically local to you, or just someone you’d love to connect with. Spend some time looking at their website content and come up with ideas as to what the post could be about. How could you help their audience solve a problem they have?

Then reach out to the owners and start to build a relationship. A blog swap is a great way of reaching a new audience and is also great for your SEO as a link back from another site shows search engines that you’re respected by other businesses.

I’d love to know how you get on refreshing your website copy and content. If you’d like some feedback on the changes you’ve made, my free Facebook group has a thread on a Friday where you can share posts or pages. To get more tips and inspiration to help you create brilliant content for your website, head over to the blog section to read more articles to get your creative juices flowing.