Related Resource: WordPress Maintenance
Many business owners think Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a one-and-done thing. You do the work to optimize your site, and then Google does the rest. Now that sounds like a pretty sweet deal, but the problem is it’s not true. If you are interested in improving your SEO for your WordPress, Magento, or other website, read on!
SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. Doing the initial work to optimize your site is important, but the real results come from building on that base and making small improvements over time. That’s not an attractive option for many online business owners; paying for regular SEO work can get expensive fast, and many people don’t have the time or the knowledge to perform the updates themselves. Luckily, we have a few tips to help you perform some quick easy SEO maintenance, and you don’t need to be an SEO expert to do them.
ABP: Always Be Posting
The #1 best thing you can do to bring in more traffic from Google is post new content regularly. Each new blog post is a chance to rank for new search keywords and bring fresh eyes to the site. Ranking in Google’s search results takes time, so the sooner you post a new article to your site, the sooner it will start bringing in traffic.
Like planting a tree, the best time to write that new blog post is twenty years ago. The second best time is now!
Because each new post brings new search visitors to the site, and the traffic for each post increases as the post ages, the snowball effect of regularly adding new content to your site is amazing. It takes some time to kick in, but if you stay consistent and keep writing, the results are worth the effort.
Update and Refresh Old Articles
Writing new posts all the time can take a lot of time and effort that a lot of people don’t have. If you can’t spare an hour to write a whole new blog post, you can still improve your site by updating some of your old posts and expanding on them.
A great way to find posts to update is to find out what posts are already ranking well.
You can use Google Search Console to see which pages on your site are bringing in the most traffic from Google, and what keywords they’re ranking for. If there are any keywords that are ranking around page two or three, updating your blog post with a few paragraphs focused on that specific keyword can help push it onto the first page of the search results.
You can also see which keyword your blog post ranks best for, type it into Google, and then use the “People Also Search For” suggestions to get ideas for quick post updates.
Google likes to show fresh content, and when it sees that your post that’s already ranking well has been updated with new information, you’ll have a headstart ranking for new search terms.
Optimize Your Images
Images are some of the largest files that users have to load on your site. With so many different devices to support, from tiny smartphones to widescreen desktop computers, image resolutions (the number of individual pixels that make up the image) have increased dramatically. Browsers like Chrome and Safari also dynamically resize images so that they appear at the appropriate size, even if the image resolution is much larger.
All this makes it very easy to accidentally use unnecessarily large, slow images on your website, when smaller, faster images would appear exactly the same. Taking some time every so often to check the loading time for different pages on your site and resize any images that are too large. We have a lot of success reducing load times for clients by incorporating this into our WordPress Maintenance Plan.
This probably doesn’t sound like a lot, but Google has been emphasizing site speed more and more. Mobile devices account for the majority of search traffic, but often use slower connections than laptops and desktops. Google wants to make sure that its mobile user base gets a quick answer when they click on their search results. Optimizing your image sizes could be the one thing that gives your site an edge over your competitor’s.
If your able to regularly devote time to these three tasks, you won’t only be adding new content to your site, but you’ll be improving the old content as well. The hard part is staying consistent; the results don’t come immediately, but if you keep working, the snowball effect will build. And if you’re not sure exactly how to get started, Watermelon is always here to help.
