Technical SEO does not have to be difficult. The four actionable tips listed below will lay the groundwork for steady streams of organic traffic and mitigate some of the issues that can hold your SEO strategies back over time.  

Start adding internal links

Internal links will distribute link authority across your website and help to create a structure and hierarchy, all of which will aid your quest for better rankings in SERPs. Google’s John Mueller even notes that the anchor text in each internal link can provide “additional context” to assist its search engine. 

Adding internal links is easy enough, but you need to do it for each new page you publish. Rather than just linking to random pages, you can enter ‘site:yourwebsite.com’ and then a keyword into Google to see which pages are closely related to the new page.

You can also use SEO tools to see specific metrics for each listing. Linking to pages that have a better URL rating is preferable as this content will have a higher authority.

Conduct regular content audits

Content can become outdated and irrelevant over time, which can lead to it dropping out of search rankings entirely. Content that has no positive impact on SEO is a potential candidate for being deleted. Running content audits every six months to a year will highlight pages that need to be jettisoned, updated or consolidated.

Removing content can actually lead to an increase in the traffic to your webpages. Again, there are SEO tools such as the free WordPress plugin from Ahrefs that offer actionable instructions for each blog or article. Assessing each page individually is important as you don’t want to remove something that contributes to your business outside of SEO.

Add subtopics to existing content

Content does not have to stand still – it can evolve over time to the changing demands and needs of users and search engines. A ‘content gap’ analysis can be used to highlight important points or sections that have not been included in a page and could potentially improve its position in rankings.

Running your pages through a content gap tool will show the keywords that top performers in search are ranking for but that are absent from your copy. Adding a new subtopic or two at a later date to cover these keywords can give your content a boost at just the right time.

Fix any broken backlinks

High-quality backlinks can also give your content an edge in search. Backlinks are created when another publisher or site links to your content or when you link to a high authority page elsewhere. Unfortunately, broken backlinks can occur and undermine your SEO. To make sure that you don’t have any broken links, you can filter for 404 pages in a relevant SEO tool such as Site Explorer.

After flagging the offender, you can either reinstate the dead page so that backlinks point to a working page again or redirect the older URL to a new URL. If a third party has incorrectly linked to your page, you can get in touch with them to request for it to be changed.