Do you find yourself looking for some SEO quick wins to incorporate into your SEO strategy? If so, then this article is perfect for you.
You might’ve heard that SEO is a long-term approach compared to other digital marketing channels, whilst somewhat true, there are plenty of short-term wins you can incorporate into your new SEO strategy to give your site the boost it deserves!
At Embryo, our team of SEO experts and content marketing specialists will look at ways to improve a website’s organic performance through a range of short and long-term approaches. If this sounds like something you would benefit from, feel free to give us a call at 0161 327 2635 or email info@embryo.com. But, before you do that, make sure to give this article a read, as there could be some SEO quick wins that you too could easily implement.
SEO quick wins for optimising content
Google doesn’t like ‘fluff’ content that’s classed as low quality – it doesn’t just mean your page is low quality, but it also impacts the overall quality of your website, meaning it will be harder to rank in the SERPs. From here, you will need to collect a list of pages that you should either edit or remove from your site.
Audit your content performance
Using tools like Google Search Console or AHRefs, export data to gauge how well your core pillar pages and blog posts are currently performing compared to the same period previous year. From here, the goal is to pull pages that have faced significant drops, or have failed to move beyond page 2 rankings.
Once you’ve gathered a list of priority pages with high potential to rank for relevant, high-intent and volumous key words, slot them into a review and optimisation phase.
Factors to consider when reviewing existing content
- Is the content ‘thin’ with very little word count on the subject matter?
- Does your article provide outdated information?
- Is your piece not fully optimised for a focused term?
- Have you externally linked out to high-authority sites?
- Does your page no longer match the correct search intent?
- Does the page rank for any terms/receive organic traffic?
- Is your page insightful and unique compared to similar pieces on the web?
- Is any information outdated or no longer relevant?
- Can you provide additional E-E-A-T elements like expert quotes, unique imagery or original data?
- Does it contain basic errors like poor spelling, formatting and readability?
- Can you implement more internal links to that page using keyword-rich anchor text?
If the piece you are looking at used to bring in traffic/engagement, an update might be what’s required to give it a little boost. Once you’ve made your changes, analyse your results and continue to make improvements until you feature on page 1 for your desired term.
If your content doesn’t get any traffic and doesn’t rank well for any key terms, then a full rewrite might be needed to revive the content piece!
Work on improving page 2 rankings
If you own a website, then you’ll know how competitive it is to attract valuable traffic to your website via your organic rankings. To understand this further, Sistrix carried out a study that states the top 3 results receive 55.2% of all traffic.
Thankfully, with this SEO quick win, you are partway there! If you already have rankings that are on page 2, then that means Google likes your content. However, it also means that it’s not good enough yet, to belong within the first page results.
To turn this into a quick win for your website, simply go to one of your SEO tools and review your keyword rankings. Then filter them by positions 11-20, this will show you terms that you rank for on page 2.
From here, you’ll need to find a way to improve your page to better its chances of ranking on the first page of Google for that specific keyword.
Target low difficulty, niche keywords
Don’t overlook low or zero search volume keywords. Some people can get lost in the idea of targeting competitive keywords with extremely high search volume – this can be an unrealistic strategy, especially if you’re working with a low-authority website.
Here’s how to go about targeting lower-volume keywords:
- Use your go-to keyword research tool or Google Trends to identify keywords that relate to your industry, product or service. It’s also useful to find topics that your audience cares about.
- Pay attention to trend forecasts across multiple platforms. Do you anticipate this topic trending in the next few months? Is an event or season coming up that will create a bigger buzz and demand around the keyword?
- Consider whether you are qualified to talk about the keyword. Does it relate to what you do? Can you offer a new or unique opinion about the topic? Is this a keyword that nobody has yet spoken about based on the current search results? Think about how you can capitalise on the keyword to pave the way for success ahead of competitors attempting to take up space.
- Figure out the intent of the keyword and create a content type that matches this intent whether that’s a blog for a long-tail informational phrase, or a short-tail keyword relating to a category or service you might offer.
The pay-off: Becoming the go-to source for that topic before it becomes competitive, building early authority, capturing qualified traffic and setting yourself up ahead of competitors as demand grows.
Top tip: Cross-reference with social media trends surfaced primarily on TikTok and Instagram. Some exploding topics can quickly turn into subject matters that people delve deeper into on Google.
Earned back links and a good digital PR strategy are funadmental to a strong performing website. There are many quick actions you can take, however, to build visibility in the short term. Look at pre-exsting opportunities like transforming content into linkable assets, involving yourself in community forums and working with partners and brands for a link inclusion on their websites.
Find unlinked mentions
The first quick win you can look to incorporate into your SEO campaign is ‘unlinked mentions’. Now, if you haven’t heard of these before, it’s simply finding where your brand has been mentioned on the web without it being linked to.
One of the main pillars of SEO is backlinks (a link from an external website back to yours), so turning these unlinked mentions into backlinks could be a great way to strengthen your domain.
