Search Engine Optimization is a term that is often thrown around in marketing meetings. It is a long-term strategy that often requires a lot of work. By following some of the best practices, you can see your site’s ranking improve over a period of time. But what if you want some quick wins? Fortunately, certain ways can help you speed up the process and yield significant gains.

These SEO quick wins are easy to execute and can deliver powerful results to help you sprint past competition.

1. Optimize Pages

While content is one of the significant pillars of SEO, you can still get a lot of traffic from your existing pages. Instead of reinventing the wheel by producing fresh content, it is also a good practice to optimize existing pages for some quick SEO wins. For on-page optimization, review your title tags, Alt tags, Meta descriptions, headers, internal anchor text, and body content. To ease your job, use Webmaster Tools and an SEO plugin (Yoast if you’re already using WordPress) to get recommendations and ensure you’ve covered the basics.

Use relevant internal anchor text to help Google crawlers understand what the page is about. Don’t use the anchor text just for the sake of internal linking. You need to make it relatable to the content on the page and ease the job of the crawlers.

2. Optimize Content

Following the previous point, on-page optimization, for quick SEO wins, regularly prune outdated content. While it may be hard to say goodbye to the plethora of content but low-quality content on web pages can hurt traffic and ranking. Identify the content that should not survive the executioner’s blade and review this list by evaluating the pages with negligent traffic. And oh, while you’re at it, don’t forget to delete duplicate content as Google will have to choose the page it feels is the most relevant to rank.

Use SEMrush’s Site Audit Tool to remove duplicity, and while creating a URL for new content, always use a canonical tag or 301 redirect to enhance SEO.

3. Improve Content Quality

Regularly improve the quality of your content based on your visitor’s requirements. In 2016, one of Google’s Search Quality Senior Strategists confirmed that link building and quality content were the two main factors that help rank better on Google. Therefore, improving the quality of the content must be your top priority for a quick SEO win. There are several ways to do that, including refreshing old content, improving readability, increasing engagement, and adding more content. You can also add more images, videos, and PDFs to make the content more engaging.

For starters, prioritize URLs between five and 30 in the search results of the Google Search Console export data and then sort this by potential search volume and relevance. Identify improvement opportunities by comparing these URLs to your competitors.

4. Finetune Existing Keywords

Ranking for a new keyword can be a long wait. For a quick SEO win, you can work towards optimizing existing keywords that you already rank for. These keywords can be identified from the Search Traffic Search Analytics section of Search Console, which provides detailed information related to clicks, click-through rate, impressions, average ranking position for each keyword, etc. According to IMPACT, 50% of search queries are four words or longer, but this can vary from business to business.

Based on the above information, determine how you can improve searches. For instance, a keyword with a high impression but a low click-through rate underlines the need for optimizing title and meta descriptions.

5. Fix your 404s

A 404 error is an HTTP status code that means that the page or resource that you are trying to access on a website can’t be found on their server. Commonly known as a broken link.

No matter how quirky your 404 error pages are, these pages are annoying and can bump up the bounce rate of your website. It gives a bad user experience, and therefore, calls for immediate attention. To avoid this problem, use online tools such as Screaming Frog to regularly crawl your website for 404 errors. These tools correctly redirect the error pages to appropriate pages for a quick win.

6. Make your Listing Consistent

In 2019, Google accounts for more than 79% of all global desktop search traffic, followed by Bing at 7.27%, Baidu at 6.55%, and Yahoo at 5.06% (Netmarketshare). Therefore, it is only logical to play by the rules laid down by Google. More and more companies are setting up their businesses on Google My Business to increase their chances of ranking above the first organic results.  To improve your chances of listing, ensure your name, address, and phone number are consistent across the web.

This helps the search engine to establish your company’s authority and rank. You can either do this manually or use online tools such as Moz Local. Even the slightest differences in the listing can result in SEO problems.

7. Be Mobile-Friendly

One of the quickest SEO wins is going mobile-friendly since Google now favors mobile-optimized sites for smoother user experience. Ever since Google introduced two mobile-friendly algorithm updates in 2016, many websites are designing mobile-friendly pages as part of their SEO strategy. You can also check if your website passes Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. If you fail the test, then it is time to overhaul your website and get a responsive design for it.

8. Improve Site Speed

Slower page and site speeds are seen as major reasons for a search engine to crawl fever pages within their allocated crawl budget. That is why Google’s algorithm uses site speed and indirectly page speed to rank pages. Improving site speed by only a second can change the user experience in a big way. If your site and page speeds are slow then you are bound to have higher bounce rates and significantly lower average time on the page.

Longer load times can adversely affect your indexation and conversions. Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to check the performance of your website.

9. Reclaim Site Mentions

As mentioned previously, links are one of the two top-ranking factors for Google, making them an excellent opportunity to supercharge your SEO. And while link building happens naturally and is a long-term strategy, you can have a quick SEO win by reclaiming your existing site mentions. You can do this by either fixing broken links or by targeting brand mentions.

You can fix the broken links by going to Crawl > Crawl Errors and clicking “Missing URLs” and the “Linked from.” Once you know the backlinks that point at the URL place a 301 redirect to guide the link to the right page. For targeting brand mentions, you should set up a Google Alert to monitor your brand mentions across the internet. If any link is without a link back to your website, then contact the webmaster, asking them to include one.

10. Guest Blogging

In a world when everyone claims to be a blogger, knowing how to successfully handle guest blogging can spruce up your website’s SEO in a big way. Guest blogging is one of the best ways to acquire new traffic, be in front of the right audience and boost SEO rankings in an extremely cost-effective way.

It’s like the saying goes – If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Being in front of a large and relevant audience helps you establish credibility by publishing your article on a reputable website. It also makes it easier for search engines to crawl your pages more frequently, resulting in higher traffic and domain/page authority.

Conclusion

There you go! In no time, you’ll see your site ranking improve with our top 10 ways for generating quick SEO wins. Though you must invest in the bigger SEO strategy, it’s always great to start with some quick and easy wins.

Let’s get in touch if you want to drive qualified organic search traffic to your website.