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12 Tried and Tested SEO Quick Wins Shared by Experts

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Creating and maintaining a successful SEO strategy is easier said than done.

You need to have a steady flow of resources, time and money to implement all the necessary actions to empower your strategy. However, even then, there is no guarantee that everything in your strategy will work as planned.

There are, however, many SEO hacks and quick wins that you can implement to maximise the current performance of your SEO strategy. For now, let us start with the definition of SEO quick wins and the many benefits that they can offer.

What are SEO Quick Wins and Why Do You Need Them?

Quick Wins — as soon as you read this term, you clicked on it with the notion that you will get actionable hacks that might give you some SEO wins right? Well, that’s exactly what SEO quick wins are. These are small solutions that you can implement easily to get major results from your SEO strategy.

More importantly, these SEO quick wins quick SEO tips or easy SEO tips that do not require much time, resources or money. These solutions can be applied at different stages of your SEO strategy to accelerate or maximise the results that you are currently producing.

When implemented correctly, these quick wins can even help you generate quicker results, increase your engagement, and boost the traffic that you are getting on your website. In any case, they will help you improve your position on the SERPs.

Now for the more important question…

Is There Really Such a Thing as a Quick Win in SEO?

At this point, you may be thinking — what’s the catch? This sounds too simple.

Well, you are right. There is a catch. You see, quick wins can act as catalysts in improving and speeding up the results generated from your strategy. But it is important to remember that SEO is a long-term strategy, and WILL take time to generate results. You have to be patient and consistent with your efforts to be able to generate the desired outcomes from your SEO strategy.

This means that you can not just pick a couple of quick wins from this list, implement them and expect a miracle. More importantly, if you do not have any expertise in SEO or an existing SEO strategy, then these tips are not for you.

So, ensure that you have your expectations and objectives clear before diving into this list, and implementing any of these hacks. 

12 SEO Quick Wins You Should Know About

Now that you know what to expect from these SEO quick wins, and are clear with the disclaimer, let us delve into some of the useful SEO quick wins recommended by the experts.

1. Mobile-Friendliness

Google’s introduction of mobile-first indexing means that if your website does not deliver or cater to your mobile users, you will see a detrimental effect on your website. You will need to ensure that the mobile version of your website performs just as well as your desktop version, for it to rank well on the SERPs. Mo

12 Tried and Tested SEO Quick Wins Shared by Experts Daniel Lofaso SEO quick wins

“If a site wasn’t created to be mobile-friendly to begin with the client may need to consider a redesign. Mobile-friendly design has been a principle for years so any site that doesn’t have this is way behind the times and should strongly consider a rebuild on a mobile-friendly CMS.”

Daniel Lofaso, President & Founder at Digital Elevator

But if your website has a responsive design, and was designed to be mobile friendly, but lacks in that area, there are a few quick actions you can take.

  • Prefer to have a task-based design, wherein you enable users to carry out top five goals possible on your website seamlessly
  • Ensure that your website does not depend on loading of large objects and images, and that it is completely optimised for mobile devices.
  • Never compromise on the quality and usefulness of your website content

2. Meta Tags

More often than not, you will be able to achieve quick wins by fixing the overlooked parts of your website that you should have gotten right, from the beginning. Every SEO blog that you might ever read will attest the importance of having correct meta tags for all the pages on your website.

We would like to highlight that this is one of the easiest SEO quick wins you can achieve with minimal effort. Almost all the experts that we spoke to talked about the importance of having correct meta tags when looking for a quick improvement.

When asked about the quickest SEO wins with maximum impact,

12 Tried and Tested SEO Quick Wins Shared by Experts Lilach Bullock SEO quick wins

Optimising meta tags: Crafting compelling and keyword-rich meta titles and descriptions can improve click-through rates and organic visibility.”

12 Tried and Tested SEO Quick Wins Shared by Experts Alina Petrova SEO quick wins

“Craft a concise and descriptive title tag that accurately represents your website and includes relevant keywords. Keep it under 60 characters to ensure it doesn’t get cut off in search engine results. Write a compelling meta description that summarises the content and purpose of your website. Make it engaging, include relevant keywords, and keep it within 150-160 characters.”

