Website redesigns can happen at any time, but even if you’re not looking to make big changes, the beginning of the year is a great time to do a little website freshen up. Like spring cleaning before the calm of the post-holiday lull has worn off, these are the 5 SEO tips that will help start 2024 off on the right foot.
Let’s Discuss Your SEO Goals
SEO Tip #1 – Change the Dates
If you are not using a plugin or theme that pulls the copyright year into your website automatically, it’s likely that any ©2021, ©2020 or worse yet ©2015 you see at the bottom of your site will need to be manually updated. WordPress makes it very easy to switch this out by visiting the admin panel and then making the adjustment, usually in the menu or widget section.
SEO Tip #2 – Check for Broken Links
Now is a great time to take a look back at some of your older content. While it’s a good idea to review and edit articles that need it, if you’ve got a lot of evergreen content, you’ll want to focus on looking for broken links. There are a variety of free tools to find broken links which work by scanning your website and then giving you a report of what and where they find links that are no longer functioning. As a website owner, you should replace these broken links with new, high-quality links to improve user experience and help raise domain authority.
SEO Tip #3 – Review User-Generated Content
User-generated content is great for marketers and small business owners. It’s free to the business and customers often trust it more than other forms of paid advertising. Unfortunately for website owners, the user giveth and the users can taketh away. It’s a good idea to review any pages or posts that are focused on embedded media — things like videos, Instagram, or Facebook posts, among others. While these posts are extremely effective when first launched, they also tend to look dated quickly because users may remove the content at any point.
SEO Tip #4 – Review Social Sites
It may seem strange that there are things you can do on other sites to improve your own SEO, but it’s true. By claiming a variety of social media handles and pages, you begin to build the digital reputation of your brand or business. The only catch is that you need to make sure these social sites have the correct info for your business in order to receive a boost. Social sites can not only help to boost the referral traffic to your site, they also help strengthen your site’s own SEO through positive link building.
SEO Tip #5 – Brush Up on Your SEO Skills
For many small e-commerce websites, January is a much slower month after the rush of the holidays. Use this time to work on your SEO skills to set yourself and your website up for success in 2024. Whether it’s a self-paced course on Yoast or similar SEO tools or a video series on YouTube, there are a variety of different ways to learn more about managed SEO services. One thing to note, SEO best practices are always changing. It’s important to look for the date on any article you read and understand that SEO is a bit of an art as well as a science.
Need a little help getting your site ready for the new year? Contact us or check out our online shop to get your website in top shape for 2024.
