KonMari method for SEO: how to conduct an SEO audit for your website
An SEO audit sounds intimidating, technical, and maybe even scary to some. But it shouldn’t be. If you say “The KonMari Method” can really be applied to basically anything–even in the digital world and SEO audit. Not so scary right?
Before even beginning to using the KonMari method to perform an SEO audit, you need to understand what it is, why you should do it, and why it’s important. You also need to understand what “Spark Joy” means, and how it might just the saving grace of your website.
So what is an SEO audit?
In its simplest definition, SEO audit is an evaluation of your websites search engine performance to identify what is causing you not to not appear on top in search engine results.
There are lots of reasons why you should perform an audit. Consequently, there are a ton of pages that explain how to perform an SEO audit but some are complicated, while others are vague.
Applying the KonMari method into the mix is just a good bonus. You can get the essence of the KonMari method by just going through this post. But, it’s better if you do more research on Marie Kondo’s actual method. That way you can learn the method through her own words.
The first step in almost every SEO audit checklist is to do your due research on how to best perform the audit and in this case, the KonMari method is part of that research. Once you’ve done all of that you’re ready.
Do the entire SEO audit in one day
According to the KonMari method, whenever you decide to clean up and declutter you do it all in one day. The whole premise of the idea is to not leave any room for “Oh, I can clean that up tomorrow” moments.
By deciding to clean everything in one day and committing to it, you already know that there’s no room for second-guessing. You just don’t have the time for it.
First, you should look for the tools you would need to conduct an SEO audit. There are a lot of SEO audit tools out there, so get familiar with them to conduct an effective SEO audit. So take some time to familiarize yourself with the tools, their respective functions, and how they can help you in performing the audit.
Once you get to know how each of the tools function and what they can identify what’s causing your site to under-perform then step two comes next.
Research on your benchmarks, know where you’re under-performing
Once you have the tools ready, you did your due research and are now ready to perform an actual SEO Audit. In the KonMari method, you have to accept the fact that there is a lot of clutter in your home, and that you have to clean it up.
Seo auditing follows the same idea. There are things in your site that are cluttering it up and now you want to clean it up. Use the tools to you’ve gotten familiar with and use them to identify the key points on your site that are causing all the problems.
In the Konmari method, you have to look through every single part of your home, leaving no spot unturned and start looking at where all the clutter is.
For websites, the tools might say identify that your site has way too many redirects, or that your web loading speed is taking too long. By identifying what’s wrong with your site, you’re going to have a much easier time in doing the next steps of the SEO audit. Now that you see what’s cluttering your site, you just have to remove the clutter.
Use KonMari on your keywords
Next on the SEO audit checklist is knowing your competitors and what they’re doing, what keywords they are using.
Identify what keywords you use as well as your competitors. Using the same keywords with even just one of your competitors will cause your site to underperform. So conducting an extensive keyword analysis is essential to an effective SEO audit.
Once you identify common keywords with your competitors as well as keywords that might confuse search engines, you can then decide what to keep and what to throw away. If you are dead set in using some keywords that your competitors have, try tweaking them to make them more unique.
The more keywords you have that others don’t have will really go a long way in making sure your site gets the attention it deserves. Don’t overdo it though. Having too many keywords will also negatively affect your website. Finding the right balance of short and long tail keywords is key.
Use a flashlight to look at the corners of your website
When doing the KonMari method at home, you start to see clutter and junk that you normally would never see if you didn’t actively look. The same goes for SEO auditing, if you don’t intentionally try to identify where things are going amuck, you’ll never see it.
Gathering data during an SEO audit will be useful in the future. Once you see the potential in the data you’ve gathered, you can then avoid making the same mistake over and over again. At home, once you identify hotspot areas of clutter and start cleaning it out, you then know that it’s an area where you should avoid cluttering again.
Categorize everything, then start to KonMari all of them
Seo Auditing is called SEO Auditing for a reason. SEO should always be the primary focus of the audit. In the KonMari method, SEO would be considered a category. The method focuses on cleaning up by category and not by location.
In SEO auditing that should also be your method of cleaning up. Start with cleaning your SEO keywords then you can move on to cleaning your web design and other categories.
One of the most discussed factors in SEO auditing focuses on improving your web speed. Propelrr has a step by step guide on how you can improve your overall web speed to 2 seconds.
Keywords not “Sparking Joy” enough? Get rid of it
Remember Marie Kondo’s iconic line when you do an SEO audit. “Sparks Joy” means if something doesn’t make you happy, get rid of it. Same goes for modifying keywords to make your site more unique. If you start modifying keywords and it doesn’t “Sparks Joy” throw it out. If you as the person conducting the SEO audit and making changes don’t like the keyword, your visitors won’t like them even more.
Fold images more than once
Marie Kondo has a famous way to fold clothes. Every single piece of clothing must be folded in a certain way to save space and achieve uniformity within categories. You can apply this “folding” method in optimizing images for your websites.
One of the main culprits of poor web performance is the loading of large images and video files. So you should put a particular focus on making the image files a small as possible without sacrificing the quality of the image itself.
If it’s not working, dispose of them
Links in your site are good, but there might be links in your site that don’t work anymore and that could cause problems for search engines trying to identify whether or not your site is reputable enough to be on top parts of a search page.
Using a tool like Majestic can help you identify the relevant links on your website. It can help you make educated decisions on which links to keep and which links to throw away.
It’s not perfect, but it’s a good start
If you think that you only need to an SEO audit once a year then you’re in for one hell of a wake-up call. Search engines are constantly evolving and new algorithms are constantly applied by the numerous search engines that your site can show up on.
Applying the KonMari method on an SEO audit isn’t perfect. It’s a simple yet effective way to identify the most pressing areas of your site that need improvement and quick solutions for them. You should always conduct an SEO audit once you start noticing a lack of performance for a certain period of time.
Applying the KonMari method will help you lessen the amount of small but frequent site cleanups since you already cleaned them as much as you can by category in an organized manner.
Test your KonMari SEO audited website
It’s the end of the SEO audit checklist. You’ve cleaned up, de-cluttered, and optimized as your site as much as you can using the KonMari Method. Now it’s time to run your benchmarks tests that you did at the beginning of the SEO audit checklist.
You should have a good amount of improvement in all your benchmarks. Once you see the website wide improvements and you’ve given yourself a good pat on the back. You can start cleaning your home too.