Alina Petrova, Head of Web Strategy at Smartcat

What’s more, these might seem like easy technical fixes, but can go a long way in getting the crucial pages on your website, indexed and ranked. 

3. Site Speed and Structure Optimisation

There are the backend fixes that you will need a technically sound team to implement, and there are structural changes that you can easily implement. Improving your page and website speed is one of the most important things you can do right away.

Listing website loading speed as a potential area for quick wins,

12 Tried and Tested SEO Quick Wins Shared by Experts Lilach Bullock SEO quick wins

“Ensuring that your website loads quickly can enhance user experience and positively impact search rankings.”

Indeed, it is important to improve and optimise the site loading speed of your website for mobile as well as desktop versions. With the Page Experience update, Google introduced Core Web Vitals, putting user experience as a top priority for websites that want to rank well on the SERPs.

12 Tried and Tested SEO Quick Wins Shared by Experts Alina Petrova SEO quick wins

Alina Petrova lists optimising Core Web Vitals as a top quick SEO win and says, “Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics that measure the loading, interactivity, and visual stability of your web pages. Google has explicitly stated that Core Web Vitals are important ranking factors. By improving them, you can provide better user experience and increase your chances of ranking higher in organic search.”

Alina Petrova, Head of Web Strategy at Smartcat

Furthermore, it is equally important to focus on structuring your website effectively, and keeping the overall navigation as simple as possible. This will also contribute to a better user experience and help your users find the right information and webpages on your website easily.

4. Technical SEO

We covered a little bit about the technical aspects that you can improve as a SEO quick win, when we discussed meta tags. But technical SEO is so much more than that. And optimising your website for technical SEO and addressing important aspects within it, will help you have a stronger foundation.

We covered a little bit about the technical aspects that you can improve as a SEO quick win, when we discussed meta tags. But technical SEO is so much more than that. And optimising your website for technical SEO and addressing important aspects within it, will help you have a stronger foundation.

Katerina Clark, Director – Growth Marketing at Fetch by the Dodo, gives a list of quick technical SEO wins that can brands can try out for quick results:

12 Tried and Tested SEO Quick Wins Shared by Experts Katerina Clark SEO quick wins

Optimising meta titles based on top 10 search results and primary keywords.
Implementing internal links to core pages or new pages to help with indexing and page authority.
Linking core pages from the mega navigation and footer using exact match anchor text.
Implementing breadcrumbs on pages using core keywords to help with page relevance and crawlability.
Improving text to html ratio to be above 15% by reducing code.
Adding image tags to help with image rankings and image carousels.

Katerina Clark, Director – Growth Marketing at Fetch by the Dodo

These are some great areas to start with optimising your technical SEO efforts, right?

Ensure to run periodic SEO audits to identify potential technical issues and areas of improvement that you can then work on for boosting your search engine performance.

5. Strategic Keyword Research

Keyword Research is a crucial part of your SEO strategy, regardless of how you look at it. When it comes to SEO quick wins, there are quite a few things you can do to turbocharge your strategy by leveraging keywords.

Along with finding the right keywords, it is also important to take a strategic approach towards it. For starters, keyword mapping will structure the entire process and ensure that you are targeting the right keywords for your product/service pages. 

You also want to focus on the critical keywords associated with your niche — especially the ones you almost rank for. This is a SEO quick win and low-hanging fruits that you should be capitalising on.

Lastly, run SEO and content audits to find any instances of keyword cannibalisation, and remove them to bring an immediate improvement to your strategy.

6. Website Menu

Ask any SEO expert and they will tell you how important it is to name the categories and sub-categories on the main menu of your website meticulously. There is a potential SEO quick win hiding right here if you are able to implement beneficial changes to the items on your main menu immediately.

