Improving your website simply means getting better than the way they are and having the changes to impact positively on your website with ranking gains. It should be clear that if ranking is not impacted positively, then you have not done your SEO right.

What if you are attempting to rank for a very competitive keyword? You may ask. Well, battling to rank for a highly competitive keyword can make things tedious but if you perform better than your competitors, you will certainly see incremental gains overtime. Besides, an optimized content will have several keywords and not all of them will have a high difficulty rating so you will do better with other keywords. The goal here is not just to rank for the difficult keywords but overall, to perform well in the search results for multiple keywords that altogether can pull the right traffic and results and achieve your website goals.

So we now delve into five key strategies to review and improve the SEO performance of your website.

Five Step Guide to Improve The SEO Performance of Your Website

Here are the steps we recommend for you to improve your website SEO performance

1. Run a site audit to identify errors and fix them.
2. Audit your content and delete or update any poorly performing pages.
3. Update old pages with fresh content.
4. Combine similar pages that target the same keywords to avoid keyword cannibalization.
5. Review your AI-generated content and make sure it aligns with your brand tone.

Run a Site Audit

Running a site audit is an essential part of improving your website SEO. We recommend that you use some professional tools for this purpose. There are a couple of free and effective website auditing tools out there which can be very helpful.

Semrush

Semrush audit tool is a free tool. It is more than just a website audit tool and will analyze and give detailed insights into your website performance. It will help you identify broken links including internal links and organic traffic, backlink gaps and more. For our purposes, the Semrush tool is great to identify the problems on your site so that you can fix them

Ahref

This tool is amazing and can be very helpful in cleaning up your website of the limitations and toxic links that are holding back your ranking. We strongly recommend its use to audit a website. The beauty of the great tool is that it is free.

SEO Analyser With Neil Patel

This tool is very precise in use and its results are easy to understand. It is also a free tool but will require a subscription to view full report. It analyses your website SEO and pin points the problems you need to focus on including on-page SEO and website speed.

Audit Your Content

Content audit is all about assessing the content of a website to decide which content to create in the first place, which to update, re-write or delete. Content audit directly affects the performance of your website because it helps to improve the quality of website content which overall will affect how Google assess the website quality.

Benefits of Content Audits

A content audit will give you proper insights into your website content performance. This help you make some informed decisions rather than taking actions without a proper guide.

Improve overall content quality and identify SEO opportunities. You might have used keywords poorly in header tags which could affect how the search engines understand your website. A content audit will help you improve how you use keywords in your content. Another way this is useful is with fixing issues like keyword stuffing in your copy.

A content audit should help improve user experience and boost visitor traffic. For example, content audit can help you identify the part of your website that is slowing down your website speed. It could be an image that is poorly optimized. Fixing that can boost your website user experience, increase visitor traffic and reduce bounce rate.

A content audit is also useful to update the functionality of your website and how it is understood by users and search engines. For example, you can have a broken link on your page due to the many updates and changes you have made to your website. A content audit can be very useful in identifying and addressing this issue which do affect user experience. A good understanding of your content performance do help with a purposeful content maintenance.

Update Pages With Newer Information

Practices and procedures’ are always changing. Google, for instance, is constantly changing its SEO rules and so what worked years ago are no longer working today. All these require that you review your content for conformity with current best practices so that your website does not have loads of old and outdated content.

Some of Google’s Most Recent Updates

Google uses an algorithm to retrieve data from its search index and serve users with the most useful results through its search engine result pages. This algorithm has become very advanced and is being updated constantly by the Google team. Here are some of Google’s most recent updates.

June 2024 Spam Update

The June 2024 spam update targeted websites that were violating the Google spam policies. The goal is to improve Google search quality and intended to be very hard on websites that violate Google’s spam policies.

Google have spam and have repeatedly emphasized its dislike for spammy websites. Some of the spammy practices targeted in this update include:

• Automatically generating content which basically attempt to manipulate the search engines to improve search rankings.
• Unacceptable link building practices like buying or selling links to manipulate rankings. So the websites that get punished are not just those who buy links but those who sell it too.
• Poor quality content like thin, duplicate content.
• Using tricks like cloaking, hidden redirects or other deceptive techniques.

Further reading:

Combine Pages That Target Similar Keyword

Let it be noted that what is meant here is not to have a page to target a single keyword. There are cases where there be need to merge pages because they essentially report the same thing and there content do not really produce or necessitate having them as separate pages. In such cases, it is a good idea to combine such pages because they could create some confusion for Google as to which of the content to rank for the particular keyword or keyword set.

A common scenario with this is keyword cannibalization. Keyword cannibalization explains a situation where you focus keyword is the same for multiple posts especially when you use the same keywords in header tags. The only impact it could have is that Google may get confused with which page to display for the keyword and may end up with a page you will not prefer for the keyword.

For example, if you provide SEO services and have developed a page for SEO services. Then you write a blog post on SEO services using SEO services as your focus keyword. Google may rank your blog post instead of your SEO services page which you would have preferred because it has greater potential to increase sales.

A content audit will help you understand that your pages are strongly competing with each other and that could create a problem for ranking your power pages and instead drive traffic to other internal content.

Review Your AI Generated Content

In this era of AI generated content, lots of content creators are developing their copy using AI tools. However, just using AI tools for content creation can pose some challenges because it repeatedly churns out similar content and creates lots of duplicate content which is not good for SEO.

We recommend that you review your AI generated content for originality.

Final Words

Content is king and Google loves content. No doubt, producing quality content for google can help your website rank better. However, as Google changes its rules with updates to its search algorithm, it is important that you continually review your content for conformity with newer rules. That way, your content remain fresh and relevant and will be able to perform better in the google search.