Spring is here! While many of us associate the season with shedding our heavy winter jackets and window washing, we online marketers have our own type of spring cleaning to tackle. Because SEO is an ongoing project, not a one-time thing, you’ll want to take a look at your web stats at least quarterly and make adjustments where necessary. Here are a few SEO Spring Clean-Up Tips:
Take a look at your Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools
Taking an in-depth look at both your Google Analytics and Webmaster tools can provide you with invaluable information about how your website is performing, and what adjustments you can make to help it perform better.
- Your Webmaster Tools can tell you a lot about the health of your site. You’ll want to make sure there is nothing preventing Google, Bing or Yahoo from finding and indexing your pages. These are called “crawl errors” and if Webmaster Tools reports any you’ll want to take care of them immediately – it’s like pulling up weeds out of your garden.
- Take note of your entry and landing pages and see which ones are performing well and which are performing poorly. This will help you make keyword, and general page optimization adjustments where needed. You can also tell which keywords you’re ranking well for, and which just aren’t doing anything for you.
Find better keywords
The data from your Google Analytics and Webmaster tools should tell you which keywords are helping bring traffic to your site and which are not – or which keywords may bring the wrong sort of traffic. Visitors that arrive at your site via very broad keyword searches are less likely to convert into customers. Remember: there are a multitude of keyword phrases that would be easier to rank for that are also more likely to convert a visitor into a customer for your products or services. Do a little research to figure out which long tail keywords will deliver the right visitors to your site.
Re-optimize your most important landing pages
Once you’ve figured out which pages aren’t performing as well as you’d like and you’ve identified some good long-tail keywords you’re half-way done. Keep in mind that each page on your site is comprised of many elements, and you want to make sure that everything is as well-optimized as it can be. Check the ALT tags of any on-page images as well as your page title, meta description, and heading tags (H1, H2) and insert your new keywords where possible.
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