Being a successful business owner, to have probably realized that the website is growing as fast as the business.
Blog posts, product pages, eCommerce lists, and contact pages add up.
With so many pages to manage, things can go wrong quickly.
Bad links can go unnoticed, the website structure becomes cluttered, and content can quickly become deoptimized.
All of this can affect the visitor experience and have tangible consequences, such as increased bounce rates and browsing abandonment.
That is why regular site cleanings are crucial to maintaining consistency, relevance and usability of the website.
Successfully executing an SEO cleanup strategy to ensure the site aligns with business goals, stays in good Google books, and provides a great user experience for visitors and customers.
6 steps to execute the SEO cleanup strategy:
Need to get an overview of the website.
Inspect the site with a site audit.
This will allow evaluating how the website looks through the eyes of a search engine.
Will better understand how search engines discover, crawl, and index the site.
A site audit will provide a starting point for cleanup.
There are many things that a comprehensive site audit could discover and identify.
From repeated meta descriptions to broken links, a site audit will reveal the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to a website’s SEO.
Conduct site audits to identify technical SEO issues and crawl issues, as well as recommend ways to improve and fix any issues.
1. Clean the site structure:
Site structure can make a big difference in search engine rankings and the way customers interact with the site.
Site menu:
The first structural element that visitors are likely to interact with is the site menu.
Ideally, the site menu should include a limited number of top-level items to keep it focused and easy to navigate. To overwhelm first-time visitors with a messy and complicated site menu!
Contents:
Another important aspect to consider is the content.
Create an overview of the content to have, so that one can get a complete panoramic view of the website content.
Divide the pages into categories such as blog, services, contact, and product pages.
Dividing web pages into relevant categories allows visitors to easily find the content they are looking for and adds some organization to the site, making it easy to crawl, which is great for SEO.
Another idea is to connect with other stakeholders or relevant departments of the company.
Request the feedback on current content and the opinions and suggestions for improvement.
Be amazed at the valuable insights that can emerge, especially from those who see the site from a stranger’s perspective.
Disclosure of data:
As with everything related to marketing, make sure the cleanliness of the site structure is data-driven.
Explore performance data to gather insightful information about the website.
Look at how much traffic the pages are getting, where this traffic is coming from, and how that traffic behaves when visitors come to the website.
Also be sure to analyze how people are engaging with the home page by tracking key metrics like time on page, bounce rate, and scrolling depth, to see if visitors are actually reaching the most important content first. place.
Now start cleaning up that content!
Armed with this knowledge and information, begin to breathe new life into the structure of the site.
A good idea is to classify web pages and content into categories and organize them based on relevance, importance, and performance.
Make sure web pages at the top of the hierarchy are accessible through the home page, so visitors don’t have to search far to find them.
Decide what is missing from the website, what existing content can be improved, and what can be removed entirely.
Understanding how visitors navigate the home page and interact with individual web pages provides insight into how can best serve visitors and hopefully customers.
In today’s world, when many organizations are digitally transforming, customers have an unlimited amount of resources at their fingertips.
Need to ensure that the website stands out from the crowd. Effective content needs to be valuable, relevant, and as optimized as possible.
2. Identify and remove bad links:
Before we delve into how to remove them, let’s understand what exactly causes a bad link.
Any link intended to manipulate a site’s PageRank or ranking in Google search results can be considered part of a linking scheme and a violation of the Google Webmaster Guidelines.
This includes any behaviour that manipulates links to the site or outbound links from the site.
There are some things that Google just doesn’t like, and wrong-site links are one of them.
An incorrect link can result in penalties from Google that will affect the ranking on search engine results pages, the performance of the entire website.
When creating a link, it is important to be aware of the sites that are linking and understand what it means if a link is good or not.
Some types of links will get into trouble, including those from press releases, private blog networks, link farms, etc.
A good link will do wonders for the SEO and authority of the website.
Some examples of good links include high-ranking site links, links from within the industry, and links that are not spam and are unsolicited.
Sure, there are good and bad links.
First, they should provide website visitors with valuable information to improve their user experience.
To remove bad links, identify the bad links that are damaging the website, there are some steps will need to take to get rid of them.
