Quick Wins and 'Low Hanging Fruit' - how do I identify them?
-
Hello,
I have fairly recently taken up a position as an in-house SEO, having previously had my own (not terribly successful) ecommerce venture, so my SEO experience is at beginner level.
I have read a LOT in coming up with a strategy (Laura Lippay's 8 Step Strategy, amongst so much more on here, has been epic), and have come up with something fairly comprehensive. However, it's taken me months! This is partyly due to other non-SEO responsibilities, and partly due to finding my way around all the tools & resources available, how everything fits together and what should be prioritised over what.
This is massively inefficient for future projects, or indeed if I ever got a job in agency, and so I need to get quicker/more productive. I keep reading about identifying and capitalising on 'low hanging fruit' - how does one go about this? Details would be hugely appreciated - starting from the bottom up, i.e. keyword research, competitive & backlink analysis, link building etc.
For the record, I have zero coding capabilities (something I plan to rectify one day soon) and so my strategy revolves primarily around content and outreach, rather changing site architecture. In any case, our website seems well put together, since new content is indexed very quickly.
Thanks so much in advance,
Ali (UK)
-
Great advice, much appreciated.
Luckily we do have quite decent traffic already and so I can see good scope for improvement already.
-
At my office we do not have any SEOs or designers or content writers or developers.
Everyone here is a "webmaster". A job that requires broad expertise and responsibility.
Working in silos is ineffective.
-
totally agree EGOL, but then your steping out of SEO and looking at UX Design - increasing CTR's with split testing etc.
-
Most of the 'low hanging fruit' that I have picked has been figuring out ways to make more money from my current traffic rather than going out after new traffic. If you are working on an established website with good traffic it will probably be easier to double your income from current traffic than it is to double your traffic. Better ad placements, more effective paths to YOUR goals, more enticing descriptions, more obvious calls to action are examples.
Get Tim Ash's book... Landing Page Optimization.
Other 'low hanging fruit' has been simply knowing my products and discovering SERPs where I have no presence or an unoptimized presence and building an attack on them.
-
No worries, im pretty sure my reply is what there on about when they say low hanging fruit, although Seb's reply are good things to check.
I will say paying for the membership on here will be a good thing for the company you work for to pay for.
You wont find a better bunch of SEO pros (who know what there talking about) then on here.
Few places I like to check out and use are: copyblogger, myblogguest, webdesignersforum and viperchill.
-
I've actually already done a very comprehensive click-through analysis of all our organic keywords, so identifying these shouldn't take much time at all.
Appreciate the wise words!
-
Thanks Sebastian, this is good common sense advice that I really should have thought of already.
Hopefully I won't be fixing such errors for too long, since our site is an ecommerce one with many thousands of pages!
-
Go into Google Analytic's, check out all the keywords generating traffic organically, export a csv of the data and copy all the keywords into Google keyword Tool.
If Google Analytic's says you have received 50 visits from 'fluffy bunnies' over a monthly period and the keyword tool says the local monthly search volume is 5000 searches, go into google and query 'fluffy bunnies', there is a good chance your result isnt that far into the results as you are picking up clicks off that term.
Thus low hanging fruit, if you work on the already ranking term, which might be on page 2 and push it through to page 1 your see a good increase in traffic for the term without to much effort (depending on the keyword).
You find 5 of these and work them up... well you get the picture.
-
Low hanging fruits are usually common errors/mistakes someone made. So for starters I would do the following thing:
Register with Google's webmaster tools.
Crawl your site with xenu's link sleuth (google it, its freeware).
- Look for 404s -> fix them
- Have a look at all titles of you page: are they unique, short and do they have the important keyword in the beginning.
- Look at the depth of your page. Anything above 4 should be looked at.
- See whether all pages send the right status code (404, 200) and the right charset
- Analyze one page with Google's Pagespeed Browser Plugin, fix whatever comes up
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Paid Subscription Directory with Low Moz Open Site Explorer Spam Score
Looking at different backlinks of my competitors and came across a few directories that require a 1 time payment for the year. Is this considered the same as paying for a link or would this be considered something like getting a listing on your local Chamber of Commerce site? Also, I put the site through Moz's Open Site Explorer and it had PA:22 and DA:20, which is nothing incredible, but also had a spam score of 2. So would a site like this hurt my rankings? I know that's a good spam score, so I am a little confused with what to do. Here is the site: http://scl-online.net/en.htm Thanks for any help! Love this site.
