How to Optimize Your Blog with an SEO Spring Clean

One of the most effective ways to improve the SEO value of your blog is to clean, tidy and update existing content that already exists on your site.

In this post, I’m going to tell you 7 easy but powerful ways to do an SEO Spring Clean of your blog and, at the end of the post, I’ll provide you with a FREE SEO Spring Clean Checklist to download!

Guide on how to SEO Spring Clean your blog or website

So, let’s get cleaning!

Table of Contents

1. Removing Out-of-Date Low-Quality Pages

To have the best and easiest possible chance of success for your site to show in search engine results, you want your site to have a solid and clear theme.

So if your blog or site is about ‘chocolate’ then every post you add should really relate to chocolate.

You can do posts about chocolate recipes, tourist attractions, chocolate massages and therapies, and anything to do with chocolate.

But do not start then including things, let’s say, about ‘Italian food’ on your site that has nothing to do with chocolate.

A common question to ask is – How then do these lifestyle bloggers do so well – if they talk about so many different things, such as money matters, travel, fashion, and so on. Good question!

It is possible to have a site that covers a number of areas of expertise but the truth is very few bloggers achieve this.

It is that much harder than if you have one clearly themed site.

So, if you want the best chance to improve your SEO value as quickly as possible, then theming and cleaning can really help you!

The idea of deleting, removing, and updating content from your website might not at first seem the most obvious way to improve the SEO on your site! Giving your site an SEO spring clean though, is in fact, an essential aspect of SEO.

Removing pages might not at first seem very appealing I appreciate!

Deleting content you put great effort into writing in the past. I get it! It is rough I know. But it can be a very quick way to give your site an SEO Boost!

So you do need to go through your site if you have old posts.

As you go through ask yourself honestly if these posts have any relevance at all anymore. If they have no relevance, I suggest you delete them!

Action: Remove any posts that clearly are not related anymore to your niche. Be brave!

2. Update and Refresh Old Content That is Still Relevant

Once you have got rid of pages that are blatantly holding your site back, the next thing is to look at all the other pages and consider what you can update!

Search engines such as Google love to see content updated or what, in blogging terms, we call ‘Content Upgrades’.

Updating content to make it more relevant is a sure sign to Google that you are a genuine blogger or site owner who is actively keeping your site relevant.

Do a search for a term such as ‘Blogging tools’ and you will find that many of the results have titles with the year in it.

These bloggers have updated the content for 2019 to show Google that the post is up-to-date and relevant (see below).

Action: Do content upgrades on any content that can be brought up-to-date.

3. Look for Any Broken Links and Fix Them

Over time, sites that you link out to can change and this can mean you end up with broken links on your site.

Likewise, you might have changed the URL of a page or moved content and forgotten to update links within your site. It happens to us all.

Broken link checker tool — Broken Link Checker Plug-in

One of the easiest ways to keep up-to-date with any broken links you have on your site is to use the Broken Links Checker Plugin tool.

If you don’t want to use a plug-in, then you can also use the SEO Spider tool to check your site for dead links.

Action: Do a broken links check and fix any dead links.

4. Search Your Google Console for Any Site Errors

Using Google Console is FREE and it is an extremely handy tool and easy and quick to set up.

Google will inform you of any site issues that they identify with your site and display them on your console.

Ideally, you will check this once a week or month but the truth is that many of us never get around to it!

Action: Ensure you have Google Console set-up and fix any issues highlighted.

5. Check New Internal Link Possibilities

If you do a spring clean each year, you will no doubt have created a bunch of new posts since you last did the checks.

And the chances are that many of the newer pages are not linked to from your old posts quite simply because these new posts didn’t exist at the time.

So either as part of Point 2 in this list (content upgrades) or as an individual task, go through all your posts quickly (this does not need to take long at all) and scan through your posts for any terms that are related to other pages on your site and link that term to that page.

For example, if you have text saying “advice on how to use keywords in posts” on a page, then I would link that to my blog page that I created a few weeks ago and that relates exactly to that.

Action: Go through your blog posts and add in any new internal links that you can.

6. Check Your Site Speed

It can be worth checking your site speed regularly but, if it is not something you have thought much about doing before, then add it to your spring cleaning list.

Site speed is certainly one of the considerations in the Google search engine algorithms so do think about how you can speed up your site.

To test your site speed, you can use:

GTMetrik – FREE to use and used by many web managers.
Google Speed Check

Action: Give your site a speed check and document it on an excel spreadsheet (or somewhere else). Start doing a monthly speed check and check and consider the suggestions from GTMetrik or Google Speed check results.

7. Extra Checks

Copyright Year

Make sure that your copyright message at the bottom of your site is showing the correct year.

About Us Page

Is your about us page up-to-date? Have you added any new achievements or anything that is relevant to tell your readers about yourself (and your team)?