Your Houston area competitor has an awesome website. Yours does not look that good. Some of the content is also outdated. It is time for an update. Hold on! Awesome or not, your site has strong SEO equity. The Houston SEO strategies you used when the site was created continue to work for you now. What happens to your hard-fought equity and solid search engine rankings if you update?
You could lose everything. Does that mean you should not update? Not at all. In fact, updating content is a great opportunity to do even better — if you do it the right way.
Follow These Five Tips to Avoid and SEO Disaster
1. Devise a Plan
Develop a Houston search engine optimization blueprint before you do anything else. Why? Everything from your updated site’s content to its architecture impacts the way Google indexes everything. Define workable goals. Do not settle for just maintaining your rankings. Make it a goal to do better.
2. Crawl for Data
Use a website crawler such as Screaming Frog or SEO Spider Tool to get accurate data on each URL in your current site. The resulting report provides vital information on what to build as well as problems to address as you update.
Possible issues include:
- Broken links
- Page titles duplicated or missing
- Missing metadata
- Duplicate content
3. Run a Rank Report
Use SERPs Rank Checker or Bulk Google Rank Checker to find out how well your site performs when it comes to specific keywords. When you run a rank report, observe which keywords and phrases rank high and which you need to work on to improve rankings.
4. You Have the Current Site’s Data. Now What?
Analyze the rank and crawl reports that outline performance levels for each page. Evaluate the Houston search engine marketing strategies you used before. Figure out why some pages rank better than others. Address issues detailed in the site crawler report to make sure they do not carry over to the updated site.
5. Use 301 Redirects
Removing pages during an update does not mean they disappear from Google. As you revise content, avoid losing your SEO standings with 301 redirects on eliminated pages. A 301 automatically sends users to a relevant new page. You will lose some equity, but a 301 passes approximately 90 percent of its ranking power on to the new page. That’s nothing to sneeze at.
Planning an update, analyzing data, implementing SEO and testing 301 redirects takes time. If you do not have the time or the expertise, think about hiring an experienced Houston SEO professional for help. Give Bizopia a call.