Admittedly, this tactic works best with bigger brands, but there’s nothing stopping you from giving it a go! Simply head over to the ‘content explorer’ in Ahrefs and type in your brand name in quotation marks. Then click ‘in content’ on the search dropdown bar. Next, click the ‘highlight unlinked’ filter option and add your domain. Once you have your results, review those pages and look for unlinked mentions of your brand.
However, make sure to avoid low-quality sites, pages talking negatively about your brand and sites that already link to you that the tool didn’t pick up.
To get the full benefit of unlinked mentions, you should look to set up alerts in Ahrefs so you can quickly react to any new unlinked mentions. Here’s a resource that will help you to set up the Ahrefs Alerts.
Reclaim lost links
Reclaiming lost links is another way to incorporate SEO quick wins into your overall strategy. As mentioned previously, backlinks are one of the key pillars of SEO success. Earning links is arguably one of the hardest parts of SEO, and mastering it can take years to accomplish. But, before you go out and try to build some links to your website, it’s probably best to check that you aren’t losing any of the link strength that’s been built in the past.
The main way to check this is to see if your website has any 404 error pages, and more importantly ones with backlinks. Ultimately, if your 404 pages have backlinks, it’s effectively wasted as those pages are unable to pass link strength throughout the site.
Set up a Google Business Profile
If you don’t have a Google Business Profile set up, then I’d suggest you get one created. Having a Google Business profile will provide local listings of your business on Google maps and local search results.
If you want to rank well locally, then a Google Business profile is essential.
Claiming your Google Business profile is fairly straightforward and doesn’t take long to do. However, it’s important to consistently review your profile and make sure it’s fully up to date at all times.
Technical SEO quick wins
Some of the best quick wins you can gain come from quick technical fixes. The technical soundness of any website directly impacts user experience and crawlability, but there are many tech bits you can fix off the back of a technical audit within a single afternoon.
Some of the most common technical pitfalls include:
- Improper bot directives on robots.txt and meta robots tags
- Missing or unoptimised XML sitemaps
- Broken internal links or 404 errors
- Redirect chains and loops
- Duplicate content or missing canonical tags
- Duplicate H1 tags
- Invalid Schema or other structured data
- Slow page load speeds
Issues like these can impact your rankings and ultimately, becoming a huge blocker between a user landing on your website and staying put. A poor experience = an increase in bounce rates, and a decrease in rankings.
Optimise meta titles and descriptions
Meta titles and descriptions are one of the first things search engines and users look at when coming across your page. A well-crafted meta title and description will provide users and search engines with information about the page.
Therefore, it’s important to draft out a descriptive, catchy and concise meta title and description that will help to boost your click-through rate.
You can simply run a crawl on your website to find pages that need a lot of attention – these include:
- Meta titles or descriptions missing
- Meta titles or descriptions which are too long/short
- Meta titles or descriptions that have been duplicated
Afterwards, you can look at your other pages to make sure they follow best practices to further improve your click-through rate success!
Clean up broken links
Aside from user frustration, broken links prevent search engine crawlers from discovering and indexing the most valuable pages on your site. If your site is riddled with 404 pages, crawlers cannot begin to understand your site’s structure, hindering your ability to rank.
Crawling interiptuon also has an adverse affect on the spreading of link equity – if an external site links tio a 404 pate, that authority becomes lost.
Get ahead of this by heading to Google Search Console and navigating to the ‘Page Indexing’ report. This report will reveal all the pages that Google has ran into trouble with when attempting to crawl. Look out for ‘Not Found (404)” errors and export the list of URLs deemed broken. Prioritse pages that are actively tanking your SEO rankings, and those that hold the most value in terms of traffic and conversions.
o combat this, you’ll want to find all the 404 pages that exist on your site and filter them by the number of backlinks. The pages with backlinks can then be 301 redirected to another active relevant page. This will help to pass link strength throughout your site that was previously lost through broken pages.
Strengthen internal linking
We’ve just spoken about reclaiming lost external links, but now it’s time to take a look at internal linking. Internal linking is an SEO tactic that is often overlooked, or not utilised to its full potential. It involves linking from one page of your website to another.
Effective internal linking strategies helps search engines effectively crawl your website, providing a structural hierarchy of navigation.
Let’s say we would like to add internal links to our Organic SEO service page, a site command like the one below would help us to find relevant pages to link from.
site:https://embryo.com/ “organic seo”
Implement schema markup
Structured data (or schema markup) refers to snippets of code that you can add to your website as contextual signals for search engines. There are over 800 types of schema that provide additional information about the content on your site. Having relevant structured data in place essentially enables rich results and improves how your content is displayed in search engines.
The most commonly used schema known to have a positive impact on rankings (when implemented correctly) include:
- Article schema for blogs and news posts.
- FAQ schema for frequently asked questions
- Product schema for e-commerce product pages
- Local business schema to verify key business details
From quick wins to long term growth with Embryo
I hope this article helps to emphasise that SEO doesn’t always have to be a long game. There are plenty of quick wins you can take advantage of to help push your organic performance in the right direction.
If you have any questions about any of the above SEO quick wins or are struggling to carry them out for your own website. Feel free to get in touch with our team of SEO experts at Embryo, by calling 0161 327 2635 or email info@embryo.com.
