While an ongoing SEO campaign will involve lots of content creation, link outreach, and technical improvement, there are a few fundamentals you can act on to improve your website’s SEO.
Bad Links
With the web constantly changing, it’s always good to audit your site from time to time, checking for broken links. Checking your outbound links to ensure your links that, at one time, pointed to valuable resources are not returning a 404 error or a completely irrelevant page. You also want to check that your internal links haven’t broken due to any website restructuring. Search engines expect your links to lead to clean, relevant pages; so when that expectation isn’t met you may start to lose some SEO value.
Using a tool like Screaming Frog to scan your website’s link profile, and spending some time to analyze that data, will provide a great road map to cleaning up any broken links.
Meta Descriptions
At the end of 2017, Google doubled the maximum length of search results snippets. With your meta description being one of the main sources for these snippets, it’s a good time to check your meta data. It’s possible, if SEO hasn’t been a main focus in the past, that your meta descriptions may be not be optimized or may not even exist.
Using the same tool that you used to crawl for broken links, review and update your meta descriptions on the most important pages of your website. Remember, a good meta description should be engaging, utilize target keywords, and be designed to entice a user to click your search result.
Mobile User Experience
Responsive design and mobile friendliness are direct ranking signals for mobile search. With a majority of search conducted on mobile devices, responsive design is a clear necessity in today’s web. Along with the direct effects of a responsive design, a better mobile experience will impact your website’s conversion performance. An easy test to determine your website’s mobile performance is Google’s mobile responsive test. Additionally, take a look at your Google Analytics to analyze how your user behavior based on device. If either of these litmus tests indicate you need to improve your mobile experience, it may be time to consider a website redesign. In some instances, you can retrofit your website for mobile responsiveness, but it may be just as cost effective to embark on a full redesign.