Search engine optimization can be an incredibly complex process when done properly taking care of all the nuances and issues presented by different search engines. The difficulty of implementing SEO is one reason why many people tend to avoid it altogether or resort to taking short cuts. Luckily, there are quite a few SEO tasks that are simpler and do not take too much effort but still have a lot of impact on your online visibility.

Remove Low Quality or Outdated Content

While you may have created the website content with the best of intentions, some of it may be pretty useless at the moment. It is quite evident that outdated content or low-quality content cannot satisfy users and this will be reflected in high bounce rates that can eventually drive down your page rankings. Now that you know that it is import to spring-clean your website once in a while, the next step is to identify the offending content. Perhaps the most comprehensive and simplest way of doing this is to generate a list of URLs with a tool like Screaming Frog. Now you need to visit every page one after the other to review the content. However, you will be able to achieve quicker results if you were to use the Google Search Console to export a CSV file of the Google indexed URLs that can then be sorted according to the traffic volume. Start with the pages that have no or minimal traffic and work your way up.

Improve the Quality of the Content

If you have been working on your content strategy, there will be a lot of content that is still pretty useful; however, you need to ensure that it is improved to give users a better experience. Typical tactics include improving the readability by editing it so that it can boost the engagement rate and making it more comprehensive by adding dimensions that were not covered earlier. You can also take this opportunity to include relevant data, statistics, research, and case studies that can make the content more engaging and authoritative. A leading Adelaide SEO for digital marketing company suggests using PDFs, infographics, images, and videos to boost the engagement of the content. Since strategically, the intention is to expend the least effort but still get easy wins, the focus should be on content that is already being ranked high not topics that have no visibility.

Update Internal Links

Internal links are often ignored when discussing SEO because the focus is invariably on inbound links, however, they can have a really big impact on your online visibility. This makes it important for them to be reviewed and updated from time to time, especially when the website content has been moved or deleted. Internal links should invariably point to the pages that are sought to be ranked well and also on pages that have content that is relevant to the destination of the link. You should also ensure that the links are direct. This can be done using tools like SEMrush or Screaming Frog that crawl the website and identify the redirect links. If you are using a WordPress site, automating link management is very easy as there are several plugins that you can use to specify the words or phrases that can automatically link to pre-determined URLs. These plugins permit you to edit, create, or delete links instantly throughout the website regardless of the number of pages.

Improve Page Loading Speed

According to https://moz.com, the longer the loading time of the web pages, the less lead and conversions! This is because users are very impatient and tend to abandon pages that take more than a few seconds to load. The boost in the bounce rate also hurts your page rankings, which makes improvement in page loading speed a vital task. Even though some amount of technical expertise is required to improve page-loading speeds, it is still worthwhile to pursue it because the effects can be noticed immediately. The first thing that you should do is to move away from your website from a shared server that may be used by hundreds of other websites denying you adequate bandwidth. Another relatively easy thing to do is to reduce the number of HTTP calls – the lesser the number of calls the faster the website performance. Removing unnecessary plugins, merging multiple JavaScript and CSS files into single files as well as using CSS to minimize the number of image files can be immensely helpful. Optimizing the image and media files can significantly boost the page loading speed.

Conclusion

As you will observe, you do not need to expend a lot of effort, time, and money to improve the SEO performance of your website. All you need to do is to prioritize your tasks and tackle the ones that are not only easy to execute but also fetch good returns.