Regardless of how well you optimize your website, it will require continual maintenance. This is because it has a lot of moving parts and each of them will impact every other part. One of the most important pieces here is search engine optimization (SEO). While some parts of SEO only need to be done once (e.g. migrating from HTTP to HTTPS) others must be performed on a weekly or monthly basis (e.g. content development). These are things you should plan ahead for so you can be proactive and make your way to the forefront of your competition.
Watching for Broken Links
Pages in your website are bound to get moved or deleted. Images will also be replaced. Additionally, you have no control over when external resources move or disappear. These “minor” changes have a significant impact on your website over time. Routine SEO maintenance is necessary to fix these broken links. Fortunately, there are some specialized tools available to help you find them, whether they’re on your core pages or more internally located throughout your website. These tools make it so you won’t need to undergo the arduous SEO task of manually reviewing each page individually. Instead, you can let the software do the work for you. Since it won’t have a short attention span, you can rest assured it’ll catch every broken link for you.
Ensuring Content Remains Relevant
Content is an SEO task you must engage in on a routine basis. Unfortunately, so it’s only natural that over time some of this content will either become irrelevant or no longer meet your quality standards so it’ll need updated or improved. Whether this is because the content was news related, about specific events, or something that simply shouldn’t have been written, you must decide what to do with it. Deleting it and setting up a redirect is the easiest solution but sometimes you’ll need to improve the content by rewriting it, adding more information, or including new, external resources.
Testing Page Speed
Research shows that page speed dramatically impacts your users’ experience. Of course, we all know that it’s also a ranking factor, especially with Google. Your SEO maintenance task here is important because small tweaks (e.g. font files, JavaScript libraries, WordPress plugins) will have an adverse effect over the course of time, especially if you conduct regular updates. As such, you must conduct routine page speed tests, especially on those pages that get the most traffic – driving at least 30% of your traffic. While conducting this SEO task, consider what plugins you don’t need and get rid of them to make your job easier next time.
Browser Testing
One SEO task that often gets overlooked is testing your website’s layout and functionality in major browsers. This is important because the small changes you make to your website (e.g. CSS files,) will impact how your website looks and functions. Most of the time this is unintended, but you’ll notice it in the top 30% of your pages that receive the most traffic. As such, your SEO maintenance should focus on this part of your website and ignore those entry points that are receiving 10% or less of your organic traffic. This is good news since this is something you must do manually. Fortunately, it should only take a few seconds per page though.
Putting it all Together
Maintenance isn’t something you can overlook but you can easily argue that your schedule is already busier than it should be. That’s why the Affordable SEO Company is here to help you. Get in touch with them today so they can start taking care of your SEO maintenance needs for you.