Quick Wins To Beat The SEO Waiting Game

When you start at a new company as the SEO specialist or pick up a new client, one thing everyone wants is to see quick results. The fact that SEO takes time can be a struggle as you try to show value while also satisfying your own desire to make an impact.

Here are a few SEO techniques that will let your colleagues or clients know you are the real deal, bringing value with your expertise.

1. Win With Featured Snippets

Winning a featured snippet spot can have a huge impact, bringing organic traffic to a page. Although getting featured in the quick answer box is not guaranteed, there is a pretty simple formula for optimizing your content for it.

Start by going to the Google Search Console to find rankings for queries that contain a question — you can do this by filtering for queries containing “how,” “what” or “why.”

Once you have a list of keyword phrases, check search volume and prioritize your list, focusing on the keywords with the highest search volume. If you do not currently rank for any question-related keywords, think of a simple question you can answer, and create the content to answer that question.

Increase your chances of being featured in the quick answer box by making on-page improvements:

1. Provide a detailed answer in a bulleted or numbered format that specifically answers the question posed by the search query.
2. Add a video to the page that answers the question (with transcription).
3. Add additional information that adds more value to the page for the reader.

Once your content has been revised, submit it to be indexed, and share it on Google Plus, so that the changes are noticed quickly. To learn more about optimizing for featured snippets, check out this article by Eric Enge.

2. Optimize Existing Content

It is much easier to improve a strong existing page’s ranking a few spots in the SERPs than it is to get a new (or poorly ranking) page to show quick results.

Knowing that you see the biggest bumps in traffic when you get into the top three results, target content ranked in position 3 to 10. Improving bounce rates or building on pages that are converting can also be a great way to see big gains from a small time investment.

There are several ways to identify which pages to focus on:

1. Going back to the Search Console, sort keywords by rank to find keywords ranked between 10 and 3.
2. Looking in Google Analytics, find pages with a high bounce rate but decent traffic.
3. Also in Google Analytics, find pages with high conversion rates. Check what keywords are driving traffic through Search Console, and focus on optimizing for those keywords.

What can you do to improve these pages and see results quickly? Here are some ideas

On-Page Optimization

• Modifying the basic on-page ranking factors to improve search engine optimization.
• Find internal pages that are related to your target pages, and create new internal links from the related pages to the target pages.
• Share on Google Plus and submit to Google to be crawled.

Crowd Source Content For Quick Links

One way to quickly improve a page’s content (and possibly gain links) is by reaching out to influencers. Keep it simple by asking influencers to contribute to a page you are trying to improve.

For example, if you have a page you wrote about the best places to eat in Austin, you could reach out to food bloggers in Austin and ask them for their opinion on the best new restaurants.

Even more effective is to ask them if they have a blog post about those specific restaurants that you can link to. They will gladly give you content to link to while you get more content to add to your page.

Once the updates are made, let the influencers know by email and via Twitter. This can result in additional social shares and possibly links for the influencers. You can also use this technique when you are creating a brand-new page.

Optimizing For Search Intent

I often find pages ranking well for queries that do not fit the page. For example, I might see an article ranking for queries related to “finding influencers” that is really more focused on how to reach out to influencers. Fixing this will likely improve rank and lower bounce rate.

1. If the page does not rank for other keywords, and the keywords currently driving traffic are strategic for your site, rewrite the article completely focusing on those keywords.
2. If you want to maintain the article, you can add a section to better answer the query that it already ranks for.
3. If the information that would match the search intent does not belong on the page, write a new page that answers the questions, and link to it from the ranking post with keyword-rich anchor text.

3. Improve Rank For Converting Pages

Look at Google Analytics to find the pages that are converting. Use Search Console to find the keywords driving traffic to that page. You can also look at paid campaigns to see top-converting keywords.

Focus on these keywords and pages to see quick results and really prove the value in SEO.

4. Find Competing Content

Check your site for several pieces of content on the same topic and combine the pages. Make sure to redirect URLs so that there is only one page.

5. Fixing 404 Errors

There are several tools that make it easy to find 404 errors. You can fix links by reaching out to site owners that have the broken links or redirect the broken URL to a live page.

Final Thoughts

While SEO is a long-term investment and can take time to show results, there are always a few things you can do to show quick value. I have included only included a few opportunities here, but there are many other techniques like using other sites to get content ranking quickly. What are some of your techniques to get quick results?

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Dan Bagby

Dan is an experienced online marketer focused on SEO. He is currently leading SEO strategy for Whole Foods Market.