Spring has always been seen as a time to start fresh. Spring cleaning your home or office can leave you feeling refreshed and rejuvenated. However, there may still be one thing holding you back from feeling completely new—your outdated Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy.
When best practices and popular techniques are always changing, it’s easy to fall behind or get stuck with an outdated SEO plan. Spending some time every spring to evaluate your goals, revamp your strategy, and eliminate bad habits can help you stay on track year after year.
So what should be on your SEO spring cleaning list? We’ve got three tips to make sure your strategy stays fresh. Let’s go!
Key Takeaways:
- Creating a new SEO plan each year can ensure you’re moving closer to achieving your business goals.
- SEO spring cleaning enables you to identify your bad habits and start the year fresh.
- Designating time each spring to revamp your SEO strategy allows you to implement new techniques to stay competitive.
Tip 1: Evaluate Your Goals
Before you start completely overhauling your SEO strategy, you need to take a look at what worked before. Checking to see how your past approach helped you attract new customers can give you a better understanding of what changes need to be made and which areas need the most improvement.
Tools like the Clickx App can be extremely helpful in tracking and measuring goals. The above example of a graph within the Keywords feature shows you an overview of how your keywords are ranking. The way you track your SEO strategy within this or another tool will depend on what your unique goals are. You may also want to look into how your content is ranking against your competitors or how many backlinks you were able to secure.
Consistently track your results throughout the year so you can make timely changes. Based on the information you collect, consider whether or not you’re achieving the goals you established. If you find that you’re not hitting the mark or indeed well surpassing it, consider why and perhaps adjust your goals to be more realistic.
Tip 2: Identify and Eliminate Your Bad Habits
If your past SEO strategy wasn’t helping you reach your marketing goals, you need to find the areas where it was lacking. Things like having duplicate pages or not conducting regular and thorough keyword research are common mistakes. Once you can identify the bad habits and poor practices that may have been holding you back, you can sweep them right out of your SEO strategy.
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The Clickx SEO Grader can help you identify the poor habits you need to get rid of. After auditing your website, this tool provides you with a report letting you know how it stacks up against some of the known components of search engines’ algorithms. In the report, Clickx will tell you what areas you’re doing well in and which ones you can improve upon. In turn, you can decipher exactly which techniques are working out for you and which ones need some tweaking.
Conducting a complete audit of your SEO strategy once a year is a great habit to develop. However, bear in mind you should be looking for improvements you can make throughout the year. Making small adjustments every so often can save you time and money trying to keep up with changes in algorithms and search habits.
Tip 3: Incorporate New Techniques
To bring your SEO strategy up-to-date, there are likely new techniques you’ll need to implement. Because search engine algorithms are always changing, you will need to include at least a few new techniques each year. Whether they’re shifts to your entire strategy or new keywords to include in each post or page, you need to identify which elements you should include in your new SEO plan.
In this example, from a Clickx SEO Grader report, you can clearly see which areas need to be improved upon. The tool will also provide tips on what you can do to turn the red warning sections into acceptable green areas.
Typical techniques you may need to implement within your new SEO strategy include optimizing your images, doing new keyword research, or adjusting your content to meet known or suspected algorithm changes. When deciding which SEO tactics you’re going to include, take a look at what you’re trying to accomplish. Listen to the experts and also look at what your competitors are doing.
Bonus Tip: Make a Plan
Trying to completely change your SEO strategy all at once can be overwhelming. Whether you have big changes to make or lots of smaller ones, you don’t necessarily have to rush into anything. To avoid making mistakes or missing important SEO shifts, devise a plan of attack.
Creating a step-by-step plan to implement your new SEO tactics can help you prioritize your tasks and get things done efficiently. When you assign different due dates for each item, you won’t feel like you need to get everything done at once.
To create the best implementation process possible, consider the items you need to get done first. Large tasks that influence the rest of the strategy, such as conducting new keyword research, should be done early on, while smaller tasks can typically wait until later. If you have a number of large tasks that need to be done quickly, consider what you may be able to outsource. This can free up some time for you and your team, and ensure you see benefits from your new SEO strategy sooner.
Conclusion
Spring cleaning enables you to get rid of the old and bring in the new—and this even applies to your SEO strategy. Consider the ways it may be out of date and what changes you can implement to help your company stay relevant and attract high-quality leads.
Let’s recap the four things you should do every spring to revive and refresh your SEO approach:
- Take a look at last year’s goals to see whether or not you were on target.
- Use the Clickx SEO Grader to find the areas where your strategy may be falling short.
- Incorporate new techniques and ideas to improve your approach for the next year.
- Create a step-by-step plan for how to implement your new strategy.
Do you have any hot tips for spring cleaning your SEO strategy? Let us know in the comments section below!
