If your question is whether you take care of your website’s SEO, all by yourself, without having to committed to a psychiatric institution for burnout after a couple of months, the answer is definitely yes!
Most website owners are aware that SEO is not something that is done once and then crossed off the to-do list – it is an ongoing project that will always be relevant as long as your website is live.
But, at the same time, SEO scares most people. So, they either give up without a fight (“well, we are appearing on Google from time to time, isn’t that already as high as a small website can go?”) or they rush into hiring an agency that might force some extra, difficult to understand, tasks, which most likely are very beneficial, but not urgent or critical right now – especially when the budget is limited.
This will make the SEO cost per month grow more than what a website owner can withstand, so he either cuts the (already slim, in most cases) budget for other digital marketing efforts (Google Ads or Facebook Ads, for example) or gives it up entirely. And in these days, not appearing on Google is, more than ever before, not existing all together, as the World Wide Web is now everyone’s shopping centre.
But what if we were to tell you that, after the large initial work of optimising your website has been done, you can take it from yourself and, with a simple weekly routine, keep your website in ‘good shape’?
Sounds too good to be true? Well, this is more than real. Here are some tasks that if done regularly will definitely make Google give some extra love to your website:
1. Keep your website free of errors. Regularly check for broken links that cause 404s or other errors. You may find this information in Google’s Search Console Coverage section. Once you find an error, see if you can fix it yourself on the website. For example, broken links are rather easy to fix, but make a big difference.
2. Keep your content fresh. Regularly look through your content and make sure all the facts, dates, laws, discounts, addresses and other information are still relevant and correct. Keeping your pages up-to-date will make users happier, bring your bounce rate down and show Google that people find your website useful.
3. Fight content cannibalism. While looking through your content, notice if you have two or more pages dedicated to the same topic, using the same keywords. To avoid your own pages from competing with each other, it is better to join them all into one big page with lots of useful content. Do not forget to redirect the disappearing URLs to the new one with a 301 redirect.
To learn more on the best courses of action for this and the previous question, have a look at our full guide for old content maintenance on a website.
4. Optimise your images and alt texts. We all know that compressing your images and adding some alt texts to them is beneficial for SEO. But what if you have thousands of images on your website? It will be very difficult to manage all of them at the same time. But if you have a routine to treat several images every week, or even 1-5 a day, you will go through this task much easily, and without having to dedicate big chunks of your precious time to it.
5. Keep an eye on Analytics. Once a week, open Google Analytics and look to your organic traffic data. Which pages bring you most of the traffic? Are they up-to-date and easy to navigate? Which pages have the highest bounce rate? Is there something you feel you might change in the layout or content of said pages that might help with this problem? Informed means well-armed!
Let us be clear, if you have enough budget, you can always delegate these tasks onto professionals and do much more than this in what your website’s continuous optimising is concerned. And you can also choose to educate yourself further in terms of SEO, add some more items to your weekly routine, and maybe even complement it with monthly or yearly variants.
As a starting point, why not check the other articles we have on SEO?
But if you are running short on budget, or on time, this SEO do-it-yourself routine might come in handy, especially now.
Happy optimising!
