It’s no secret that SEO is a long-term strategy where you see gradual improvements in terms of search visibility and rankings. However, there are some SEO content quick wins you can implement in order to beat the SEO waiting game. These will help if you’ve experienced a drop in rankings or just want to give traffic to your site that extra push. This way, you can see immediate value while the long term plan gets going.
Optimise Existing Content
When SEOs put a strategy together, they’ll often focus on pages a website doesn’t have and needs to create, before they even look at the content on existing pages. Whilst this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, there is value in improving an existing page’s content and seeing it move up a few spots quickly, instead of trying to get a brand new page to quickly show up in Google’s SERPs.
But how do you know which pages you should focus on in order to get the most value? There are a few methods to try!
Use Search Console to find pages that need pushing
One way to find pages you can quickly optimise is by logging into Search Console and seeing the average position for your pages – choose any pages ranking below position three to give it that extra boost. You can also do this with keywords. Once you’ve chosen your pages, have a look at what you can do to improve them. Simply click on Search Traffic > Search Analytics you have your list!
Utilise Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an incredible free tool that’s worth its weight in gold. It offers so much information about your website, so why not use this information to your advantage and find pages you can improve?
Look for pages with high traffic and high bounce rates
If you’ve got a page that’s getting traffic but the bounce rate is letting it down, have a look into why. Does the above the fold have a call to action? Does the user get all the information they need from the above the fold content? Is the page technically sound? Asking these questions will give you the answers you need.
Look for pages with high conversions and their keywords
In Google Analytics, select Behaviour > Site Content > Landing Pages and look at the pages with the highest conversion rates – then use Search Console to find which keywords are driving traffic to your site and optimise your highest converting pages to target them.
What Can You Do To Optimise On-Page Content?
- Never underestimate the value of looking at your ranking competitors. Does their page have more content than you? Are they covering more topics? Have they got links? Pick out a few things they’re doing that you’re not, and replicate it!
- Amend the H1, H2s and H3s so that it targets desired keywords.
- Add interlinks to Landing Pages.
- Interlink the page you are optimising to other pages within your site.
- Ensure the meta title is targeting your desired keywords.
You should see ranking improvements pretty quickly. This is a tried and tested method – the screen grabs below shows a pretty big increase in organic traffic to a client’s page (top) and blog post (bottom), hours after the content was tweaked (7th – 8th November).
Increase in organic traffic after amending onsite content
An increase in organic traffic after re-optimising a blog post
Target Featured Snippets With Existing Content
Featured Snippets have the potential to really impact traffic to a website – after all, a featured snippet receives 32% more clicks than any other listing on Google’s SERPs. While there’s no magical formula that will guarantee a Featured Snippet, there are certain things you can do to content that’s already ranking in order to increase your chances of scoring one.
Find Featured Snippet Opportunities
In order to optimise content for a Featured Snippet, you need to find out what long tail phrases people are searching for – the majority of phrases that return a featured snippet have ‘how’, ‘what’ or ‘why’ in them. You can find this out by using tools such as LSI Graph or Answer The Public. Simply type your focus keyword in the search bar on Answer The Public and you’ll be served with a plethora of queries and questions that people search for in relation to your keyword (shown in the screen-grab below).
Alternatively, you can use Search Console and filter queries you are already ranking for but could do with improving. Once you’ve done this, prioritise them in order of search volume and make the following improvements:
- Have the query as a h1/h2/h3 and offer a detailed answer below. In some instances, it may require a bulleted or numbered format.
- Add further information on the topic in question – this will adds more value for both the page and the reader.
There’s one we did earlier!
Check your site for duplicate and competing content
Another super quick way to see results is to comb your site for any pieces of content that are on the same topic and competing with each other. If this is the case, then combine the pages to create one big piece of content (usually on the page with most traffic). Ensure that you 301 redirect the other URLs, so that there is only one page.
You can find duplicate content via the free tool, Siteliner – their detailed report will show you any competing pages and you can go from there.
Sort out your Internal Anchor Text
Go through your pages and change any vague anchor text such as ‘find out more here’ and make it relevant to the page you are linking it to. Anchor text helps Google determine what a page is about, so you need to make sure it is pertinent to your content in order to help Google’s crawlers. Just make sure you don’t go OTT and stuff your content, as Google won’t like it.
Don’t forget to Fetch and Render
Once you’ve made changes to your site, submit the URL to Search Console so that it can be indexed quicker. Select Crawl> Fetch as Google, then submit the last part of the page’s URL and click ‘Fetch and Render’. Once you’ve done this, a ‘Request Indexing’ button will appear (it can take a few seconds) – click that and voila!
Want to see quick results to your site? Why not let the SEO wizards at Ricemedia take a look and do it all for you… From Digital PR to Technical SEO and Organic Search, we’ve an abundance of knowledge. If you’ve any questions or queries, get in touch.
