How To Pick Up SEO After You’ve Neglected Your Site

Neglecting your website’s SEO is a bit like neglecting your body.  If you don’t look after it properly, you’ll find it can’t do the things it used to.  It’s not as fast, or as nimble.  It’s also not as responsive and it just doesn’t feel or look right, both inside and out.

If your website hasn’t been getting the right level of SEO attention, you’ve probably noticed a decrease in traffic, stagnant business growth and a slip down the rankings (or is that a plummet?).  

I get it.  Staying ahead online does take time and effort and SEO is often a casualty of our busy lives.

But the good news is that there are plenty of ways to revitalise your SEO and get your website back on track.  Just as you would commit to a step-by-step programme to get back into physical shape, you can take positive action to regain your website’s SEO fitness!

Here’s what you can do to show your neglected website some love and get it back where it counts – at the top of the rankings in front of customers who count.

Spend Some Time Thinking and Planning Your SEO Strategy

It’s a good time to re-evaluate your priorities and your goals.  The more effort you put into thinking about what you want to achieve, the better the outcome.   Who are your customers?  What do they really want?  What motivates them to visit your site?  What’s their search intent?  How has your audience’s search behaviour changed?  What do they know about your business and are they getting the right information?  

Your answers will help you discover whether your keywords are still relevant, minimise any keyword cannibalisation and ensure your content is still appropriate.  You can then do further keyword research if necessary as well as update your content plan.

If you’re completely new to SEO my Free SEO Starter Kit will help get you started

Use Google Analytics and Google Search Console to Analyse Data and Revise Your SEO Efforts Accordingly

Google Analytics and Google Search Console are really great for assessing your site’s vitals in terms of traffic, trends, its performance and audience behaviour. 

Using these tools will highlight important stats like which of your website pages are your most lucrative ones, which ones deliver the most click-throughs, which of your blog posts have the longest dwell-time and which get the most traffic.  This info will help you focus your SEO attention where it’s needed most.  You’ll be able to identify which articles are the most important and you can then structure your internal links and other elements of SEO to help boost their rankings.

So, once you’ve done your investigations and have crystallised your thoughts and plans (including doing some extra keyword research if necessary), here’s what you should do to show your neglected pages some SEO love:

• Write new content (remember, keep it original, easy to read, informative and engaging)
• Refresh outdated or orphaned content.  You can rewrite articles (making sure you’re focusing on the right keywords) or just tweak them a little to make them more relevant and drive traffic
• Look at your site structure and add internal links where possible.  A strong internal linking strategy is a great way to make your focus articles more ‘findable’ and bump up articles you want to rank for 
• Find any orphaned content and add links so that they serve a purpose for your SEO
• Add quality images or graphics to your content (making sure they’re optimised properly)

Ongoing SEO Work

These initial steps are great, but for sustained SEO success over the longer term, you’ll need to put in a bit more effort on a regular basis.   In the same way that you would put a structured ongoing programme in motion to get your neglected body back to peak health, you need to do the same to regain your site’s SEO peak performance.   They both take time, effort and hard work – but the rewards are well worth the inputs!

This will involve technical SEO checks and fixes like:

• Checking for broken links and 404 errors 
• Assessing your site speed and making changes to speed it up if necessary
• Making sure your structured data is optimal
• Adding meta tags 
• Making sure your robots.txt is set up properly
• Checking your site’s Core Web Vitals to meet Google’s expectations
• Working on your link-building strategy (internal and external)
• Evaluating your competitors and applying any learnings to your website

As you know with SEO, there’s no such thing as instant success.  It requires commitment over the long-term but trust me, good things are possible.  You can get your web pages to feature prominently in the search engine rankings just by spending a little time on your SEO on a regular basis.  

If you think you could do with a helping hand getting your neglected site back up to speed – and then accelerating up the rankings – have a look at what The SEO School offers.  This easy-to-follow, self-managed SEO course gives you practical instruction of all the key elements of SEO – including the technical stuff – and you implement your strategy as you progress through the course.  You’ll get heaps of insider secrets too, so click here to book your spot at The SEO School.

Karen Dauncey

Karen Dauncey has been working in SEO since 2003. She specialises in helping businesses get found online through Google using Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) She is the founder and creator of The SEO School an online SEO Course to help teach business owners how to do their own SEO. She regularly delivers educational programs for both Local, State and Federal Government and is an advisor for the ASBAS Digital Solutions Program. Karen’s passion and commitment to help small business owners get found online is the driving force behind her online school, making SEO advice accessible to all with free resources and online courses.

Karen's wealth of SEO knowledge and practical digital marketing experience comes from running her own SEO and Google Ads agency, Blue Cherry Online Marketing since 2008. Karen has optimised over 1000 websites, managed millions of dollars' worth of spend on Google Ads and has a solid understanding of the constantly shifting industry of digital marketing and SEO. This gives her a unique advantage when it comes to being able to recommend the right online marketing strategies for your business. This gives her a unique advantage when it comes to being able to recommend the right online marketing strategies for your business. She was recently recognised as an SEO Expert for the popular course creation platform, Kajabi as well as appearing on ABC Radio
for her expert opinion on the ACCC's investigation into search engines.

Karen has attended search engine conferences in London, Stockholm, Adelaide and Sydney, and was also invited to attend a pilot Business Coaching Course at Google’s Head Office. She has a Diploma in Marketing from the Chartered Institute of Marketing in the UK.

She is also the co-owner of the Digital Experts Directory, an online directory for female serviced-based businesses to promote their business (with a great backlink for SEO).

To keep up to date with the latest in SEO, join her Facebook group The SEO School Community or follow her on Facebook or LinkedIn.