12 Tried and Tested SEO Quick Wins Shared by Experts Gerry White SEO quick wins

“Your menus across the site are vital for internal linking, making sure that it crawlable (when the page is rendered the links are present) the destination pages are the canonical versions, which means that they are not non-indexable parameterised or duplicates of another page. If the page is in the menu, it almost always should be an accessible landing page, internal linking should have a descriptive term as the anchor text, not just ‘Mens’ but Mens Shoes.”

Moreover, it is always a good idea to name items in a way that Googlebot can identify the context of the page to which a link leads. 

Say, you have a WordPress website for your plumbing business in Brisbane with the aim of taking online bookings. Your main menu lists “plumbing repairs” as a service. This service further has multiple sub-services such as “tap”, “pump”, “toilet” and so on. Instead of using these broad terms, naming your sub-services as “leaking tap repairs”, “water pump repairs” and “toilet repairs”, will indicate the services you offer in a clearer way to Googlebot.

Once you have optimised these elements on your website as per the best practices, it is good to track how your menus are performing with the help of heatmap analytics.

7. Header Structure

One aspect that even the most impressive of websites overlook in their endeavour to have a strong SEO performance is having an appropriate header structure. There are definitely many rules that you will need to consider while creating headers for pages on your website.

However, this aspect can quickly become an SEO quick win if you are not already following the best practices and are open to implementing them. After all, H1s have a direct correlation with your click-through rate.

12 Tried and Tested SEO Quick Wins Shared by Experts Gerry White SEO quick wins

“I’ve always made sure I have a good H1 on the page which matches the same intent as the title tag, not to say it should be the same as often the compounding of the two will have key benefits with more queries being reached. The two, in addition they can have quite different intents, with the main being to increase clickthrough and rankings and the H1 can be longer, or a parallel query. From experience Google can and will often take the H1 to display in SERPs if it closer matches the query.”

In addition to the aforementioned parameters, Gerry White also recommends paying attention to your header structure. This can be a time consuming process, however, if you have the resources and time to devote, you will need to double-check whether your headers are optimised from the page code. 

Ideally, you should be following a header structure that resembles the following:

Header Structure

8. Sitemaps

Without sitemaps, your pages will never get discovered, or indexed, let alone getting ranked in search engines. Sitemaps lists the important pages on your website, and often help in ensuring that those pages are discovered and ranked. 

Even though listing pages in your sitemap and submitting it does not guarantee that those pages will be indexed and ranked, it is recommended that you create and submit one. This is especially important if you have a large website.

About turning your sitemap into a SEO quick win,

12 Tried and Tested SEO Quick Wins Shared by Experts Tom Pool SEO quick wins

“There are a couple of areas with sitemaps that I’d review for quick wins – Make sure that all URLs that are included in a sitemap are indexable, and you’re not referring to any low value-add pages. Ensure that ALL indexable, valuable pages are included within your sitemap, as well as the internal linking structure of your site.”

Tom Pool, Technical & Training Director at Blue Array

Regardless of whether all your listed web pages get indexed, you should have sitemaps listing them to ensure you have paved the way for them to be discovered by the search engines.

9. Redirects

Firstly, if you have already set redirects wherever necessary — Kudos! You have already done half of the work. The second half of the work includes actually getting this right.

You may already know that redirects affect the way your pages are crawled and indexed, so getting them wrong can result in pages not being indexed. Say, you have a PrestaShop website for your Sydney-based HVAC business. If you have not implemented correct settings from the beginning, your 302 redirects will be set automatically. In such cases, you may need to update them to 301 ones wherever applicable.

When asked about dealing with redirect modifications as a SEO quick win,

12 Tried and Tested SEO Quick Wins Shared by Experts Katerina Clark SEO quick wins

“Anytime it comes to redirects, the team needs to ensure that as a first step they follow a checklist. Do you need to set a 301 or 302, are you 1 to 1 mapping the URLs etc. Most redirects don’t need to live longer than 6-12 months.”

Katerina Clark, Director – Growth Marketing at Fetch by the Dodo

You should also be careful about converting your 404 errors to 301 redirects to the new page, when you delete web pages from your website. These kinds of errors can put strain on the process of getting your website crawled and indexed, and should be resolved at the earliest. You can use several easy SEO tools to aid you in the process of identifying such redirect errors and resolving them.

