Retrofitting Your Website for Better SEO in the AI World

We’ve been discussing search engine optimization best practices, which make a great blueprint for building a new website. But what if you aren’t ready to start all over? Here’s a checklist for retrofitting the website you already have:

Except for a few specific cases, you won’t have to throw out the baby with your website’s bathwater. Instead, you can identify where to make changes, prioritize those changes by Return On Investment, and then start knocking them off your list. Planning to address low-hanging fruit and budgeting for bigger updates will make the most of your time and resources while giving you the powerhouse website you want. Use the following checklist to personalize your priorities.

1. Clarify and beef up your technical foundation

• Audit your website for speed and mobile performance
• Clean up your sitemap and robots.txt files for crawlability issues
• Apply structured data (schema) for your website’s pages, products, FAQs, etc.
• Optimize for mobile-first indexing, especially responsive layout and touch-friendly navigation
• Check your HTTPS, canonical tags, and proper redirects to avoid duplicate content issues

2. Enhance your website content with multimedia

• Optimize your images with descriptive alt text to capture improvements in AI image indexing
• Add transcripts to multimedia content, both for better accessibility and increased SEO indexing
• Create infographics and charts that can be embedded and shared as AI summary reference material
• Publish short-form videos or audio snippets for growing AI video results

3. Consolidate and optimize your business’s brand in search

• Clean up all citations to use consistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone)
• Update your Google Business Profile and other relevant online directories
• Add schema markup for categories such as Local Business, Local Organization, Local Product, or Service, etc.
• Encourage user reviews on Google, Yelp, and industry directories
• Get backlinks from trusted sources like news outlets and industry associations

4. Add to and rework your web content to reinforce your brand

• Choose a few main themes and write content around them to build your authority
• Know your users search intent to include those search terms in your content
• Add glossary or definition pages to encourage scraping by AI summary
• Add first-hand experience content such as case studies, reviews, and testimonials
• Highlight trust signals, including security badges, associations, and certifications

5. Set and follow an update routine

• Use GA4 and Search Console to track what’s working and what’s not
• Regularly update your website’s pages to maintain freshness
• Repurpose your content across formats, for instance, a blog post becomes a video which becomes an infographic
• Audit your website on a regular basis to stay ahead of changes instead of falling behind

Digital marketing is in a new era. Your website may have been in fighting shape a few years ago, but is it prepared to do battle in today’s arena? We’ve been getting more and more calls from business owners concerned about dwindling website results and puzzled by the causes. Our Business Strategy SEO Audit reports how your website is performing in search right now and what your competitors are doing, so you can strategize improvements and opportunities to leap ahead. Contact us today to learn more.

Photo by Katie Brittle
Photo by SpaceX

Kate GingoldKate Gingold

I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.

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I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.

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