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
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
-
Gained a number of new 'do-follow' links - Good or Bad?
So, my client's site is on a subdomain of the parent site and there were a number of links previously pointing to the subdomain site from the main site which were all no-follow so were purely for referral/traffic benefits. Around the end of February, the main site changed all the links to 'do-follow'. Is this likely to have caused the decline we've recently seen in organic traffic to the site and a drop in rankings? I'm curious as to how that could have affected the site as we didn't know and have only just found out about it but I'm not sure how to show that it's led to a decline. Any help is appreciated!
Link Building | | soapmed1 -
HELP! Google is penalizing me and I can't figure out why.
I've come to the conclusion Google is definitely penalizing me for the keword "sensaphone" and I cannot figure out why. I've checked back links etc. and I don't see anything that would raise a flag. We rate very well in Bing etc. for the same keyword, but in Google SERP's will be on the 3rd or later page. Our domain is - www.absoluteautomation.com - any ideas?
Link Building | | absoauto1 -
How Effective Are Links Between The Same Company's Websites With Different Domain Extensions?
Morning! The main competitor of an eCommerce site I'm working on has a total of 31 sites for 31 different countries. Each one of these sites has a different domain extension (.com, .co.uk, .fr, .it etc.), and every single one of these sites' pages links to all the other homepages through a dropdown menu on the navigation bar. When I pop the .co.uk URL (our main competitor) into Open Site Explorer, I'm advised they have a 45,079 links from 475 domains. If I look at 'just discovered' links, most are from their own sites - I guess MOZ picks these up every time a new page is created. Now, these guys are huge in the UK. They rank in the top 10 for pretty much every single search term and, to put it into some kind of perspective, their Search Metrics score is 33,000 compared to our measly 160! Don't get me wrong, they do get some decent links from authoritative sites, but it seem most of their links are from their own sites. How does Google view these? Does my competitor have these thousands of 'internal' backlinks to thank for their current position? I've just checked their .kr URL and this has 12.5 million(!) links from just 450 domains. Do every single one of these links pass equity? Or does Google just look at one from each domain? Thanks, Lewis
Link Building | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
I have well over 110 identical backlinks of widely varying quality - is it worth taking the page they're linking to down?
The site on which I'm working has been experiencing a month-to-month decline since the Panda and Penguin updates - I didn't get an unnatural links notification, but have clearly fallen off the face of Google with many of the more important rankings. After running a scan on my backlinks, I found over 110 identical backlinks (it looks like the same medical definition and my website is listed in the endnotes as a source - just the URL, not anchor text), some from reputable websites with high pageranks and others that look very 'spammy.' We've redesigned the architecture of the site, so the actual link itself has a 301 redirect on it, but I'm just wondering exactly how much of a liability is it to have these links out there? I'm guessing it's an all or nothing kind of thing given the identical content on each page - on one hand, I'm pretty frantic to get to the root of the Google penalties and get back in their good graces. On the other hand, I don't want to kill the site completely by going after a set of valuable links. Has anyone dealt with this before?
Link Building | | travis-taylor0 -
Is it better to have a blog under your main website's domain or should the company's blog have its own domain?
Is it better to have a blog under your main website's domain or should the company's blog have its own domain? And if the blog is on its own domain, do links to the main site look good or bad to Google? Thanks! (And please feel free to add any other related advice you might have...)
Link Building | | Linda-Vassily0 -
Quick Question About Exact Matched Keyword Domain
if you have lets say tools.examplexxxx.com in which "tools" + "example" makes a good keyword together i.e [example tools] (a good key word). Is it wise to put 300 quality backlinks with exact matched anchor text containing keyword**[example tools]** from niche related domains and not worrying getting hit by penguin.
Link Building | | ksbnok0 -
Think I'm ready to do some link building. Couple questions.
Getting ready to do some link building. I've got several lists of competitors' links, including a bunch of sites with broken links that would be a great fit to link to us. I've got a capable VA to get started work on reaching out to people. Just curious if this is the right game plan, seems a little simple: For this round of link building I'm thinking all the links would point to my root domain. -Find quality sites/links to go after -Find an email to the owner/webmaster -Have the VA send them a value proposition email(i.e. why it's good fit for all)...or tell them about broken links etc. -Follow up myself when a response is generated. -Hope/verify they link to us. Thanks for the help with the newbie questions.
Link Building | | astahl110 -
Why doesn't the Better Business Bureau show up in my link analysis
I've been working on SEO for one of the companies I've designed a website for and I'm confused by the company's lack of Better Business Bureau backlinks. The Company in question does have a BBB account and that account links back to the company's website. However, when I check in the link analysis for the site, the BBB link doesn't appear. My competitors, on the other hand, do have BBB links in their analyses. So, I'm wondering if I somehow don't have the right type of BBB account. The BBB seems to be a pretty good place to have a link from, and the company pays $300.00 per year for the membership, so I'd like to get the most out of it. Here's a link to the BBB page for the company http://www.bbb.org/utah/business-reviews/plumbers/platinum-plumbing-services-in-west-jordan-ut-22199778#bbblogo And here's the company's website www.slcplumbing.com Now, the company site I've just listed is 301 redirected to www.platinumplumbinginc.com, but even when www.slcplumbing.com was the main site, the BBB backlink didn't show up. Thank you Blake
Link Building | | BlakeMcGillis0