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Your Q2 2014 “Spring Cleaning” SEO Checklist

Didit Editorial

February 25, 2014: checklistSpring — and Q2 — are in the air! You’ve digested your Black Friday and Cyber Monday stats, examined your keywords, and reviewed your site architecture. Now that you have a bit of breathing space, you can put some thought into your overall strategy. Performing a clean-up now will let you be prepared for the post summer onslaught.

Every business and industry is different, but the Didit SEO staff makes these suggestions as to how to clean up your SEO act for Q2 and beyond:

301 Redirects
Have you gotten rid of products? Removed seasonal pages? Changed the URLs of blog pages? They still have good links—so redirect them to relevant pages to keep link equity/traffic. This is a case of “not throwing out the baby with the bathwater,” and saving your web coders time. Also, correct  internal linking increases engagement and site stickiness. Running WordPress? Plug-ins make the 301 Redirect process pain free. We like John Godley’s Redirection plug-in.

Backlink Audit
Use a tool like Open Site Explorer and go through your links. Check for spammy links. Don’t remove bad links/disavow unless you know what you’re doing. If you’re clumsy or clueless, you can destroy your entire site’s rankings on Google, so be careful and review each link.

Broken Links
Have you gotten rid of products? Removed your seasonal pages? This needs to be reflected in your links. Don’t have links pointing to 404 pages. Update them to point to more relevant landing pages. Use a tool like Screaming Frog SEO Spider to perform this analysis.

Upgrade Google Analytics
You are missing out on tracking opportunities and analysis ability if your site is not using universal analytics. Make sure you upgrade (and stay current) with Google’s latest analytics code updates.

Sitemaps
Check your Google/Bing WMT accounts to see how many of your pages are being indexed vs. how many pages you have on yoursite. It might be time to update your sitemaps and resubmit them to Google/Bing Webmaster tools. If you are not using automated sitemap generators and you are constantly adding/removing pages, you should consider investing in this technology to keep search engines up to date. A few tools to look at are PS Auto Sitemap (for WordPress sites) and XML Sitemaps Online.

Are You Connected?
Websites can be sprawling affairs. Are your Google Analytics connected to Google Webmaster Tools? Do you have both of these connected to the analytics feeds from Youtube, Constant Contact, and your social media channels? Make sure that you’re seeing the full picture.

Review Your Keywords
While Not Provided still remains a vexing issue, you can still match the keyword density of your pages against the actual keyword occurrence that appears in both Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools (and the Bing equivalents.) Since your products may be changing, it’s also time to review your keywords and phrases and optimize for those, based on your promotions. 

Harmonization
Now is a good time to get both your Social, Content, PPC and SEO staff into the same room and review promotions, campaigns, and keyword strategy. Digital marketing is a wheel, and each practice is a spoke. These spokes are all connected and have effects on each other. Having your SEO and PPC teams work on keyword buildout, for example, will help you to find keyword opportunities and lower your CPCs.

Once you carry out these steps, you’ll be in good shape to get ready and be prepared Summer, which is rapidly approaching, and the post-Labor Day rush just beyond. Getting ready now – when the trees are still leafless — will save you time and prevent headaches in the months ahead.

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