Spring is the perfect time to declutter and refresh – not just your home, but your website too!
Over time, websites can accumulate outdated content, broken links and technical issues that hinder search engine rankings. A thorough SEO spring cleaning can help boost your site’s visibility, improve user experience and drive more organic traffic. This guide offers some ideas on how you can spring clean your website for SEO.
1. Give your website an SEO audit
Beginning your spring cleaning with a comprehensive SEO audit can identify any issues and areas of improvements for your website. This will give you a deeper understanding of how your site is performing and lay out the foundations for the next steps you should be taking to improve your rankings. Uncovering issues like broken links, slow pages, duplicate content and crawl errors will lead to an improved user experience and make your website more optimised as a whole. You might not even want a full audit – some minor checks and changes could be all your site needs to make a significant improvement.
2. Optimise your content (again)
As you create newly optimised and fresh content, you don’t want to forget about the previous content you’ve published! Your site needs to stay relevant, so that means reviewing blog posts, landing pages and product descriptions is necessary to keep everything up to date. This may seem like a herculean task to accomplish, but taking the time to update any outdated information and refreshing your keywords can breathe new life into pages that may have been dropping in rankings. According to HubSpot, updating and reoptimising old posts increased their number of monthly organic search views by an average of 106%.
Freshen things up by updating statistics, reworking stale content with new insights and ensuring everything is accurate. Optimising older pages for more relevant or trending keywords may also give your site a boost and don’t be afraid to remove or redirect any low-performing pages that can’t be saved.
3. Fix broken links and redirects
No one likes hitting a dead end, which makes broken links really annoying for users when they’re simply trying to get from page to another. Not to mention that having broken links can negatively affect your ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs) by reducing crawl efficiency. You should scan your website for broken or outdated internal and external links – especially if you removed any pages as mentioned in the previous point – give them a polish and fix them up.
4. Strengthen on-page SEO
Your pages should be complete with unique and compelling meta titles and descriptions to encourage searchers to visit your site. Make sure your meta titles and meta descriptions all fit within the character limit to fully appear on SERPs and optimise your heading structure with H1, H2 and H3 tags to keep content organised and easily readable. The way users search is dynamic and changes over time, so checking that your titles and headers still match with user intent will keep your content relevant. Have a look at which of your current pages seem to be working well and have a high click through rate – can you apply the same ‘formula’ to your other meta descriptions and titles? Also, adding descriptive alt text to images can make your site more accessible while giving search engines more context to what your content is providing.
5. Mobile and UX optimisation
With mobile devices accounting for 63% of organic search engine visits, you cannot neglect the importance of creating a mobile-friendly website. Make sure your site is fully responsive on mobile with easy navigation, clear call to actions and a readable font size with properly spaced design elements. According to Google, 53% of mobile users abandon a site if it takes more than three seconds to load, making mobile optimisation a top priority.
6. Update internal linking strategy
Having a solid internal linking strategy can guide users to important content while strengthening your SEO. Check that key pages are properly linked, using descriptive and natural anchor text. If you find orphaned pages floating around, connect them with relevant content to bring them back into the fold. A well-structured internal linking strategy also makes it easier for search engines to find and index the important pages on your website.
7. Continue monitoring performance
Spring cleaning your website is all well and good, but maintenance is key. Keep an eye on your site’s performance, monitor your rankings and analyse traffic patterns to figure out what’s working (and what isn’t). SEO is an ongoing process, so tweak your strategy as needed to make continuous improvements to your site.
Need a helping hand to spring clean your website for SEO?
Spring cleaning your website for SEO doesn’t have to be a time-consuming task! If you need to focus on other areas of your business but would still like to reap the rewards of freshening up your website, consider partnering with a digital marketing agency like Adido (that’s us!) to help you. Our wonderful team is brimming with expert knowledge to make sure you can make the most out of your website, from an initial SEO audit to on-page optimisation, as well as performance monitoring after it’s all said and done. Get in touch with us today!
