We’ve all experienced a point in our lives where we’re stressed for time. Life gets busy, and you might wonder where you can cut some corners to save time. Perhaps one of those places is your website. In a busy season, some people ignore their website completely — and while we certainly don’t recommend this strategy, we’ve got some ideas to save you time managing your website’s SEO.
Consider which pages matter most
Here’s a dirty little secret you won’t hear from website designers very often: the pages on your website are not all equally important. Especially if you create content frequently, you may have hundreds of posts and pages on your website. If you don’t have time to optimize everything for SEO, which posts and pages matter most?
First, you’ll want to ensure every page in your navigation bar. You’ll also want to ensure that your posts that get the most traction in search or on social media are properly optimized. But is it okay to let some of your posts slip through the cracks and not optimize them properly? Yes. Your site as a whole won’t be punished in search engine results of some posts aren’t properly optimized. They just won’t show up as frequently on Google searches.
Use your first paragraph as an excerpt and meta description
SEO optimization adds a couple of extra items to your list of tasks to complete whenever you create new content. But if you’re short on time, it doesn’t have to be that way. Compose your search engine meta description first to ensure it fits the correct character length, and you can then use that content elsewhere. If needed, use it as the first paragraph of your content and your excerpt as well.
Automate what you can
Do you find yourself repeating tasks every time you create new content? Consider if there’s a way you can automate those repeated tasks. Whether you decide to use Jetpack or IFTTT to take care of your social media scheduling or you create a template in Photoshop or use an app like Canva for featured images, try to find ways to simplify any tasks you repeat to save time. The same is true for SEO as well. If you create separate images for Facebook and Twitter apart from your featured image, can you use one of those as your featured image instead? If you create a meta description for search engines separately from your post excerpt, can you use the same text for both? Simplifying these tasks will help you cut down on the time you spend creating your content.
