website maintenance + seo

increase speed, accessibility, rankings.

Site maintenance and search engine optimization (SEO) work together to ensure that a website remains effective, accessible, and competitive.

Regular website maintenance involves updating content, fixing broken links, improving performance, and ensuring that all features function properly. These tasks help create a positive experience for visitors and prevent technical issues that could drive users away.

One important aspect of website maintenance is keeping software, plugins, and security systems up to date. Outdated systems can create vulnerabilities that expose a website to hacking, malware, or data loss. Regular updates help maintain security while also ensuring compatibility with modern browsers and devices. A secure and properly functioning website is more likely to maintain stable performance, which supports both usability and search engine visibility.

Search engines favor websites that are regularly updated with relevant, high-quality content. Adding new blog posts, refreshing existing pages, and improving keyword optimization can help a website maintain or improve its search rankings. Maintaining accurate metadata, headings, and structured content helps search engines better understand and index the site's pages.

Optimizing page load speed, ensuring mobile responsiveness, and fixing crawl errors all help search engines evaluate a website more positively. Faster websites not only rank better in many cases but also provide a smoother experience for users. Addressing technical issues such as broken links, duplicate content, and outdated redirects also helps search engines crawl and index the site more efficiently.

Ultimately, regular updates ensure that the website remains secure, functional, and relevant, while SEO efforts help attract new visitors through improved search engine rankings.

monthly maintenance + seo tasks

Review Performance

You can't improve what you don't measure.

  • Check traffic trends in Google Analytics
  • Review keyword rankings in Google Search Console
  • Identify:
    • Pages losing traffic
    • Pages gaining traffic
  • Compare month-over-month:
    • Organic sessions
    • Click-through rate (CTR)
    • Average position

Testing Tools

Improve Page Speed

The speed at which a page downloads is the single most important factor in determining visitor satisfaction with a website. A few short years ago a site had 5-7 seconds to engage a visitor before the site was perceived as slow. Today, studies have shown you have about 2 seconds to download a page before the visitor gets frustrated and leaves.

The goal is to serve pages, images, CSS, Javascript, et al. in files that are as small as possible, and to serve those sources in the most efficient manner to provide the site visitor with a better experience.

  • Compress resources on the server to reduce bandwidth in transmission
  • Minify resources on the web page to shrink file size
  • Optimize images to reduce the file size
  • Rearranging the order in which these sources download
  • Eliminate render-blocking elements from the download
  • Utilize browser caching

Testing Tools

Improve Standards Compliance

Refers to the adherence to coding practices in relation to the use of HTML, with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to define the layout, colors, and fonts of a web page. Following the WC3 (World Wide Web Consortium) web standards helps ensure that site visitors — regardless of their browser, device, or operating system — can view the content of a web page.

Standards compliant websites are more likely to load faster in a browser and tend to have better search engine rankings than their non-standards compliant counterparts.

Testing Tools

Improve Accessibility

Google strongly recommends the site should be accessible for visitors with visual and motor function impairments. By following these recommendations, the site becomes better for everyone.

WAVE is a suite of evaluation tools that helps authors make their web content more accessible to individuals with disabilities. WAVE can identify many accessibility and Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) errors, but also facilitates human evaluation of web content.

Testing Tools

Check Site Integrity

Things change. As sites get older, the likelihood of things breaking, becoming redundant or extraneous increases. Links to external sources and internal sources become outdated and possibly no longer work, or require confusing redirects. Design standards and practices change constantly.

  • Find and fix broken links
  • Find, fix or remove orphaned files
  • Ensure all images contain ALT tags and that the tags convey meaning to site visitors
  • Ensure all relevant <meta> tags are in the page head code and are used properly, convey meaning:
    • charset
    • viewport
    • canonical link
    • description
    • author
    • robots
  • Ensure headings structure is valid (<H1> followed by <H2>, followed by <H3>, etc.)
  • Ensure XML sitemap of pages is updated
  • Ensure XML sitemap of images is updated
  • Ensure the titles, page headings, and topics for EACH PAGE are unique

Testing Tools

  • arrow_rightLink Checker Tool Add-on in Firefox Browser
  • arrow_rightSEO META Testing Tool Add-on in Google Chrome Browser
  • arrow_rightMangools SEO Extension Tool - Headings Tab in Firefox Browser

Keyword Optimization

visitor search intent shifts constantly.

  • Refresh existing pages with:
    • New keywords
    • Better headings (<H1>-<H3>)
    • Update site content
  • Add Long-tail keywords (higher conversion)
  • Local modifiers (if applicable)

Testing Tools

format_quoteWhat is most remarkable to me are the number inquiries we are receiving for our services from people who found us on Google. John's expertise in SEO and website design has been an integral part in doubling my business over the past 12 months! Thank you, John! — Mike Jotautas, Swim & Triathlon Coach,
Barrys Coaching