Maintaining your website ensures a consistently modern, relevant, and high-performing tool for connecting with consumers. Consistently completing these tasks strengthens security, improves user experience, maximizes functionality, and maintains an up-to-date design and fresh content.
Some website maintenance tasks can accomplish even more. Keeping your site running smoothly can also boost your SEO efforts, improving your chances of showing up in the search results.
Here are 10 specific tasks that, when completed consistently, can improve your SEO efforts and, therefore, your visibility within your target audiences.
Fix broken links.
Broken links to and from your site can harm your efforts to impress search engines and consumers alike. They can interfere with your SEO in the following ways:
- Increase your bounce rate as visitors discover a broken link and leave
- Use up time search crawlers could be spending on your working pages
- Reduce link value, a ranking factor for SEO
By checking for and repairing broken links monthly, you earn happier search crawlers, happier visitors, and a stronger SEO presence.
Minimize page redirects.
Broken links are not the only problem search crawlers can encounter on your website. They may also encounter multiple page redirects as the link takes them, not to the original destination, but a new location for the page.
Website visitors may not notice these redirects, since they happen almost instantaneously, but search bots will, and that can negatively impact their perception of your site.
Make searching for, and correcting, excessive page redirects a part of your monthly website maintenance routine in order to reduce problems and improve your website's SEO strength.
Optimize page load speed.
You only have a few seconds (2-3, to be specific), to impress website visitors. Pages that take longer than that to load are more likely to send visitors running and negatively affect your bounce rate.
By regularly examining your pages' load speed and taking steps to improve it (e.g. eliminating clunky code or compressing images), you can keep your site speedy and keep your visitors and search engines alike happy with your site's performance.
Optimize images.
Images have a powerful influence on how visitors perceive your site. Even search engine crawlers will take images into account when deciding how to rank your page-as long as they are fresh and optimized.
You can optimize your images in the following ways:
- Compress images to improve loading speed
- Fill out alt text with relevant copy
- Customize image file names
- Create mobile-friendly images
- Include images on the site map
Optimized images are easier for search engine crawlers to “read,” understand, and use to determine where your site should rank in the search results.
Incorporate high-quality images.
When possible, avoid using stock photos on your website. Your web support should include examining images regularly, updating them when necessary, and ensuring that they are all of a high quality.
Low quality photos can create a negative user experience on your site, which can lead to a higher bounce rate, and lower conversion rate.
While search engine crawlers cannot read an image without attached copy (e.g. alt text), they can read the results of poor images and rank you accordingly. Keeping your images high-quality can, therefore, keep both visitors and search engine crawlers happy.
Add fresh content.
Fresh content is one of the most important elements in an SEO-successful website. Regularly updated content allows you to accomplish the following tasks:
- Target multiple keywords
- Demonstrate authority
- Encourage visitors to lengthen their time on your site
- Generate backlinks
- And more
Your website maintenance strategy should include regularly incorporating fresh content into your site in order to reap these benefits and improve your rankings. This fresh content can take many forms, from blog posts to landing pages and product pages. As long as it delivers new, keyword-rich material, this material will advance your SEO efforts.
Review your analytics.
Analytics give you a window into your website performance. You can use this information to learn about many aspects of your site and use that information to improve your SEO efforts.
In particular, use analytics to advance your SEO goals by tracking bounce rate, length of stay, and other factors that influence how search engine crawlers will perceive your site.
When you see areas that need improvement, your web support team can help you fix these issues in order to improve your SEO rankings.
Optimize existing content.
Your website maintenance tasks should not neglect the content that already exists on your website. Instead, you can improve your SEO performance by regularly optimizing your existing content.
For example, consider taking these steps to make your existing content more SEO-friendly:
- Update content for current topics and keywords.
- Check links on all content.
- Create new links to other areas of your website.
- Update facts and information with current numbers.
Consider reviewing and updating any content that is more than a year old in order to maximize its SEO power and keep it an engaging and relevant aspect of your site.
Optimize metadata.
The metadata on your website refers to the title and description for every page on your website. Optimizing this information for your preferred keywords and topics is a good way to add SEO power to these pages.
Your website support services should regularly check and optimize your pages' metadata to ensure that it is accurate and in keeping with your SEO strategy.
Hire professional website support.
Keeping your website updated and maintained can take many hours of work throughout the year. When you are also trying to optimize your site for SEO, you may find it difficult to keep up with all the tasks required of you.
Most small businesses benefit from hiring professional web support services to assist them with these tasks.
Here at Distinct, we offer web support services with small businesses in mind. We can keep your SEO efforts up to date, keep your website up and running, and implement all design and refresh tasks you require, all for a small business-friendly budget.
Don't neglect your website and reap the benefits of better rankings and greater brand awareness. We would love to help you along the way!
