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The Effective Way To Clean Up Site Performance Issues

Having a website that performs well is an extremely important factor towards improving your online success. High performing sites are valued by the users that visit your site – as they’ll leave if your site is slow or clunky – and Google’s machine algorithms.

Due to the fact that a well performing site is so important to both searchers and machine algorithms, it’s crucial that you manage your site well and make sure no errors pop through – even the smallest anomaly can have a detrimental effect on rankings, traffic and conversions. We’ve put together this quick article to give you insight into the most effective way to relieve your site of any technical issues that may be harming the SEO value of your site.

Manage Your Strategy

Before you begin on making any changes to your website, you’ll want to make sure that you have a clear idea of all the issues on your site and the level of importance of fixing each one. If you rush into amends before identifying and planning out each issue and its importance, you’re going to be running a site amend strategy that’s very difficult to manage.

Run A Site Audit

The first step you should take to effectively clean-up any site performance issues you may have is to run a site audit. Take a look at every aspect of your website to see where any issues or anomalies pop up, identify and document each problem.

The main things you’re going to want to consider are:

  • Site speed
  • Faulty/spammy links
  • Page errors
  • Broken/incorrect redirects

You’re also going to want to look over your sites content to ensure that it’s of high quality, and includes well-picked relevant keywords for SEO value. When it comes to keywords, you should use a mix of long-tail keywords and more generic terms. Think what a user is likely to search to discover the information that you have on your site and try to incorporate keywords that searchers are likely to use.

Prioritise Performance Issues By Their Impact

There are a lot of different site errors that can occur, but not all of them are as severe as each other. Some site issues can have a detrimental impact on your site, whereas the effect of others can be almost unnoticeable.

For this reason, you’ll want to make sure to prioritise your site performance issues based on their severity, and fix the most negatively impactful problems first.

Priority One Issues

The site performance issues that should be addressed first are any that effect the navigation, visibility or user experience on the site directly. This includes things like broken/incorrect links, low page speeds, blocked pages, errors and redirects.

Priority Two Issues

Any issues regarding content quality and optimisation should be looked at next. These are still very important factors on this site, but Google’s algorithms won’t take so much notice of thin content in comparison to an inaccessible page, and users will think less of bad content than a site full of broken links. When you’ve fixed the sites primary performance issues you should check Meta data, page titles and content quality – ensuring they’re all written to a high standard and optimised with well selected keywords.

Amend Your Sites Issues

When you’ve identified and managed your sites performance issues based on severity, it’s time for you to start making the amends to your site. Start by fixing the most impactful issues, and work your way through the list of tasks until everything has been amended.

Here’s a few of the things you may have to do to boost your websites SEO value:

  • Set up any broken pages with 301 redirects
  • Check robots.txt on the site to ensure crawlers have full access
  • Remove duplicate content
  • Rewrite thin, low quality content & optimise it
  • Check page speed and see how you can work on improving it (if required)
  • Add alt text & tags to any pages that are missing them.

Need Some Help Improving Your Sites Performance?

Think you need some help improving your sites performance from a team of digital marketing professionals? UC4 is a Birmingham branding agency – providing SEO, design, PPC and development services - dedicated to bringing clients from around the area the best possible internet marketing service - raising rankings, increasing traffic and encouraging conversions.

Contact us today to discuss the setup of your digital marketing strategy plan.