SEO isn’t a one-time thing. It’s not like you are done doing SEO on some pages, and you never have to see them again.
SEO is a repetitive process of refinement, and it goes in an infinite loop. As your business grows, your website also does, and it becomes cluttered.
The process is subtle, but it may affect the results significantly. Hence, it’s necessary you schedule an SEO clean-up of your site to achieve better efficiency in the marketing results.
Here is how you have to proceed with your business website SEO clean-up.
Table of Contents
SEO Declutter Strategy
Directly jumping on the site correcting things isn’t a viable option. You first need to audit your website so that you can find the scope of the work or improvement.
You can use online SEO audit tools like Moz, SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc., to find the potential SEO issues in your website. These tools will help you find all the technical and on-page SEO problems on your site.
Many tools recommend a suitable solution with the issues, and you can work on those as a start.
Hereafter, you may follow the below steps to clean up your website.
1. Hone Your Site Structure
It depends on your site structure and how the experience of the users on your site. And depending on that experience and user behavior in your site, Google concludes your rankings. Hence, it’s crucial for your site structure to be perfect.
Sync Menu and Content
The menu is the thing users will surely interact with to navigate to their desired web pages. Hence, the menu should be easily accessible and facilitate smooth user flow across the site. You must keep your menu tabs limited because too many options bemuse the users. You keep the top category pages in the menu directly, so people can access them quickly.
Now, you have to segment your website content according to the website menu to make it easy to find and access. You may arrange your content according to the top-level categories of the menu.
This way, you’ll set up a smooth site structure facilitating the best user experience.
Dig in Some Data
Data can be your lighthouse and guide you on the right path of optimization. You may analyze the user behavior signals on the site to find the scope of improvements. You can set up a whole funnel to track users’ flow across the site and find where they are facing problems.
This way, you can find the spots on your site that you need to improve or remove to aid the user experience.
You may also examine the bounce rate, session time, exit rate, scroll depth, etc., to improve your website content.
Clean Up the Content
After analyzing the user behavior data, you must have many valuable insights about how visitors interact with your site.
You have already arranged and categorized the content to make it easily accessible. However, now you have to use the data insights to find out where you need to update or remove the content.
It’s definite that your old pages have outdated content, and you have to optimize it according to the latest trends and best SEO practices to boost your business SEO results.
You know that competition is fierce in online business, and you need to stand out to have the maximum customers. Always prioritize the best user experience, and you’ll ultimately become search engine friendly and top-rank worthy.
So, declutter your website content according to the user behavior data and upgrade it according to the latest trends to have potential results.
2. Revitalize Your Content
Content is the fuel of any marketing strategy, and as you are doing site clean-up, it means you have a lot of content on your site.
You just can’t publish content and leave it till eternity. You have to nurture and refine it to keep having beneficial results.
Google also considers the content freshness as a ranking signal. Hence, it’s crucial to keep your website content up to the mark.
Follow the below steps to revitalize your website content.
Re-align Your Content with User Intent
User intent isn’t a fixed thing and keeps changing. Hence, when you wrote your content, people had a different persona than today. So, study your new user persona, and update your content accordingly.
Incorporate Your New Business Goals In Old Content
You had different business objectives 2-years back than now. You accomplish your goals, expand your business, and set new targets to further continue the business growth journey.
So, your old content might not target your current goals, and you may refocus the content’s objective to your current targets to accomplish them soon.
Upgrade Your Content to Be Best
You know that your content must be the best version available on the internet, so you get the most traffic and prominent rankings. You created the best content, but it’ll get outdated over time, and you need to update it to hold on to be best.
Hence, add relevant content to your existing content to fetch the potential results.
Remove Duplicate Content
It’s a very critical issue, and you can check whether you have duplicate content on your site with a website audit tool. If you have duplicate content, then remove it or make it unique.
Moreover, if there are multiple copies of a single page (mostly happen on eCommerce websites). In that case, you may consider the canonicalization to mark the main page among the multiple copies to deter the duplicacy issue.
3. Give Good Riddance to the Bad Links
White label links have a significant impact on your website authority and rankings. Google promotes webmasters to earn natural links, but sometimes people do shady things to get links. Moreover, you get some spammy links over time, even if you didn’t make them.
Bad links aren’t good for the site, and too many bad backlinks can get you penalized from search engines. Hence, it’s crucial you audit and removes bad links to keep upkeep your site authority and win top rankings.
