Search engine optimization (SEO) practices are now commonplace with most business websites. However, without the help of a professional firm to properly execute an SEO strategy, DIY efforts can easily create a cluttered website that fails to provide desired results. While your website is an ever-evolving tool, sometimes it doesn’t hurt to pare down certain elements when success grinds to a halt. If you know that you’re putting in the work but aren’t seeing the conversions your brand needs, it may be time to declutter your website. Try out our five decluttering tips to get your website’s traffic back in the fast lane.

Review Your Website on All Devices

The first thing you need to do once you notice your conversions falling away is to examine how your website shows up on different devices. Desktops, phones, and tablets are all different mediums that require different web development features to properly display a website. While you’re checking that there are no visible issues pushing your audience away, we also suggest using a program like Screaming Frog to run an in-depth site audit.

By the time you’ve completed this first step towards decluttering your site, you’ll understand the following issues behind your pages:

• Your site may not be mobile-friendly (but it has to be)
• Metadata errors behind the scenes
• 404 pages that go nowhere
• Page speed issues
• Insight into how your website is performing as a whole

A site audit and visual review are excelslent ways to save time during a site cleanup and revamp. Both approaches give users a clear idea of how they should map their attack plan and get their site back in shape as fast as possible.

Re-visit Your Brand’s Goals

Before taking a virtual sledgehammer to your site, take a moment to sit down with your team and review your brand’s overall SEO goals. After all, changes may only need to be minimal updates and not a complete SEO strategy overhaul. Once you’ve analyzed your analytic data, take a look back and find out how well your SEO approach did over time and if you were ever close to meeting the goals you set for yourself in a specific timeframe. If you find that your approach actually helped increase your amount of customers over its course of use, and the fallout has only been within the last few months, you may not have to make too many huge changes.

Here are some of the biggest culprits behind keyword ranking drops

• You never adjusted the keywords you need to rank for. Now, your site’s keywords are no longer relevant.
• Your site continues to rank on other search engines but doesn’t show up on Google. This indicates that you have a Google penalty against your site that you should immediately address.
• Natural changes in what matters to your audience. Therefore, search engines will prioritize pages with content that gives users what they want. If you haven’t updated your keywords, chances are your content has grown stale and needs some sprucing up (more on that later).
• General server issues
• Too many redirects
• Poor navigation options on your website, and more!

All of these issues will require tweaks in your SEO strategy that still allow for your goals to remain on track. The right SEO team behind your site has the experience to prioritize your site’s needs and implement quick changes that once again prove your overall strategy was never off course, it just needed a tune up.

Break Your Bad SEO Habits

Once you get into the groove of an SEO strategy, it’s easy to pick up some bad habits as you continuously believe your stagnant results just need time to flourish. Although SEO doesn’t have a set amount of time where it clicks for a brand, there shouldn’t be months on end without some type of positive results. If you aren’t seeing any movement after 3 to 6 months, you may have picked up some bad SEO habits you need to KonMari ASAP.

You’ve Allowed Duplicate Metadata into the Fold

Duplicate content is something we can all agree is an SEO sin. However, many people don’t realize that duplicate metadata can negatively impact who decides to click on your site. If you only use a generic meta description for each of your pages, you’re missing out on an opportunity to create a description that accurately reflects a person’s search inquiry and entices them to click on your page. A generic description may get you some keywords that attract audiences, but it isn’t enough to prove as successful as unique metadata content.

Your Content is Too Similar

If you are a site with a lot of location pages, we understand that writing unique content around the same services can seem impossible. However, it’s something you have to do in order to get your content ranking well. Many brands with multiple locations keep their content the same and only switch out the city or state, thinking that this move is enough to qualify the pages as unique. Search engines will quickly take notice of what you’ve done and deem your content low-quality, which, in turn, takes down the rankings of your site as a whole.

You Create Content With Only Quantity in Mind

While we’re on the subject of quality content, one of the worst bad habits you could pick up is creating content solely for the sake of using keywords. We aren’t saying that it’s bad to churn out piece after piece, but make sure that if you do, the quality is present and it gives your readers something of value that they didn’t know before reading your content.

You Don’t Keep Up With SEO Best Practices

SEO and the algorithms that control its success are always on the move. Relying on old practices that paid off in the past without looking to the future is a dangerous gamble that no one should take with the management of their site. Fortunately, keeping up with the Joneses is easy these days, and many sites like Moz and Search Engine Journal offer email subscription services that automatically keep you in the loop with current best practices that you need to implement within your site.

Give Your Poorly Performing Pages Life

If your analytics review reveals a downfall in the performance of many key pages, all you really need to do is give them a quick content spruce-up.

Pages that once ranked well and begin to fail are typically due to the following reasons:

• Different keywords are your industry’s current focus
• Your brand moved into a different direction
• Your industry itself moved into a different direction
•  Your current content doesn’t provide enough relevant information on your products and services

Fortunately, all of these reasons behind pages dropping in rankings have an easily implemented solution: Add more content! No matter what anyone tells you, content is, and likely will always be king. When it comes to Google, the more relevant and informative your content is, the greater your pages will rank.

Don’t let crummy content get the best of you!

Review your content, expand it, add in new keywords, and make it something that audiences can relate to, today! It may take some hard work to get your content where it needs to be, but we guarantee that this essential step will help boost your website’s authority amongst Google and audiences.

Is Your Website an Index Hoarder? Dallas SEO Dogs can Help!

If you’ve reviewed the analytics and found that your website is full of useless pages or has mass amounts of content that needs updating, don’t let this revelation overwhelm you. Instead of freezing up due to not knowing where to start your spring cleaning, reach out to the experts at Dallas SEO Dogs. We will take the time to get to know your brand, analyze your SEO progress and ultimately make all of the additions and deletions your website needs to reclaim its title as an industry ranking powerhouse. Contact us today to learn more about our services or to schedule your free consultation with a member of our team.   About the author: We\'re not just a search engine optimization company. We\'re experts in all aspects of Digital Marketing, from Web Design and Development to Social Media, Content and Online Advertising. Since 2005, Dallas SEO Dogs has helped thousands of companies in Texas and across the world improve their brand image and online visibility and achieve tremendous growth.