The Most Important Ongoing SEO Tasks For 2020 And Beyond
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a crucial component of any digital marketing strategy if you want online users to find your products or services on the web. To this day, there are many people who think that SEO is just a one-time, set it and forget it type of campaign. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. SEO is an ongoing investment that requires routine maintenance and ongoing tasks to ensure you are ranking well in organic search results.
Three Reasons Why You Need An Ongoing SEO Plan
- Google continuously puts out algorithm updates that require modifications to your SEO.
- Google puts new content at a high priority in their algorithms.
- Your competition is most likely staying on top of the SEO game.
You may be wondering what recurring tasks are critical to maintaining your first-page rankings for SEO. Below, we have outlined some of the more critical recurring tasks that you simply cannot afford to skip when working on your website.
Check For Broken Links
With constant website updates and modifications, it is easy to overlook pages that were moved or moved elsewhere on site and pages that you may have internally linked to may no longer exist.
While this may seem like a minor task, these broken links can have a significant negative impact on your website and rankings over time.
Fixing broken links can be a time-consuming process to go through your entire website. We recommend starting with the top-level links in your main navigation and then working through your internal pages. You can also utilize specialized tools that make this process much easier and much more automated. Using tools like Broken Link Checker to assist with this task will also ensure that you do not miss any of these broken links, which can often happen if you are reviewing these manually by yourself.
Make Sure Your Content Isn’t Duplicate
We all know that duplicate content can affect your visibility via search engines but many people don’t take into consideration that someone may have stolen their content. We would never accuse you of plagiarism, but we’ve seen some shady individuals clone entire websites and pass it off as their own.. It may be worthwhile to run your site through Copyscape or Siteliner and check to see if another website is using your content
Check Your Website Speed
Another crucial ongoing task for SEO is making sure your website is always loading as quickly as possible. Page speed is extremely important as it can severely affect the user experience as people do not like to wait for slow websites. Google’s algorithm takes website speed and bounce rate into consideration and your site can slow over time as you continue to add new functionalities, high-resolution, and plugins for content management systems.
The rule of thumb is that if a page loads within three seconds, you’re in the clear. If a page takes longer than three seconds to load, try out a tool such as GTMetrix to figure out what is causing the page to load so slow.
Often, some of the items that are causing pages to load slowly require the assistance of web developer to make some changes in the backend of the website’s CMS.
Make Sure The Site Is Functional On All Major Web Browsers
Whenever there is a significant design or layout change to the website, you should be checking the functionality in all major browsers, including Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge.
Even small changes can affect how your website appears on a certain browser. More than likely, it will require you to manually check these pages. If you have a very large website, then start with the pages that get the most traffic. It shouldn’t take more than a few seconds to check a page on a few browsers.
If you’ve made design changes or routinely make changes to the layout of your website, make sure to always check mobile functionality as well.
Review Content For Quality & Relevance
Another crucial task to keep your first-page rankings is to continuously create and implement new content. However, content that you created a few years ago may no longer be relevant or may no longer meet your quality standards.
Look through your recent blog posts over the last year or so, go through your internal pages, take a look at your News section, and so on. If you find content that is outdated or just simply not good content, then you will need to determine whether you should delete it (and redirect the URL elsewhere) or update it.
While cleaning up old, irrelevant content will definitely help improve your overall success with SEO, coming up with a solid, consistent, and quality content-rollout strategy is highly recommended. By getting into a nice rhythm of putting out high-quality content on a consistent basis, it can have a snowball effect that provides favorable results with search engines. Here are some tips to up your content game:
- Details: Focus more on getting into the nitty-gritty. Basic information can be found in any Google search. Dig deep, and add more depth to your subjects.
- Feedback: Getting friends in social media, co-workers, or acquaintances – who are familiar with whatever topic you choose – to look over your content can provide a huge payoff. Receiving thoughts from different perspectives can only help to improve your content overall.
- Keep It Simple: Readers judge things by their looks. It could be the most valuable content in the world, but if the experience of actually getting the information seems complicated, then people will not continue viewing the content. Make it clean, fun, and simple. As a result, users will flock to it if the information is top-notch.
Update Your Plugins And Extensions
Finally, remember to check your CMS plugins or extensions where applicable. Plugins can impact many aspects on your website so it’s critical to review the plugins you are using and require, and also to review the plugins to make sure they are updated to the newest versions. This ensures that your website will function as it should.
So, in conclusion, no matter what industry you are in, it is essential that you have a solid SEO strategy in place for both the initial setup and the ongoing maintenance that is required to maintain first-page rankings for relevant keyword searches.
