Boost Your Website's Traffic: 17 Late Night SEO Optimization Secrets Unveiled [LNIM260]

Hey Late Nighters! In this jam-packed episode, I dive deep into my current SEO journey as I work to revitalize the Late Night Internet Marketing site. I share 17 actionable SEO tips that you can apply to breathe new life into an old website, or get a new site started on the right foot.

A key theme is the importance of consistently growing your email list, one of the few business assets you truly own. SEO is a powerful way to drive targeted organic traffic to build that list.

I also have an exciting announcement – I’m giving away a limited number of complimentary, no-strings-attached coaching sessions to listeners. It’s my way of providing massive value to this awesome community. Just head to latenightim.com/apply to throw your hat in the ring for a full, private, high-impact session with me on your business.

As I mention in the episode:

“Email lists are one of the few assets in an internet business that you actually own, that actually belong to you. It doesn’t belong to YouTube or Facebook or Twitter or X or whatever we’re calling that these days. Your email list is your asset.”

“I’ve decided that I’m always going to have a coaching slot or two open for complimentary coaching sessions – the full-blown, high-ticket, high-end experience available to listeners for free.”

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Show Notes

In this value-packed episode, I walk through 17 specific action steps to revitalize an old website through strategic SEO. I use my own site, latenightinternetmarketing.com, as a case study, but these principles apply whether you’re fixing up an existing site or starting a new one.

The first crucial step is to find and fix any broken links, as these signal to Google that you’re not maintaining your site. After 10+ years, I have hundreds of broken links from defunct affiliate programs, changed URLs, and more. It’s a big cleanup job.

The next priority is to define a clear keyword strategy – identify the specific terms you want to rank for, and map out the targeted content pieces that will drive those rankings. With over a decade of content, my site’s keyword targeting had become scattered and out of alignment.

Then, audit your existing content using a tool like Screaming Frog. Identify any pages that have little or no traffic and are no longer relevant. These should be pruned, with the URL redirected to a relevant page.

“If you’ve got content that Screaming Frog tells you no one is visiting, it’s not ranking in the search engines, you determine it to be no longer relevant and not worth updating, then I would delete that content from your site and make sure you redirect that old link to something relevant so that you don’t create more broken links.”

For the pages you keep, do thorough on-page SEO optimization. Ensure the titles, meta descriptions, headers, and body content utilizes your target keywords naturally.

Site speed is another key factor, especially for older websites that may have accumulated code bloat over the years. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to diagnose issues, and implement fixes like image compression, code minification, CDNs, and more to speed up load times.

“Most Great website hosting platforms that include a CDN or, if you’re using Cloudflare, they do a lot of this speed optimization work for you. You just need to make sure that all that stuff is turned on and you’re using all the modern optimization tools available.”

It’s also critical to have a mobile-friendly, responsive design. Check how your site performs on Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test and correct any issues.

Another “trust signal” for Google is having your entire site served over secure HTTPS rather than HTTP. Don’t let any stragglers slip through the cracks.

Analyze and clean up your backlink profile as well, using a tool like Ahrefs. Identify and disavow any spammy or toxic links – these may be dragging your site down in the rankings.

“If you’ve got sketchy or toxic links pointing to your site, maybe because you or someone else did some kind of sketchy backlink campaign, you need to disavow those links so that you can make sure that the links Google considers are high quality.”

Some other important factors to check:

Ensure your social media links are up to date (embarrassingly, I still had some Google+ references!)
Optimize your key pages (especially the homepage) for user experience and conversions
Update your copyright date in the footer
Revamp your About page to showcase your authority
Ensure your name, address and phone number (NAP) info is consistent across all listings
Eliminate any duplicate content issues
Optimize your titles/meta descriptions for click-throughs from the SERPs
Implement canonicalization to specify the primary URL for any duplicate or similar pages
Check that your robots.txt file isn’t blocking anything it shouldn’t

Whew, it’s a lot – but the traffic payoff of strong SEO is worth it. Treat this as a checklist, not a one-time task. Tackle a few items each week and watch your rankings climb over the next several months.

“This is kind of an ongoing checklist that you can be doing all the time. You don’t need to do all of this stuff all the time. Maybe each week, pick a thing off this list and then four, five, six months from now, your website SEO will be much, much better. And what’s great about that is it gets you free traffic.”

Resources and Links

Next Steps

I hope you’ve found this episode’s SEO advice as helpful and actionable as I did in revamping the Late Night IM site. I encourage you to implement these techniques diligently – and if you need personalized help, don’t forget to apply for one of the limited complimentary coaching sessions at latenightim.com/apply.

As always, if you got value from this episode, I’d be honored if you’d subscribe to the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast and leave a quick rating or review. And if you know a fellow entrepreneur who’s looking to drive more organic traffic, why not send them a link to this episode?

You can catch up with me on Twitter @latenightim and Instagram @markmason.lnim. Reach out and let me know what SEO tips you found most eye-opening.

Keep grinding, keep ranking, and I’ll see you next week!

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