Chapter 07: Quick wins

The key to SEO success isn’t always creating more content, getting more backlinks, doing more. If you already have a lot of pages created, you probably have missed opportunities to optimize them or new opportunities have shown up since you created them. 

Companies with 100s of pages very often have “generations” or marketing teams. As teams change, pages that got created by them get abandoned. This scenario is very common, in fact, it rarely has exceptions.

This is your chance to optimize them to get results.

How do you find quick wins?

1. Find
2. Prioritize
3. Implement

Step 1: Finding quick win opportunities

This is a pure data play. 

1. Pull in data from GSC, GA, your CRM, the tool you use to pull backlinking data from, the tool you use to pull tech issues data from, and a tool to get website crawl logs from. 
2. Figure out patterns(we’ll talk about this further down in this chapter).
3. Structure a the data in a way that you can see all the opportunities

Step 2: Prioritize what to work on

The list of opportunities you’ll create will likely be very long, i.e. you cannot start implementing everything at once. Where would you start?

1. Estimate the impact of each optimization. This doesn’t have to be accurate, just use your experience to make informed bets.
2. Also estimate the amount of work required to make each optimization. Think about which stakeholder (content team, tech team?) available.
3. Finally, create the prioritized list of tasks.

Step 3: Implement

Once you have the list of things to do, you’ll see that different tasks will have different stakeholders involved in the execution of each. How you coordinate between these stakeholders will make or break the project.

1. Break down the implementation of the tasks into phases. Make sure to create these based on the availability of the stakeholders required for each stage.
2. Then coordinate with the different teams and actually get them to implement each task. Make sure you have a good cadence set up to follow up with everyone and keep track of each task.
3. Finally, check the work done and move to the next stages.

Examples of “patterns” you will find.

Pattern set 1:  Search term-level opportunities

Find opportunities by looking at the data you see at a search term level, i.e. data that is associated with search terms like impressions, positions and clicks.:

1. Move up your existing rankings: It’s easier and more reliable to improve positions you already have than to target completely new keywords. Focus on moving your pages that rank between positions 3-20 slightly higher – even small improvements here can bring big results.
   
2. Recover lost rankings: Go back and look at pages that used to rank well but don’t anymore. Something caused the drop, and often, it’s not that hard to gain back lost rankings.
   
3. Increasing the CTR: The next steps for this is also almost the same as trying to improve the position but you sometimes find missed opportunities or scenarios where you can do something else to get the CTR up like trying to get featured snippets or improving the meta data.

Pattern set 2: Page-level optimization

Next, focus on opportunities you find using the page-level data:

1. High-traffic pages with low conversions: Consider the type of pages and see if you’d want to optimize that page for conversions or a different action like diverting the audience to a different page where they may convert.
   
2. Bounce rates: High bounce rates mean users aren’t sticking around. Tackle this by improving the user experience, whether it’s through better content, improved loading speed, or a cleaner design.
   
3. Too many links in/links out: If you have a lot of links coming in, should you add links to your most important pages that need a boost?
   If you have too many links going out, is that on purpose or should you check if it is delivering any SEO value?

Pattern set 3:  Page type level optimizations

Divide the pages you have by “page type” and look at the data on that level (for example: blogs, product pages, and industry pages). Then find opportunities of optimization that may apply to the whole category.

Let me share an example of this:

I once noticed that the blogs on a website were driving a lot of high quality traffic but were still waiting for conversions. My hypothesis was that we’ll have to add a conversion path in the blogs but since this audience might not know about the product, we’ll also have to introduce the product.
If we are successful, we should see an increase in conversions.

So, we first selected which product the audience of each blog would most probably be interested in, based on the blog content. Then, we created pop-ups for each product with the product description on the left and a demo form on the right. We coded it such that the pop-ups would trigger based on which product the blog was tagged with.

Pattern set 4: Deleting pages

Every page on your website takes up “crawl budget”,i.e. the more useless pages you have, the harder it is to get useful pages crawled. So, if a page is useless, just delete it.

“Deleting” a page doesn’t mean anything.

This is what I really mean by deleting:

– Identify the page to redirect to (new page)

– Redirect to the new page

– Redirect all links pointing to the current page to the new page

Here’s the process:

1. Look for pages with no visitors in the last 6 months (Not just SEO visitors, any visitors.)
2. Manually verify if for any reason you’d want to keep the page
3. If not, pick the most relevant page to redirect traffic to (Use the home page as the default)
4. Use a 301 redirect to ensure the transition is smooth
5. Update internal and external links to reflect the new URL

What impact can you expect?

For websites with over 500 pages, these SEO improvements make a real difference.

Our clients usually see a 10% increase in MQLs each quarter after making these changes. While you might not be able to measure everything exactly, focus on tracking your biggest wins.

A yearly SEO audit is enough – you don’t need to check more often than that. This way, you can make the most impact without spending too much time or resources.