It’s a two-way thing; whether you link to any bad website or a spammy site link to you, both are unacceptable.
What are Bad Links?
It’s easy; every link that is there only to manipulate search engine results, then it’s bad. You can easily separate bad links with this simple rule.
An ideal link should pass value to the users, must make sense in the place, and mustn’t redirect anywhere other than the intended source.
The below infographic represents the multiple ways you can get bad links.
Additionally, you shouldn’t do the black hat link-building techniques to make links because all those links will be bad, and you’ll get no benefits.
How to Remove Bad Inbound Links or Backlinks?
You can remove the outbound links from your site, but you have no control over the other websites. Initially, you may reach the webmasters to remove your site link from their site. If they didn’t remove your link, then you can use the Google Disavow Tool to do so.
You add all the bad links in a .txt and submit it in the Disavow tool to disown those bad links. Search engines recommend that you only submit the bad links in the disavow tool when you have a significant number of bad links.
4. Optimize the Broken Links
Broken links are the links that take you to a page that doesn’t exist. Broken links aren’t good for the site’s health and spoil the user experience. Broken links frustrate people, and if people don’t like them, Google doesn’t like them.
Too many broken links on your site show that you aren’t maintaining your site, which somewhere impacts your site authority.
Here are the reasons that can cause the backlinks.
- Mis-spelled URL
- Page Deleted
- The external website you linked to is deleted
- Firewall restriction to access the linked page
You can use the site audit tools to find the broken links on your site. Once you have the list of broken links, optimization is easy.
You may un-link the hyperlinked text to optimize the broken links. Moreover, if the broken link is there due to mis-spelling, then correct it, and here you go.
If the external target page is moved, then update the link. Furthermore, if you moved some pages, then redirect the old URLs to the new URLs to deter the broken links.
That’s it; you are good to go. You may also create an amusing 404 page for your site with an appropriate CTA to retain your users when they encounter any broken page.
You must audit your website for broken links in a fixed time interval to optimize them and keep your site experience seamless.
5. Embark on Image Optimization
Images are important to make your site and content engaging. People respond to visual content in a better way. Google itself promotes the use of images in the content. Images are good, but if you don’t treat them right, they can create problems.
Like images increase the loading time on the webpages, which affects the rankings and increases bounce rate.
Hence, it’s necessary to optimize the images so that you can have SEO value along with better user engagement.
- Compress the Images without Spoiling the Quality
- Update the Image Alt Text
- Include Your Target Keyword in Alt Text
- Give a Relevant Image Name According to the Image
- Define a Size
- Add Image Structured Data
When you do these optimizations on your images, you’ll get better rankings in traditional and image search.
6. Remove Duplicate Metadata
Meta title and description are often overlooked but have myriad SEO value. The best SEO practice is that every web page should have a unique meta title and description. When you have a big website with thousands of pages, then it’s possible some pages have the same meta details.
You shouldn’t ignore this issue and must optimize it. Duplicate meta title and description confuse the search engines, and they split up the page authority among all the copies. With distributed authority, your no page makes up to the first page in the SERP. Hence, it’s crucial you resolve the duplicacy issue.
Meta title and description may not be the ranking factors but directly impact your CTR. Click-Through-Rate (CTR) is a user engagement signal, and search engines consider it while ranking.
Hence, meta details have an indirect impact on the rankings.
So, write the unique meta title and description according to the best SEO practices to improve your SEO results.
7. Test and Improve the Site Functionality
It really frustrates the users when they click some button or fill some form, and it doesn’t work. This harms your authority significantly. Hence, you need to check all your website pages and test whether everything is working perfectly or not.
Sometimes, the reason behind your low conversion rate might be the non-working buy button.
Hence, you may test your website and ensure the site is functioning most smoothly.
You can also do the A/B testing to find the best-performing web pages for your site.
Final Words
This is all about the SEO clean-up strategy for your website. You will see significant results after doing this decluttering.
As homes and other sheds require regular cleaning, websites also need regular clean-up to work flawlessly and bestow the finest user experience.
So, schedule your SEO clean-up and increase your marketing efficiency to fetch the flabbergasting results.
You may also hire a professional or digital marketing agency for high-performing SEO for your business.
Author Bio:
Gajendra Singh Rathore is a digital marketing expert and associated with a digital marketing agency. He is always eager to learn, experiment, and implement. Astronomy is his escape from the outside world.