SEO Spring Cleaning: 8 Ways to Revive Your SEO Strategy

Do you think your website is up to today’s standards? 

To make sure you top the rankings and outperform your competitors, make it a habit to do a bit of SEO spring cleaning. It never hurts to go over your site, clean it up, and optimise it further. 

Of course, this is a big challenge, especially if your website has dozens of pages to work on. 

Don’t panic, we’ve got a list of 8 tips to get you started. Keep on reading our guide below to learn how to boost your SEO efforts and get your website back in tip-top shape:

1. Always Run Audits

Google Analytics should become your first go-to tool for anything regarding on-site SEO and web design. It’s also your major tool when you need to go over performance metrics and formulate a reliable digital marketing strategy.

Running audits consistently will alert you about other issues enumerated on this list. You’ll be able to find pages that take too long to load, dead links, and pages that don’t see much traffic. You should also look into visual metrics too, such as a heat page to test which areas of a page see the most interaction. 

Your audits should also include things like cost per conversion and click-through rates.

Don’t forget to audit site accessibility. Check your site’s text readability and the efficiency of text-to-speech. If you have colours on your pages, check for the efficiency of colourblind options too. 

Of course, audits alone won’t do you any good.

You also need to understand what these metrics indicate. A page seeing low traffic isn’t automatically a sign that the content isn’t good. It might be a case of poor choice of keywords or a weak backlinking strategy. 

2. Reevaluate Page Speed

Did you know it can take as quick as three seconds for someone to leave a page if it doesn’t load? That’s the optimal speed for a page to load nowadays. However, there are so many factors working against this goal.

You should take your time to check page loading speed. Don’t forget that SEO and website designs go hand in hand. A poorly-designed site will perform poorly in SEO too. 

For example, you need high-quality images to entice people to further explore your site’s content. However, high-resolution images consume a lot of bandwidth and their file sizes cause a delay too. 

Other factors that can affect site speed include the coding running everything in the background. You’ll need a professional audit to check that and to optimize it for faster loading speeds. Don’t forget to eliminate unnecessary media too, such as background music or auto-play videos that don’t work towards informing visitors or boosting conversions. 

3. Boost FID

One of the most important SEO-related site vitals to check is FID (First Input Delay). This refers to the time it takes for a user to interact with something on the site, like a link or a fillable form. This metric doesn’t require the page to fully load. 

Keep in mind that this isn’t the same as Time to Interactive (TTI). TTI refers to the time it takes for a site to fully load and for everything to become fully interactive to a user. FID is the delay between someone tapping a link and when the page processes that interaction.

There are a few ways to fix a high FID rate. The most crucial step is to comb through each page’s JavaScript coding and try to optimize every line. You can also use Web Workers for faster interaction.

This is an extensive task, however, and you’ll want professional help for this. You don’t want to waste your resources solely on one task. 

4. Fix Broken Links

You never want a visitor to click a link only for the page to not load. That can lead to enormous detrimental effects. A person can easily lose interest and decide to look for the same information, products, or services elsewhere instead of further exploring your website. 

404 Errors are among the most common examples of a broken or dead link. This occurs when someone clicks a link but that page no longer exists. This can happen due to typos in the hyperlink, the page metadata, or when the site owner creates a new page but forgot to redirect. 

Other examples of broken links include 400 Bad Requests, Bad Code, or an HTTPS Timeout. 

A good idea and simple way to identify broken links on your site is to use the Google Search Console tool. However, keep in mind it only audits internal links on your site but not external links. 

5. Eliminating Duplicate Metadata

If Google’s algorithm seems to have issues with one of your pages, it might be due to duplicate metadata. The system can penalize you, for example, if two or three of your web pages share the same page title or meta description.

While unlikely, it can happen!

You might rename a page, forgetting that you already had one with similar SEO title tags. This happens a lot with websites that manage thousands of pages, such as eCommerce sites. Online stores have dozens of product pages, after all. 

Fortunately, you can use tools like the aforementioned Google Search Console to find these duplicates. You may need to use other plugins as well to find more niche identical data, such as repeated image tags or URLs. 

Of course, hiring a professional team to do this for you is the better option. The more advanced tools and skills can guarantee you won’t miss any duplicate metadata by chance. 

6. Mobile and Desktop Performance

Did you know that a majority of people access the Internet using only a phone? Gone are the days when powerful desktop PCs and laptops were the dominant tools for going online. Nowadays, anyone can access websites and social media apps on a phone, while on the go.

This means you need to prioritize mobile users, given the majority of users, without ignoring the value of those on traditional PCs and laptops. However, phone screens and other mobile devices come in different sizes. 

The good news is modern tools make it easy to optimize your site for screens of all sizes. That said, you need to do some manual adjustments to make sure everything runs smoothly. For example, you need to make sure your site uses the proper font type to make text readable on a small phone screen. 

Browsing architecture is also a little bit different from device to device. The browser on a desktop PC runs differently from one on a phone. You’ll need to run audits to make sure your site runs quickly and properly regardless of the user’s device. 

7. Assess Low-Performing Pages

Remember that at the end of the day, the goal is to achieve high conversion rates and profit. Traffic, exposure, and positive feedback are all crucial to success but none of it matters if you’re spending and not earning. 

This means you need to evaluate every page on your site and go over those that don’t perform well. 

Check a page’s conversion rate, for example. If it’s not as high as you thought it should be, check for possible causes. Is the page slow, are the visual assets loading properly, and are the backlinks leading to this page no longer working? 

The problem might not even be with the product or the page.

Never forget to run an analysis on things like your conversion funnel. How many steps does it take for a visitor to discover a product, put it in their cart, and complete a purchase? Optimize and simplify every step along the way to reduce drop-off rates. 

8. Individual Bounce Rates

Make it a habit to check the bounce rate of each page instead of your website’s overall rate. You have to inspect each page as a whole entity.

After all, your contact page or homepage with new products listed might perform well. However, you might have a page displaying discount vouchers not performing as well. Go over it and check what’s causing people to leave instead of availing of those vouchers.

Separate one page’s problem from the rest of your website. 

Is there a problem with your choice of keywords, for example? Ranking high on the keyword research search results volume list doesn’t automatically guarantee traffic or conversion, after all. Is there a problem with the assets loading slowly or is there a button not working on the page?

Conduct SEO Spring Cleaning Today

Now you know how to conduct a thorough SEO spring cleaning! Follow this list, from auditing individual pages for speed and performance, and don’t forget to eliminate dead links. 

Of course, you shouldn’t run an SEO spring cleaning list on your own. Always run things by with the help of professionals. 

Don’t fret if you don’t know who to call. We’ve got your back on this hefty challenge. Feel free to message us today for all your SEO needs!