Who doesn’t love a great SEO quick win?
Discovering and implementing opportunities to increase your organic rankings can help to drive additional traffic translating to more leads and additional revenue to your business.
Finding these opportunities doesn’t have to be difficult.
If you take just one or two of the below items and focus on implementing them, you’ll be off to a great start to increasing your organic traffic rankings.
This is one of the first steps I take when researching a website to understand what content is indexed in Google.
You’ll be surprised what you’ll find when you run this query in Google.
Simply open up Google and type:
site: domainname.com
This will return a list of all of the indexed content in Google for the given domain:
GQ has over 65,000+ results indexed in Google.
That’s a massive amount of pages.
I’m also positive that a lot of that content could be pruned from search.
When you look through the results, the further you go back in the pages, the more interesting items you’ll find.
You want to be looking for content that you can prune and remove from search, including:
As you scroll through the results and check for these items, you’re bound to find more than a few on the majority of websites.
You’ll probably also notice a lot of duplicate pages, where the page title ends in “-2” or “-3”, etc.
If the domain is running on WordPress, you might also run into a large amount of tag pages, or archive pages as such:
In most cases, you can safely de-index these pages and pull them out of search.
If you want to spice things up a little more, you can add some additional operators to your query to find specific pages you probably don’t want in search:
site:domainname.com inurl:test
If you find a bunch of old test pages, you’ll want to get rid of these for sure:
You can play around with this query and get creative to find a ton of pages that most likely you’ll want to pull out of Google’s index.
There’s nothing better than improving existing content with on-page SEO and some links for big gains.
Finding keywords that are ranking in positions 5-20 of Google is a great start.
You already have the page built out, it just needs a bit more of a push to jump up in the rankings.
The fastest way to check this is to open up Ahrefs and enter your domain name:
On the left-hand side, click on “Organic Keywords” from the menu:
Ahrefs is now going to pull bank all keywords it finds ranking for the target domain.
We’re going to want to set a filter here to find keywords ranking in positions #5-20:
I normally like to click on the “Position” metric from the results tab to filter everything in ascending order.
Scroll through this list, and you’ll most likely find a ton of keywords you’re already ranking for that could use a boost:
For larger sites with a ton of keywords, you can also set some additional filters to help cut down on the volume you’re looking at:
Keywords ranking on the second page are a great starting point.
Some on-page SEO and additional high-quality content will go a long way for less-competitive terms.
Ensuring a great experience for mobile users is a must.
If you’re unsure how you’re currently doing when it comes to mobile, Google’s got a tool for that called the Mobile-Friendly Test.
Head on over and enter the domain you’d like to check and you’ll get a result:
If your result comes back as not mobile-friendly, you’re going to want to dig in a bit deeper to find out why.
These three stats directly from Google says it all when it comes to why mobile experience is so important:
If you imagine yourself as a user browsing on your mobile device and finding a website with a terrible mobile experience, you know already what you’re going to do next.
Websites running on older platforms might not be built for responsive design, and it might be time for a revamp or to check out Google Amp.
Mobile-friendliness is no longer a nice to have – it’s a must have.
Continuing on the user experience path, site speed plays an important role in rankings and the overall user experience.
If your website loads slow, there’s a high chance that a user will bounce.
No only does this mean you just lost a visitor, but as users continue to bounce, your rankings will also take a hit.
It’s important to ensure that all pages on your website load for users within 3 seconds or less.
If the website is slow, the user will go.
Per Google, these are the average load times per industry across the United States.
If you can be within the few second range, you’re going to have a big advantage over the competition.
You can check your site speed using either GTMetrix or Google PageSpeed Insights.
Both are going to spit out load times for specific pages, and Google PageSpeed Insights will even show you exactly what you can resolve th speed up your site.
Normally, this entails image compression, caching, minifying JS/CSS, and so forth.
Hosting and using a CDN can also play an important role in page speed.
Larger sites are naturally going to have slower load times, but if you have a site with great hosting and even a few thousand pages you shouldn’t be cracking above the 5-7 second mark before optimizing.
All in all, site load time is important, and shouldn’t be ignored.
Again, you can put yourself in the user’s shoes.
You ran a search in Google, and clicked on a result.
The page is taking over 10 seconds to load.
What do you do?
Yep, you head back to Google and look for another result that meets your needs.
If you’re running a local storefront that people can visit, you should have a Google My Business account setup.
Even if you’re not running a local storefront, in many cases, you’ll still want to set up an account.
Why?
Google Local results are one of the first things a user sees when they run a local search query, right underneath of the paid ads:
Local search queries are not limited to just searches for local business, but you’ll also notice that often times the local map pack will appear as well for queries that might touch your business:
Not only will it be possible for you to rank you business in the local map pack as shown above, but it’s also possible to take up real estate in the below results as well.
If you’re running paid ads, you can have 3+ shots at getting in front of potential customers all on the same search query.
There’s a lot that goes into optimizing for local search, but having a Google My Business account is the first crucial step.
Founder of Rock The Rankings, an SEO partner that helps B2B SaaS brands crush their organic growth goals. An avid fan of tennis, and growing micro-SaaS businesses on the weekend. 2x SaaS Co-Founder – Currently working to build and scale Simple Testimonial.
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