First, try searching the websites that host those links to find their contact information.
If don’t receive a response agreeing to delete a link, or if see that the link remains active, it’s time to take more action.
When to disavow links, essentially asking Google to ignore those links to the website domain.
If the request is successful, these links will not be counted.
Google is pretty smart when it comes to third-party actions that affect websites, so rejecting links should be the last resort.
Deciding to disavow bad links, head over to Google’s disavow tool to get started.
The process is the following:
- Define the links want to disavow.
- Create the disavow list and make sure the entries are separated by URL or domain.
- Upload the list as a .txt file to Google’s deauthorization tool.
Disallow backlinks if there are a significant number of bad links to the site and the links have or are likely to cause a manual action to be taken on the site.
3. Remove or redirect broken links:
A broken link refers to a link on the website that leads to a page that does not exist.
Linked pages may lead to non-existent or outdated pages on their own or external websites.
Clicking on the results will get a 404 error message.
After having conducted an audit of the site, it is likely that it has revealed some broken links on the site.
These tools will tell which links are returning 404 messages.
Broken links can occur for several reasons:
The URL of the link entered is incorrect.
The linked page has been removed.
The external website to which it was linked was removed.
A firewall restricts access to the linked website or page.
Broken links can detract from the authority of the website, frustrate visitors, and thus affect search engine ranking.
Fortunately, fixing them is simple.
There are a few things can do:
Detach the text.
Please correct the link if there was an error entering it
Replace the link if the destination still exists but has been changed.
Create a redirect for recurring broken links to site pages.
4. Optimize images:
To attract visitors, the website needs images.
The visual aspect of a website is sometimes as important as the information that is shared, so images must be displayed correctly.
Images are also a great way to further boost the site’s SEO!
Compress page images to improve loading speed.
The loading speed can make a big difference to the way people interact with the site.
When the page load time increases from one second to three seconds, the bounce probability increases by 32%!
Pages that take longer to load result in a higher bounce rate, especially for people browsing on mobile devices.
Therefore, ensuring that the website loads as quickly as possible is crucial to attracting and keeping visitors.
There are several plugins for WordPress that allow compressing images into various types of files.
Using an external compression tool may need to download, compress, and reload the images.
Updates the alt text of the image.
Alt-text is a great way to embed keywords on the page and improve website SEO.
Using a website like Shopify for product management, easily add alt text to product images or other media. A tool that is used to improve the experience of the visually impaired.
5. Eliminate duplicate metadata:
Each title tag and meta description must be unique, as it appears in search engine results.
Add more pages to the website, it’s easy to end up repeating metadata.
Having the same title tags, or meta descriptions that are too similar that affect the quality of the site, without even realizing it.
By cleaning up the SEO of the website, removing any duplicate metadata will help improve ranking and be on the good side of Google.
Audit the site, the crawl data will reveal which pages have duplicate metadata.
Set up a spreadsheet with all of these duplicates and find some time to create unique title tags and meta descriptions.
Title tags are possibly the most important element of on-page SEO.
Each title tag must be original, with up to 65 characters.
It should also start with the keyword topics and end with the website or brand name.
Meta descriptions don’t necessarily affect ranking, but they do affect site click-through rates.
The meta descriptions should present the keyword topics and provide a short description of the page in approximately 155 characters.
6. Check that everything works:
Ensuring that every element of the website is fully functional is vital to ensuring that visitors have a good (great!) Experience when they access the site.
If some parts of the website are not working as effectively as they should, it could result in increased bounce rates as visitors get frustrated and leave before taking the desired action.
Test the functionality of contact forms, subscriptions, e-commerce shopping carts, checkouts, etc.
Make the SEO cleanup strategy common.
The website requires constant maintenance to keep abreast of algorithm updates, changing consumer demands, and developments in business goals.
Make site cleanups a regular occurrence.
Schedule monthly cleanings, so the marketing team can stay on top of dynamic SEO practice and keep the website at peak performance.
Tools like Google Analytics and Moz provide accurate data that reflects site performance and can be used to inform future strategies.
The benefits of SEO through quality links, higher organic traffic and a more satisfied audience.