As a business owner, it is fulfilling to walk on the winding road of success. Along the way, you encounter several challenges, experience failures, and celebrate success. Now, you realise how things are quickly growing.
If you have a website for your business, you probably have a large one by now. Before you even realise it, your website has over a hundred pages. All the blog posts, contact pages, and product listings are out of hand. What’s even more overwhelming is each page has a set of SEO problems to worry about.
Managing several pages and SEO problems is a daunting task. Unnoticed bad links, unorganised website structure, and de-optimised content may quickly decline your website’s performance. Moreover, it will drastically affect your web traffic resulting in real consequences.
That’s why periodical website clean-ups are crucial. You have to maintain the coherence, relevance, and usability of your website.
There are 5 efficient strategies for SEO clean-up strategy. These strategies will help you ensure your website aligns with your business goals.
Let’s start.
Efficient Strategies You Can Use for SEO Clean-Up
An updated website overview will give you a kick start on where to begin the SEO clean-up. It would be best if you look for a reliable website audit tool to efficiently evaluate how your website looks in the eyes of a search engine.
Doing a comprehensive website audit might surprise you. Website audits will help you understand how search engines discover, crawl, and index your website. It may unearth broken links, duplicate meta descriptions, and anything else that made your website problematic.
Although it will also let you know the good parts, you need to determine what you need to fix. You will have an idea where you will start your SEO clean-up.
Here are the 6 actionable and efficient steps for SEO clean-up.
1. Clean Website Structure
Your website structure creates a huge difference in the way your visitors interact and search engine ranking.
- Site Menu: Web visitors most likely interact first with your site menu. It is ideal for featuring essential web pages on your site menu to help your visitors navigate around easily. You don’t want your web visitors to deal with a confusing site, right?
- Content: Your content should align with your website or business goals. Ask yourself if your content exhibits the mission of your website. Then, create a content overview to have a bird’s eye view of your web content.
If you have an overview, you can easily categorise your pages with the services or products page, blogs, and company information. If you have a well-organised website, it’s easy for Google to crawl and reward it with an excellent SEO rank.
- Build Links: Aside from the website structure and content, it’s best to link credible websites back to yours.
- Ask Suggestions: Do not hesitate to ask your colleagues for feedback on the content. Their opinions or suggestions matter to help improve your website. It would help if you had an outsider’s perspective.
As you clean up your website structure, determine what’s missing or what’s wrong. Then, understand how your visitors navigate through your homepage and interact with your pages.
Remember, your website visitors have several resources at their fingertips. Ensure that your website is one of them. Create an organised web structure and compelling content.
2. Remove Duplicate Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
Title tags and meta descriptions appear on the search engine results page. That’s why you have to keep in mind that each title tag and meta description has to be unique. As you add more content and pages to your website, you will easily repeat your metadata. A similar title tag or meta description will affect the quality of your website. You might realise it, but that’s what usually goes down for some websites.
It is inarguable how crucial title tags are for on-page SEO. Thus, please pay attention to it! A title tag can have up to 65 characters. It should begin with the keyword theme and end with your website or brand name. Although meta descriptions do not directly relate with your SEO ranking, it affects the click-through rates of your website.
Meta descriptions are somewhat the synopsis of your website. It should contain your keyword themes and provide an overview of the page in only 155 characters.
When you do an SEO clean-up, eliminate those that are in duplicate to boost your SEO ranking and make a good impression with the Google algorithm. If you audit your website, the crawled data will reveal the pages with a duplicate title tag or meta description.
You can create a spreadsheet of all your posts to determine whether the page has a duplicate or not quickly. It might be a daunting task, but hey! The SEO reward is all worth it.
3. Identify and Remove Bad Links
Have you experienced clicking through a 404 error message? It sucks, doesn’t it? Imagine having a web visitor experience that with your website. You would lose more potential users than you think.
What leads to a 404 error message? A broken link. Broken links lead to pages that do not exist. These may cause a broken link:
- Incorrect link URL
- Deleted linked page or deleted external website
- Linked website or page is restricted with a firewall
If you did a website audit, you will notice there are some broken links on your website. Don’t worry. It happens often. You can easily detect the broken links with crawl errors report through Google Search Console.
Whatever the cause of your broken links, it does not do good with your website. Broken links will affect your website authority, disappoint your visitors, greatly affecting your SEO ranking. Fortunately, fixing broken links is simple. You can either:
- Unlink the link from the anchored text
- Correct the link
- Replace the link if the URL has changed but it still exists
- Create a redirect for recurring broken links to pages on your site.
Consistently do an SEO clean-up to remove broken links easily.
4. Optimise Media Content
Among the elements that entice visitors is media content, such as images, videos, or GIFs. The importance of visual elements is as crucial as the shared information. You need to have relatable images or media content. Thus, it’s great to optimise your images further to boost your website’s SEO ranking.
Here are some tips on how you can optimise your media content:
- Compress images. Before you upload the pictures on your website, compress them. Large images may affect the load speed of your website. Load speed makes a huge difference in how your web visitors interact with your websites. For example, a 3 seconds page load time will make your web visitors leave. Thus, it’s crucial to take into consideration the image size you upload on your website.
- Add alt text. Take time to add an image alt text to your images. Alt texts are descriptions of the pictures. If there’s an instance, your image will not load; the alt text is shown instead.
Improve the experience of your web visitors to prevent increasing the bounce rate of your website.
5. Check All the Updates You Made
Now that you have made the SEO clean-up, do not immediately assume that everything works. You have to ensure that each of the elements on the website is fully functional.
Ensuring that each tweaked element is fully functional is pretty crucial. You have to ensure that your visitors will have a great experience once they land on your website. If some of the website features are not working effectively, it will increase the bounce rate. Moreover, you will lose more potential visitors.
A high bounce rate does not go well with the Google algorithm. It will significantly affect your SEO rankings. You can go through each page or use a co-browsing tool with a colleague. Test the functionality of contact forms, signups, e-Commerce shopping carts, checkouts, and such. Doing this will allow you to identify elements that are not working. Moreover, you can improve your services with this.
Final Thoughts
Treat your website as your home. It has to be neat to be accommodating to your visitors. How often do you clean your house? Your website requires the same attention and constant maintenance as your house.
It may sound weird, but that’s the truth. Your website needs constant maintenance to catch up with algorithm updates, the shift in consumer demands, and business goal developments.
Schedule monthly clean-ups to help your marketing team strategise. Always keep your website at its peak performance to quickly catch up with updates. Look for tools and resources that will give you accurate data and future strategies.
You will experience the benefits of SEO clean-up once you have included it in your routine. What’s not to expect if your website is full of quality links, satisfying audiences, and increased web traffic?
