SEO Spring Cleaning Checklist

Spring is here, which means it’s time for spring cleaning! Discard possessions you no longer need, repair broken items, deep clean each room, polish and dust your belongings, and revamp your living space. You may be surprised to learn that you should apply similar techniques to your website to ensure it is delivering the best possible user experience while staying optimized for online searches. Check out our SEO spring cleaning checklist, and get in touch with Pennington Creative if you need help creating new content for your revamped site.

Discard Duplicate Content

• Why do it:
  • Identical content that appears in multiple places online can impact search engine rankings.
    • Search engines struggle to identify which version should be indexed and ranked in search results.
  • How to do it:
    • Use a tool such as Siteliner, Copyscape, or Moz Site Crawler to identify instances of duplicate content.
    • Revise text that is repeated on multiple pages of your website.
    • Use canonical URLs, 301 redirects, and “noindex” meta tags to make sure your content is not indexed on multiple pages.

Revamp or Remove Outdated Content

• Why do it:
  • Outdated product, service, or contact info can confuse potential customers and cost you sales.
  • Older content may not be optimized for modern search engine algorithms.
• How to do it:
  • Audit your static onsite pages and remove or update pages that do not reflect your current product or service lines.
  • Use Google Search Console to identify older blog posts that aren’t ranking well, and revise them using modern SEO practices.
  • Update blog posts that contain important information that is no longer factually correct.
    • This is especially important for websites that contain medical or legal information.

Repair Broken Links

• Why do it:
  • Links are a ranking factor for search engines, and having broken links can hurt your SEO and user experience.
  • Website visitors may become frustrated and leave your site due to broken links.
• How to do it:
  • Use a tool such as Ahrefs or Screaming Frog to locate broken links on your site, and remove or update them with live links.
  • You may also want to check for broken inbound links from other sites to your own.
    • You can fix these by contacting the linking site and providing a working link or by redirecting the broken URL to a live page.

Polish Each Page’s Pictures

• Why do it:
  • Search engines can’t crawl images, but they can crawl the data associated with them and incorporate that data into search rankings.
  • Large image files can slow site speed, negatively impacting user experience and SEO.
• How to do it:
  • Update file names to accurately and succinctly describe each image.
  • Audit your website’s images using a tool like Screaming Frog to identify problematic images.
  • Add alt text to every image, incorporating keywords as appropriate and limiting the text to around 100 characters.
  • Compress or resize large images to improve load time.
    • Tools like Optimizilla let you compress images while maintaining their quality.

Clean Up Your Keywords

• Why do it:
  • Using the right keywords is essential to ensuring your website appears in relevant search engine results pages.
  • Best practices for keyword use have changed over the years, and outdated techniques may be harming your site’s search rankings.
• How to do it:
  • Read through existing content—especially older content that may have been written using bad practices like keyword stuffing—to identify pages that need updated keyword strategies.
  • Use an online tool like Moz’s Keyword Explorer to identify the keywords your site is currently ranking for.
  • Check for better keywords to target using Google’s Keyword Planner, and update relevant pages accordingly.