Although SEO is a tough, meticulous process, there are ways to make an impact with minimal effort. In this article, we’ll talk about low-hanging fruits, but also other tactics that allow you to make an impact with minimal invested resources.
What is low-hanging fruit?
In the business world, the phrase low-hanging fruit is used to describe quick wins. These are opportunities for generating revenue with minimal effort, without a need for comprehensive strategy or planning.
According to just about any veteran marketer, a company should always be looking out for low-hanging fruit opportunities as a way of boosting profits. However, there are certain cases where you might want to consider prioritizing general business objectives in favor of these quick wins. In the end, if you’re constantly looking for small victories, you might omit the bigger goal ahead of you.
When talking about “low-hanging fruit” SEO term, the phrase is commonly used for keywords that are easy to optimize or on the brink of a breakthrough. These are usually long-tail keywords with high organic traffic and low difficulty. Then again, the term can also refer to other tasks performed during search engine optimization.
Benefits of low-hanging fruit SEO strategies
Executing these tasks is the best way to maximize the value of your marketing efforts. Here’s how this methodology will affect your website and web pages:
Fast start
As a marketer, you’re well aware of how important it is to provide fast results. This is especially true when handling new client accounts.
The biggest concern for business owners is that their SEO investment won’t provide enough value. The initial few months are especially tricky as most clients are glued to their Google Search Console, waiting for something to happen. This result anxiety is the main reason why many clients pull the plug on their optimization project before it can yield tangible benefits.
By finding low-hanging fruit, you can make an immediate impact on the search engines. That way, you can persuade the customer that you are the right agency for the job and that they should keep working with you. Further, this quick start puts you in the right position to maximize your efforts in the future.
Efficient optimization
Search engine optimization isn’t only about optimizing websites for Google search; it’s also about optimizing your internal processes. Due to heavy competition, this marketing approach forces you to be very cautious with your investment. In fact, improper allocation of resources is the main reason why many digital businesses go under.
By finding easy victories, you can get the most from every marketing buck. While this might not be important for a month or two, you’ll notice significant improvements after some time. Having more money will allow you to create more content, more links, and, ultimately, gain more traffic.
Strong SEO basis
If you’re looking for great SEO performance, you must have a strong basis. So, by tackling various simple tasks on the website’s backend, you can improve your technical SEO and set yourself up for success.
Besides improving technical aspects, you can achieve some wins by tackling various errors. Every site has its fair share of problems, which have a disastrous impact on search engines and visitors. Most of these issues can be fixed in just a few steps and can provide enormous value to your future efforts.
10 Simple low-hanging fruit SEO strategies
These are the best examples of low-hanging fruits for SEO:
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Find the right tools
Nowadays, the use of software and automation have become focal points of SEO, as well as other marketing processes. It’s hard to imagine doing paid advertising or using social media platforms without using at least a few analytical tools.
Aside from the basic Google toolset, including Google Analytics and Google Search Console, you should also invest in platforms like Ahrefs, SEMRush, Majestic SEO, Kissmetrics, SurferSEO, Frase, and Screaming Frog. Keep in mind that different tools yield different results, so make sure to find the right ones for your marketing strategy.
Ideally, you should get as many free tools as possible. Deciding on the right platforms is something you can do overnight and can make a major difference in your performance. Aside from popular tools and suites, you should also find the right plugins for your site and content management system.
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Fix site speed and mobile-friendliness
Having a fast site loading speed has become one of the priorities for Google. Basically, the search engine company doesn’t want to promote platforms that don’t provide top-notch experience to its users. The good thing is that you can easily introduce the improvement by caching images and CSS files and reducing their sizes.
You should also improve your mobile optimization for better site performance. The users who access your platform via cell phones should have almost the same uninterrupted experience as those accessing from a desktop. Specifically, they should be able to access the critical elements of a web page without any hiccups.
Keep in mind that this process doesn’t necessarily improve your placement within search results. Instead, it only puts you on the even playing field as the other sites. Nevertheless, improving these two aspects is vital for any serious digital platform, and you can do it rather quickly.
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Check similar sites during keyword research
Keyword research is the basis of just about any SEO process. During this step, you’re looking for phrases that are relevant to your industry and have a decent search volume with acceptable difficulty. Most notably, you should focus on keywords that don’t take much time to optimize.
For this step, you can use platforms like Google Keyword Planner to perform competitive analysis. Make sure to focus on sites that are similar in size and authority to yours. The logic is that if they managed to rank on the first page of Google for these phrases, you’d likely be able to rank for the same keyword.
