44. SEO Spring Cleaning Tasks

Stephanie 0:00

Could your website SEO use a little bit of spring cleaning? Let's chat about some quick wins you can add to your to do list this season to make sure your website is in tip top shape by the time back to school season rolls around.

Stephanie 0:16

Hey there, teacher business owner, it's time to give your bank account a break and pause that ad campaign. I'm your host, Stephanie Royer, and I'm going to show you how to pay less for traffic.

Stephanie 0:27

Welcome back to the podcast. We're continuing our spring cleaning discussions this month with some quick wins that will help you make sure your website is putting its best foot forward when it comes to SEO. Now, there are a ton of little things we can do to improve user experience and search engine performance, but a lot of these tasks are things I would consider fluff, I guess, for lack of a better word, because they are tasks that can make you feel good by clicking off boxes, but they aren't the true needle movers when it comes to SEO, and so that's why I wanted to focus on three of the most important spring cleaning tasks that you can add to your to do list this season.

Stephanie 1:14

The first thing you should check during your SEO spring cleaning is whether or not you have any broken links on your website. A broken link is just what it sounds like. Someone clicks on a link and it doesn't work for one reason or another. The typical broken links you might see are external links to Amazon, because usually the product no longer exists at that link or you also could see a broken link when you link to an article on someone else's website and that article no longer exists at that URL. I would say one of the most common error codes that you get for a broken link is a 404 which is page not found. Broken Links can impact your SEO because it makes it more difficult for the bots to crawl and make sense of your content. Since broken links often relate to Amazon links, these can also impact your income, so it's definitely worth your time to identify any broken links on your website. But I know what you're thinking. Stephanie said this episode would be full of quick wins, and manually checking every post on my website for broken links does not sound like a quick win, because let's just use a conservative number of let's say you have 10 links of some kind in each of your posts, and if you have 100 posts on your website, that would be 1000 links to check, and no one has time for that. Luckily, there are websites that can help with this. The one I've used in the past is brokenlinkcheck.com I'll put the link in the show notes, but you can use a website like that to check the links on your blog. Now for me, it only took about five minutes for my report to be ready, but it could take longer depending on the size of your website. It's really tidy - the results. I was really impressed. You get a spreadsheet of the results, and it gives you for each link, it gives you the actual URL that the link goes to. It gives you the anchor text that you used in the post so you can quickly find it. It gives a link to the actual page where they found it, and it lists the type of link error it was. And like I said earlier, it will most likely be a 404. But running a report like this can make it so much easier to tackle this spring cleaning task. You know, you can save it or keep it open in a tab and just chip away at it over the next month or so, so that you can make sure that all of your links are ready to go once back to school season rolls around.

Stephanie 4:10

The next thing on your SEO spring cleaning list should be to do a quick audit of your plugins. While website plugins are a great way to make blogging more user friendly, they can be one of the first things to impact your website performance when something goes wrong with that plugin. Whether it's a plugin that's no longer being updated, or something that you no longer need, it's important to take stock of your plugins every so often, just to make sure that you are only using the ones that are absolutely essential to your website. If you don't have auto updates enabled on your website, it's also important to make sure your plugins are up to date, to go in and click on them and manually update them. If it's been a while since you've checked on your plugins, no judgment from me, because I've done it. I've gone a long time without updating plugins in the past, but you can find them on the left side of your WordPress dashboard, on the menu. If you hover over or click on the plugins option, you'll get a pop up menu and then you select installed plugins. So once you're there, this is the list of all of the plugins that you have installed on the back end of your website. I would suggest looking for plugins that are on the list, but you'll notice that they'll either have the option to deactivate or activate. And so what I would suggest you do is look for the plugins that have activate as an option, because that means they're not currently active on your site. You're not actively using them. And so those would be a good candidate for removal, because they are still installed on your website, they're just not activated. And then the other thing to look for is whether or not the plugin has an update available, which just you'll see a big yellow notice below the details for the plugin, if there's an update available. Now, you might be listening to this and thinking, you know, plugins really? Is it really that big of a deal? Absolutely, it is. If you've ever had a situation with an incompatible plugin that all of a sudden it's not up to date and compatible with your version of WordPress, you can have major issues with your website. I mean, it can become where it's almost it feels like a fatal error. My website is broken, it will never work again, and all it is is you just needed to update a plugin. So it is a big deal to keep track of your plugins and to make sure that they are all up to date.

Stephanie 6:57

Finally, one of the most important things you can do for your SEO is to make sure that each and every post has an internal link that's directing to it. I mean, we can easily remember to add internal links from a post that we're writing to another piece of existing content on our website. I feel like that's the easier direction to link, but we often forget to go to existing content and add an internal link to that brand new blog post that we've written. And occasionally we forget to do either type of internal linking, and this results in what's known as an orphaned post. We want to avoid orphan posts at all costs, because this basically creates a dead end for the Google bots. When content isn't easy to crawl, it's less likely to be indexed. And so it's essential to make sure that all of your posts have internal links pointing to them. And again, you might be thinking, that's a lot of backtracking, that's a lot of link checking, that's a lot of time I don't have. Luckily, there's a tool for this. If you use an SEO plugin of some kind on your website, so Yoast, rank math, you know, those types of plugins, there is built in support for tracking internal links. So I have Yoast installed on my website, and I like how they do it. So if Yoast is activated on, you know, go to the plugin, make sure Yoast is activated. Then when you open your dashboard and your list of blog posts, if you scroll all the way over to the right at the very end of each row, there are two numbers at the end. One is the column for how many outgoing internal links are on that post, so how many links to other pieces of content are included in that post? But then the other number is how many internal links are pointing to that post from somewhere else on your website. And what's nice is that you can sort these columns in ascending order, so you can quickly see which posts have no internal links. And so this is just a quick way to help you prioritize this SEO spring cleaning task. So let's just say, as an example, I look at my Yoast data and I discover that my post that I wrote a few months ago about an end of the year memory book is orphaned. I have not linked to that post at all from any other content on my website. But I know, or I can look through my, you know, my list of posts, and I know that I wrote last year a post about 10 ideas for the end of the school year, and I'm like, Oh, well, that would be an easy fix, because either I didn't mention a memory book so I could go ahead and add that talking point to that post and then link to it, or I already did mention a memory book, and I can just quickly add that internal link to the orphaned post. But to be able to see that number on my dashboard so easily to see the posts that have zero incoming links is a huge time saver, and so we can just get right to work rolling up our sleeves and fixing those orphaned pages.

So as I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, there are many, many more tasks that you can do to tidy up the SEO for your website. But I would say that these are three of the most important things that will help you see the biggest return on your investment of time. I would love to cheer you on as you work on your spring cleaning tasks. So tag me on instagram so I can see what you're up to. You can find me at stephanieroyersolutions.

Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you enjoyed this conversation, I'd love it if you could share it with a teacher biz bestie. You have created high quality resources. Now let's help teachers find them. I'll see you next time.