With so many different ranking factors affecting search engine optimisation, it is important to try and stay on top of as many as you can if you want to outrank your competitors content.
There are a few simple SEO checks you can easily work your way through on a monthly basis to keep your website optimised. These checks will not only help keep your content relevant but also maintain your website’s potential for attracting the right visitors.
Review Blog Tags
After you have been producing regular content for a while, the number of tags can really build up. This will mean that you are left with a large number of duplicates and tags that all fall into similar categories.
It might be worth reviewing all of the current tags and creating a list that documents those you want to be used on the website. These tags have the purpose of enabling the user journey to be as efficient as possible and to help them find the content they are looking for quickly. This has the benefit of lowering your website’s bounce rate and encouraging users to spend longer on your website.
Site Speed Check
Using the Google Page Speed Checker you can assess the current speed of your website and identify areas that can be improved on. Completing this check will generate a list of areas that you can optimise in order to provide your users with a better experience. For example, compressing your images will help the load quicker and result in a faster website.
“53% of mobile site visits leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.” – Google
Page speed (especially for mobile devices) is an indirect ranking factor for search engines as Google expects websites to load quickly. Longer load times mean that search engines will not crawl as many pages of your website, as they have an allocated crawl budget.
Google Page Speed Insights Tool
Broken Link Check
This is a task that should be completed regularly to ensure that you have no broken links displayed within the website. Broken links can have a negative impact on SEO as they prevent users from maintaining a journey through your website. This again will mean that your website’s chances of having a high bounce rate will be much more likely. Search engines want your website to consider usability, so ensure that it is as user-friendly as possible.
Using Broken Link Checker, you can enter your website’s URL and it will crawl your website to identify any broken links that need to be fixed. If this task hasn’t been done in a while, then it can be quite a time-consuming task. Therefore it is worthwhile doing this check once a month to keep on top of the broken links.
Review Google Analytics for Opportunities
Google Analytics is such a good resource for keeping your content relevant and developing it even further. Taking a look at your analytics will allow you to identify popular areas of content that are currently performing well on your website. This gives you the opportunity to produce similar content that will be of interest to your audience. Creating sticky content using Google Analytics also means you can optimise the popular pages even further to get your visitors to convert.
Ensuring that these checks are done on a regular basis will only benefit your website. Over time you will notice your website ranking higher in the search engines, and also attracting more visitors. Therefore it is worth setting time aside each month to spend refining and reviewing your website’s content.
