Signs you should Update your website –
How long has it been since you updated your website? If its been a few month, you should refresh your content by making changes to the copy, tags, or keywords on your company’s site. If its been a few years, it’s safe to say the entirety of your SEO Strategy is outdated.
Not sure if your website is up to date? Take a look at the 5 signs listed below that could indicate it’s time for an update or fill out the form below and let us figure it out for you!
1. Keyword Stuffing
Keyword Stuffing: a term referring to the practice of using a keyword (or multiple keywords) as often as possible on one page with little regard to the keywords relevance or how it reads.
Keyword stuffing is by far the biggest red flag for an SEO Strategy that is outdated. When Google, and other search engines, first launched, keyword density was the basis for their algorithms. Stuffing your webpage chock-full of keywords was an easy way to rank well in their search results.
Luckily for us, the complexity of such search engine algorithms has increased over time. Now instead of taking into account 1 keyword, rankings are based on a plethora of factors that include both content quality and user experience – both of which are now negatively impacted by keyword stuffing.
Take a look at your site. Do any of your pages fit this description? Rewriting them can make a huge difference in your site’s ranking along with making it easier to read for your users.
It can also help you avoid getting a Google Penalty
2. Thin Content
Thin Content: a term referring to pages with little or no added value to the site and its visitors. This includes, but is not limited to, low-quality pages, unhelpful affiliate pages, content on doorway pages, content stolen from other sites, and any content that is automatically generated.
Much like keyword stuffing, pages with thin content serve no real purpose and do not provide visitors with the information they’re looking for. It can also result in a Google Penalty which makes it one of those signs you should update your website.
Webmaster tools will often send out a “thin content” notice – making it pretty clear it is an issue on your site. But, even if you haven’t received such a warning, it’s still a good idea to check through your pages and identify any areas where your content could be improved upon.
Much like keyword stuffing, pages with thin content serve no real purpose and do not provide visitors with the information they’re looking for. It can also result in a Google Penalty.
Webmaster tools will often send out a “thin content” notice – making it pretty clear it is an issue on your site. But, even if you haven’t received such a warning, it’s still a good idea to check through your pages and identify any areas where your content could be improved upon.
3. Broad Keywords
Part of creating an advanced SEO Strategy is choosing the correct keywords. Selecting the right keywords goes well beyond the initial research and if you haven’t updated yours in a while you may in fact be targeting short board keywords.
SEO has come a long way since site owners first began optimizing their pages. They could literally choose to rank for just about whatever keyword they wanted since there were so few sites actively doing SEO. Nowadays you would be hard-pressed to find an industry or even a company that isn’t trying to attract new clientele through the use of keywords. As you can imagine, ranking for any phrase or term is a huge challenge. The broader the keyword the more competitive and challenging it becomes – especially if you’re new to SEO.
Example Time. Let’s say you just started a balloon company. 10 or 15 years ago you may have been able to optimize your homepage for “Balloons” and end up on the very first page of search results.
If you Google “balloons” today, you will come up with about 706,000,000 results in .78 seconds. Unless you happen to be a major international balloon corporation, you don’t stand a chance at ranking for the keyword “Balloons” – again, another one of those signs you should update your website.
Instead of using these overused, short, broad keywords, it would be more beneficial to focus on using long-tail keywords. If our friends over at the Balloon Company were to put this into effect their keywords would resemble something like -“Reusable balloons in Dayton Ohio” or “weatherproof balloons for car dealerships”.
4. Links from Irrelevant Sites
When it comes to a successful SEO Strategy, links from relevant and quality sites are an important SEO signal. Like everything else in SEO you have to earn them, and that begins with focusing on quality over quantity.
As you can imagine, this hasn’t always been true. When SEOs first started link building, the only thing that mattered was that they had a plethora of links pointing to their sites. The result – Link Schemes. Link schemes lead to a lot of site owners paying for links from low-quality sites that most of us would consider ‘spam’ today.
Google has since adjusted its algorithms and has begun to penalize site owners that used these underhanded link-building tactics. Take a look at the links your company has ever paid for. If they are coming from low-quality sites it’s definitely in your best interest to disavow them – sooner rather than later. By disavowing them, you’re showing Google, and other search engines, you aren’t trying to benefit from underhanded links. Helping to not only improve your site’s reputation but also your search engine rankings.
5. Over-Optimized Anchor Text
Last, but certainly not the least of the signs that you should update your website, is the over-optimization of anchor text. It’s not only the links from another site that impact your SEO, but also the links to other pages on your site.
Links within your navigation, helping users find the pages they want, are by far the most important links on your site. However, it’s also very beneficial to include other links within the body of your content. Links that provide other relevant reading or information to supplement the content on that page. If we go back to our Balloon Company example, we could link a photo of our balloons to a section that describes the different components of the balloon display or a section on how those balloons can be used.
Just like with keyword stuffing, Google penalizes over-optimized anchor text and it can actually hurt your site. Instead of using anchor text anywhere and everywhere, use it where it will make sense to your visitors.
If your SEO Strategy is in desperate need of a refresh or you just aren’t sure, Big Shot Mad can help! We have years of experience creating and managing successful SEO strategies for our clients and we pride ourselves on keeping up to date in this ever-evolving industry. We promise to do the same for you! Contact Us TODAY for more information.