Link Building | | aua0 -
What's Your #1 High Authority Backlink Strategy For 2015?
Hey everyone, I am gathering responses from the SEO community regarding the two questions below. I will feature your (legitmate) responses as part of a study for current SEO backlink methods being used by the SEO community. There are no wrong answers. I look forward to seeing your responses and make sure to add your social profile details. 1. What is your number 1 method of acquiring high authority backlinks?
Link Building | | kirkbowlen
2. What platforms/ software do you use or recommend as part of your method? Thanks, Kirk Bowlen0 -
Best way to regular check backlinks & identify low quality and spammy links?
Previously my site was under manual penalty and then 80% of the links i removed and my penalty lifted. ( I am talking about 1 year before) Now i have few queries - What is the best way to regular check backlinks? what to do if a spammy link appears What to do about directories that link to us What to do with old links that are not good quality Now I have to check number of links and quality of links of website so which is the best method check? Thanks! dev
Link Building | | devdan0 -
I use to have very good ranking for my website, now I'm struggling
I use to have very good ranking for my website, now I'm struggling with ranking, I've been trying almost everything, I purchased an advance link building, a contextual link building campaign with Submit, and doesn't seem to be working. Any recommendations!
Link Building | | desdetj0 -
Can't remove and can't disavow...
Wondering if anyone could help me. A client is suffering a Google penalty at the moment which is harming their performance. That said it is properly the best penalty they could have got..the site has a penalty which is stopping them ranking as high on keywords which they have been spamming links for. I say the best penalty they could have got because, other than these keywords, the site is still performing as well as before in the engines. Have been trying to clear up the backlinks for the past couple of months and just when I think im winning I discover some 32,000 blog comments on one domain 6 weeks or so ago!! - [http://www. iimpact.co.uk/blog/about?ss=%25&replytoc&rep&d=http://8;d=http://166",.moveForm("comment-1628", "1628", addComment.m&replytocom=265](http://www.iimpact.co.uk/blog/about?ss=%25&replytoc&rep&d=http://8;d=http://166",.moveForm("comment-1628", "1628", addComment.m&replytocom=265) example url, I broke it on purpose as to not make it a backlink With that many links i will not even try and contact the site, I put in the disavow in google that there is no way I can get these removed and explained it etc, however, they, again, rejected the reconsideration request saying they are still not happy with the links. At a bit of a loss here. It's starting to look that the best approach will be to write off the half a dozen terms and go a little more long tail. The site will not rank for (this is an example as would not want to give the client away) door knockers. They used to be first page but now are page four. However they remain page one for terms such as brass door knockers, cheap door knockers, chrome door knockers etc. In WMT ranking report they have hits from 1200 words ranking in the top 5 in the past 30 days and 3000 in the top ten. Im a considering trying to up the rankings of these words at the expense of the ones which we cannot seem to get the penalty off. Any thoughts please.
Link Building | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Seo for a photographer's website
Hello all, I am a big fan of this site & of SEO. I am a photographer & I do my own SEO (horribly, I must admit), my questions is how to I go about attracting natural links when so much of my content image of weddings & family portraits? How I do get good websites or blogs interested in about my website?
Link Building | | KristopherWho0 -
Any benefit to others' links in my blog comments?
I recently started a blog for my client. So far the response has been decent but, as should probably be expected, most of the commenters want to put a link to their own site in the comment. Do I have anything to gain by allowing these comments to stay on the page?
Link Building | | AmericanOutlets1 -
Getting a link from a page on a site with high site DA but low PA?
Does anyone know if it is still worth it getting a link from a page on a site with a really low Page Authority - say a news page on a site that has an SEO Moz tool bar PA of just 1 or 2, but the domain of the site has a high DA like say 83 Is this worth getting?? Thanks
Link Building | | inhouseninja0