Boost Your Website’s Traffic: 17 Late Night SEO Optimization Tips [LNIM260]

Hook

Your website is sitting there with years of content, but traffic has flatlined. Sound familiar? In this jam-packed episode of the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, I share the 17 specific SEO optimization steps I'm using to revitalize the Late Night IM site — and every single one of them applies to your website too, whether you're fixing up an old site or starting fresh.

What You'll Learn

• How to find and fix broken links that are signaling neglect to Google
• How to define a clear keyword strategy after years of scattered content
• When to prune old content (and how to redirect properly)
• On-page SEO optimization techniques that still move the needle
• Site speed fixes that improve both rankings and user experience
• How to audit and clean up your backlink profile
• Quick wins: social links, copyright dates, About pages, and more

Summary

After more than a decade of publishing, the Late Night Internet Marketing site had accumulated the kind of SEO debt that happens to any long-running website: hundreds of broken links from defunct affiliate programs, scattered keyword targeting, outdated social media references (yes, including Google+), and pages that nobody had visited in years.

In this episode, I walk through my 17-step checklist for revitalizing the site, using it as a real-world case study. The steps cover the full spectrum of technical and on-page SEO.

It starts with the basics: finding and fixing broken links, which signal to Google that you're not maintaining your site. Then defining a clear keyword strategy — identifying the specific terms you want to rank for and mapping content to those terms. Next, auditing existing content with a tool like Screaming Frog to identify pages with no traffic that should be pruned or redirected.

From there, the checklist covers on-page optimization (titles, meta descriptions, headers, body content), site speed improvements (image compression, code minification, CDNs), mobile responsiveness, HTTPS enforcement, and backlink profile cleanup using tools like Ahrefs.

The episode also covers often-overlooked items: updating social media links, optimizing the homepage for conversions, refreshing the About page, ensuring consistent NAP (name, address, phone) information, eliminating duplicate content, implementing canonicalization, and checking robots.txt for accidental blocks.

Key Takeaways

• Treat SEO as an ongoing checklist, not a one-time project. Pick a few items each week, and in four to six months your site's SEO will be dramatically better.
• Broken links are the low-hanging fruit. After 10+ years, I had hundreds. Fix them first — it's the clearest signal to Google that you're actively maintaining your site.
• Prune ruthlessly. If a page has no traffic, isn't ranking, and isn't worth updating, delete it and redirect the URL to something relevant.
• Site speed matters more than ever. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to diagnose issues. Modern hosting platforms and CDNs handle most optimization automatically — you just need to make sure everything is turned on.
• Clean up your backlink profile. Sketchy or toxic links from old campaigns can drag down your entire site. Use Ahrefs to identify and disavow them.
• Don't forget the obvious stuff. Outdated copyright dates, dead social media links, and a weak About page all erode trust with both Google and visitors.
• SEO drives free, targeted traffic to build your email list — the one business asset you truly own.

What's Changed Since This Episode Aired

Since March 2024, Google has released additional helpful content and core algorithm updates that further reward well-maintained, authoritative sites. AI-generated content has flooded the web, making genuine expertise and E-E-A-T signals even more important for rankings. The 17 tips in this episode remain the foundational checklist — if anything, doing this work now sets you apart from the flood of low-effort AI content sites.

Resources Mentioned

• Screaming Frog SEO Spider
• Ubersuggest by Neil Patel
• Google PageSpeed Insights
• TinyPNG Image Compression
• Ahrefs Backlink Checker
• Apply for a Complimentary Coaching Session
• Subscribe on Apple Podcasts

Related Episodes

• LNIM261: The Importance of Email Marketing — Lessons from Leslie Samuel
• LNIM259: Mastering Copywriting — The Key to Unlocking Your Sales Potential
• LNIM099: Responding to a Google Thin Content Manual Site Action

Keep the Conversation Going

Which of these 17 tips are you tackling first? I'd love to hear about your SEO wins. Reach out at [email protected] or leave a comment on this post. If this episode helped you, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts — it helps other entrepreneurs find us.