Over the winter months, a lot of cobwebs and dust can creep into your business without you noticing it. But once the summer months roll in, the sunshine sheds some light on the corners that haven’t had much TLC, such as a website cleanup.
You don’t need us to tell you that ignoring the potentially overlooked parts of your business can have a detrimental impact. However, have you thought about your website recently? If you don’t have an SEO checklist that you regularly tick off, how can you be sure your website is performing correctly?
Sometimes, it can be easy to forget about your business’ website, whether it’s a shopping platform or a place for clients to learn more about what you offer. A good website often keeps itself going in the background, which can lead to you thinking everything is okay.
But from an SEO perspective, leaving your website to chug along isn’t always a great idea. Keeping on top of your spring cleaning should also translate into your business too, and giving your website a dusting by using an SEO checklist will help clean up any potential issues.
If you need some inspiration or guidance throughout your next website spring clean, the experts at Tecmark have put together six must-have SEO checklist points for your website cleanup.
SEO checklist
Review keyword search trends
Search trends change constantly. For example, for the term “best coffee machines” over the last 12 months, you can see the peak around November and December before dipping.
Changes in search can be due to many things, including the seasonality of terms, such as “Christmas decor”, or changes in the retail landscape.
This should also include:
- News interests (Growing interest in products or services due to press)
- Holidays (Christmas means retail goods and shopping increases)
- Pandemic changes
- Technology improvements (iPhone 12 vs iPhone 13)
- Financial years (Businesses looking at new budgets in April may allocate for more services)
Using an SEO tool or Google analysts, review search trends to ensure you’re keeping your strategy up to date with what searchers are actually looking for.
Update metadata
After reviewing search trends, review and update metadata on your key pages. Refreshing your website’s metadata every once in a while is very important.
It’s a fantastic way to keep Google informed and lets the search engine know that you’re keeping your site up to date and will ensure your keyword targeting is on track.
Although Google has released a new update that means that your assigned title tags won’t always be used, it’s still a good opportunity to further tell Google what your landing page is about and what key terms you’re looking to target.
Ensure your site is well optimised for site speed
Site speed is a major factor for any website, as no one wants to be waiting around for a page to load. Your SEO checklist should have a task that ensures any recent images have been compressed and sized properly. But these should also remain high quality and include alt text, otherwise, they won’t be performing to their best standard.
Any new elements that have been added to websites should also be reviewed. There is potential for their functionality to have become clunky and usability to be affected, so double-checking they are working fine is key. This goes for plug-ins too, making sure they are up to date and the most recent version
This part of your website clean up should also include reviewing your website’s caching policy for visitors.
Review the backlink profile.
Any SEO strategy should focus on driving organic traffic and improving user experiences using SEO best practices. This is exactly why you should always continue to review the backlink profile for your website so that more people can appreciate the hard work done through your SEO efforts.
During your SEO checklist website cleanup, run through all links using your favourite software across the site’s structure to fish out any toxic backlinks. If you find any toxic backlinks, make sure they aren’t pointing to your website, and work to have them removed.
These should be reviewed about every quarter to ensure your backlink profile isn’t hindering your website’s overall SEO performance.
Clear out broken external links
We all know that links, external or internal, are incredibly useful for boosting your website’s overall health from an SEO perspective. Your website cleanup should also include double-checking for any broken links.
Use a broken link checker to check your website for any potential broken links, both internal and external, that are on your site.
Having a broken link on your web page is a signal to Google that the page could be out of date, and will cause your rankings to suffer. By clearing these out you keep everything fresh and up to date – key if your visitors are going to enjoy what you have to offer.
Keep up with your competitors
Your competitors can have some of the best inspiration on what to do and what not to do on your website. Your website cleanup should always involve taking a closer look at your competitors and taking a look and see if they have recently updated their website.
See what kind of social media implementation they have used, along with any page titles and blog posts that you could take inspiration from. You can also take note of their site’s structure, and compare it to yours for an idea of any changes you might need to make.
Don’t forget about other search engines
It’s easy to think Google rules all, but there are countless other search engines that internet users use to find answers to their searches.
Bing has around 1 billion users every single month, and your website shouldn’t be trying to avoid them! During your cleanup, ensure that your Bing Webmaster Tool is updated with the right information, and use it to keep keywords on track and your website performing as well as it can.
Does your website need Tecmark’s help?
Keeping on top of your website’s overall performance and health can be a tough job, with so many different factors to take into consideration. By having the experts steer the ship, you can relax knowing everything is taken care of and focus on different parts of your business that need your attention.
Tecmark’s expert team has plenty of experience and knowledge that your website needs to ensure it’s fully optimised and bringing the best results to the table. Get in touch today for guidance, advice and consultation about what we can do for you!