10. Links

Links are important and you know that. But did you know that fixing your links — internal, external, broken, and backlinks — can be a true blue SEO quick win?

Almost every expert we reached out to for this blog post, mentioned links as an area to be looked at as an easy SEO improvement in some form or the other.

Let’s start with backlinks. An integral part of off-page SEO, backlinks play a pivotal role in improving your position on the SERPs, and authority.

12 Tried and Tested SEO Quick Wins Shared by Experts Lilach Bullock SEO quick wins

“Acquiring relevant and authoritative backlinks from reputable websites can significantly boost your search rankings and organic traffic.”

It is also important to pay attention and fix any broken or lost links so that you do not face any detrimental effects resulting from that. Not to forget, there are many benefits of doing so too.

12 Tried and Tested SEO Quick Wins Shared by Experts Patrick Stox SEO quick wins

“Reclaim lost links with redirects, internally link relevant pages, add relevant schema (not really for rankings, but for visibility in the SERPs).”

Patrick Stox, Technical SEO & Brand Ambassador at Ahrefs

When it comes to internal and external links, knowing where to place them, how often and which ones to ignore can make all the difference. Internal linking among your webpages ensures that Googlebot crawls your website seamlessly and discovers all the webpages on it. On the other hand, external links add credibility to your content and verify the information that you have added on your website.

Internal linking between the core pages or important landing pages on your website can define your user experience and help your users discover crucial web pages on your website as well.

11. Local SEO

If you have a website that caters to a local audience, you will need to put in a bit more of a specific effort to attract the right target audience. Local SEO is often a crucial part of organisations’ SEO strategy that also doubles up as an SEO quick win, if you leverage it properly.

Even getting the basics sorted can be a great way to ensure that your local SEO strategy will work for your business. Focusing on boosting your local SEO will ensure that you rank for local search queries, but even then there are many companies that do not even get the preliminary aspects right such as setting up a Google Business Profile listing.

12 Tried and Tested SEO Quick Wins Shared by Experts hardy

You will be surprised at the number of businesses that have not yet created or claimed a Google Business Profile. Doing so, and updating your NAP details in all the local online directories might sound simple, but can grant you a quick SEO win

Hardy, Founder Supple Digital

Even for search queries that do not actually have a local search intent, you will have higher chances of ranking for them if it includes terms that touch your business. What’s more, these are quick actions and can be implemented quite quickly to gain an edge over your competitors.

12. Structured Data

Getting hold of SERP features on search engines can boost your visibility and website traffic significantly. Adding important information in your HTML code will ensure that you have the opportunity to get your website appear in featured snippets, rich snippets, and other prominent SERP features.

“Implement relevant schema markup on your homepage to provide search engines with structured data that enhances the understanding of your website’s content. This can improve the visibility of rich snippets in search results and increase the likelihood of attracting clicks”, adds Alina Petrova.

Structured Data

Patrick Stox also adds, “Go after things that get you SERP features. Look at what is listed in Google’s structured data gallery and see what is applicable to your site.”

Considering this, it is a good idea to consider adding structured data to your website’s HTML code to increase its chances of getting more visibility and traction on the SERPs.

Power Up Your SEO Strategy with These Quick Wins

If your SEO strategy is able to accomplish some of the objectives successfully, but unsuccessful in giving your website that much necessary extra boost, you might need the help of a good catalyst to speed up things. This is where some of these SEO quick wins recommended by experts can help you out.

If you face any issues with implementing any of these tasks and actions that may influence your SEO strategy, and need some extra help, get in touch with us so that we can help you out.

Authors
Hardy Desai
Hardy Desai

Hardy is the visionary founder of Supple Digital, a boutique SEO agency based in Melbourne, Australia. With a profound understanding of the digital landscape and a deep passion for innovation, Hardy has steered Supple Digital to become a leading name in the SEO domain.

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