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Find low-hanging fruit
When talking about low-hanging fruit, in its narrowest, original sense, these pages are on the brink of ranking in the top ten. They’re usually somewhere between position ten and twenty, and they just need a small push to yield significantly more organic traffic.
Luckily, it doesn’t take much to find low-hanging fruit pages on your site:
- Go to Google Search Console
- Filter keywords that rank between positions ten and twenty
- Ideally, you should focus on the search rankings from the last three months. However, if a keyword managed to rank in the top 20 in the last year, it might still have some potential for improvement
- If you find several low-hanging fruits, you should start with the most relevant keywords. These are the ones that provide the most traffic or can potentially have the biggest impact on your sales
After finding these low-hanging fruits and improving their performance, you can experience a major surge in traffic.
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Improve and update low-hanging fruit
Whether we’re talking about low-hanging fruit pages or other valuable content on your site, it’s wise to perform periodic optimization for these pieces. Not only can this boost placement within search results, but it can also make the article more relevant to the current SEO trends.
Here are a few simple things you can do:
- Start by adding or updating meta tags. Back in the day, many sites didn’t pay much attention to their title tags and meta descriptions, so this is definitely an area where you generate a lot of value quickly
- Check the keywords on your pages. You can use modern SEO tools like Frase to add relevant phrases or Grammarly to improve readability. Most notably, you should check for potential issues such as keyword stuffing
- Improve the structure of these pages. Add bullet and number lists, and make sure that paragraphs and sentences are short and easy to skim
- Add enticing graphics and embed YouTube videos
Although a bit more complex than other strategies we’ve mentioned in this piece, content updates don’t require that much time. Depending on the size of your site, you can implement these changes in just a few days, completely revamping your old pieces and boosting your overall performance.
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Use internal links
Internal links are vital for just about any optimization process. First and foremost, they help search engine crawlers find relevant pages published on your website. Even if you have great sitemaps and site architecture, this small trick will allow robots to index valuable pages even faster.
However, internal linking has an even more important value. You can use it for creating funnels and clusters. Internal links can be used to point from web pages of lower significance to those with higher value. The strategy is crucial for boosting any pillar page, a blog post that is the centerpiece of a cluster.
Internal links are also vital for boosting overall user engagement. They can entice people to stay on your site for a while longer, sending a strong signal to Google that your site is exactly what they’re looking for. When coupled with high click-through rates and low bounce rates, this is a precursor for reaching top spots.
The best thing yet is that adding these links won’t take too much of your time.
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Removing low-quality pages
Many blog owners have a tendency to leave their old content on the website, even if it’s not providing any value. What’s worse, the information in these blogs might become irrelevant or misleading over time, leading website visitors to bad conclusions and negatively affecting their experience.
The best thing you can do in these cases is prune low-quality pages. This simple tactic will make your site look much cleaner and will focus visitors on quality pages that move the needle for your business. In the end, if these low-quality pages never managed to rank in Google, there’s a good chance they have bad user intent or are poorly written.
Of course, you don’t have to be that drastic. If you think that one of these bad pieces still has some potential in it, you can always freshen up the content with new information. However, based on our experience, it is usually much better to create a new piece from scratch.
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Fix errors
Tackling errors is a common part of technical optimization. There are lots of things that might be plaguing your site, but the most common problems are related to content and links. For example, you might be suffering from broken links, duplicate content, cannibalization, and other issues.
Depending on the particular problem, you might need more or less time to fix it. Nevertheless, in almost all situations, fixing these errors can provide a boost to your traffic and can significantly improve user engagement.
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Get easy links
Link-building is front and center of every optimization process. And while every SEO expert will tell you to focus on gaining high-quality links, that doesn’t necessarily mean you should avoid the others.
There are lots of things you can do during this step to improve your performance and gain additional external links:
- Share your recent content on social media. Some people might pick up on it and decide to link back to your post from their blog
- Turn mentions into relevant backlinks by asking the website owner to change the rel to dofollow
- Find free guest posting opportunities. While it might take time to create articles for these external sites, you might get a valuable link in return
- Post your content in relevant groups and forums in an attempt to garner attention among the target audience and other influencers
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Set up local SEO
Submitting your site to local directories is probably the cheapest and easiest way to gain more traffic and increase brand awareness. By adding your company to Google My Business, Yelp, and other platforms, you might rank in local maps and for local snippets.
Just make sure that all your business data is the same on different platforms. While you might need some extra work to get to the top spots in local searches, you can still gain traffic from people browsing area maps.