7 ideas for low hanging SEO growth to do now

This week’s newsletter is sponsored by the Digital PR agency Search Intelligence and North Star Inbound. See their case studies linked in the newsletter.

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Most companies I meet with the potential to build an SEO channel have plenty to do to unlock it. Usually, the bulk of the SEO effort and work revolve around understanding the ideal user and then building a product offering around acquiring this user. As I advocate in my book, this is usually product and engineering work and not just marketing tasks.

However, for many companies, there isn’t enough of an SEO upside to justify a significant investment in this channel. (See this and this past newsletter for more details about my thinking.) Even if SEO isn’t the best channel for investment, there is still usually a reason to AN experience for the search users that will inevitably search to find the business or products. (Again, read those other newsletters because there’s a big difference between spending hundreds of dollars on tasks and hundreds of thousands to build a channel.)

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For these companies where SEO is going to be more task-oriented, SEO might be a well-optimized homepage or even a set-it-and-forget-it landing page for a single persona.

Regardless of where a company is in its SEO journey, here are seven ideas for grabbing some low-hanging SEO upside.

Delete URL’s

If a URL has not been indexed in some time, whether because of an error or Google didn’t like it, AND you believe that the content is valuable, here’s an idea for you. Change the URL by a character or two, and then it becomes a brand new URL to be evaluated by Google. If the content is genuinely of high quality, it will be indexed.

I am always surprised that this still works, but it does, and I have used it repeatedly when clients have specific URL challenges. A word of warning: do not do this at scale. It is a focused effort for individual URLs you want to be indexed, but you can’t force Google to do so.

Look at some of your crawled but not indexed pages in Google Search Console to find candidates for this tactic.

Create a brand vs your competitor page

If you have built a brand, people are likely searching for your brand vs. your standard competitors. If you don’t own this traffic, someone else will. A standard pushback on this advice is that companies do not like to elevate their competitors brands, however, if users already compare you to these brands, you might as well own them.

Unfortunately, many sites specifically target these kinds of terms in the hopes of either redirecting them toward their products or generating an affiliate commission from the traffic the brands should already own.

Consider whether you want to give this traffic away as a part of your decision to avoid making competitor pages. One challenge to this is that many competitor comparison pages tend to be very detailed, requiring frequent updates. There is no genuine need for this if you are trying to own your brand term. Use the lightest version of a comparison page that will be visible in search traffic rather than building the most functional and influential page requiring heavy maintenance.

Add CTA’s to your 404 page

This is a topic I have dedicated much longer content towards, but the short version is that many large sites inevitably have a lot of users that see their 404 pages. You can reclaim this traffic by ensuring you never have a 404, which is impossible. What is a lot easier is to make an excellent 404 that redirects users to a better page or experience.

You can add calls to action, sitemaps, and brand information, so at least when people see the page, it is not just a dead end.

Test your titles for CTR

While many SEO efforts are focused on creating more traffic by “ranking” higher on Google, clickthrough rates are far more critical. If you double your ranking position or even impressions, you don’t double traffic, however if you double your CTR you do get twice the traffic.

Build SEO tests that will generate higher CTR. You can test putting numbers, brands and prices directly in the URL. You likely will not be able to have a pure scientific test. However, this shouldn’t deter you from trying to test and learn as much as you can on an anecdotal basis.

Set up Bing search console

Google is, of course, the dominant search engine globally, but Bing has between 5-10% of the market share. This isn’t huge by any stretch, but a free bump in traffic is always a good thing. Set up Bing’s Search Console, which even has a migration from Google feature, and see if you have any issues with your Bing visibility. As a plus, some great tools in the Bing Search Console aren’t available on Google.

Head over to Bing and get started.

Create an HTML sitemap

While many sites endeavor to build an XML sitemap to submit to Google Search Console (and hopefully Bing too), many neglect to build an HTML sitemap. Googlebot uses XML sitemaps to build a crawl queue, but they crawl HTML sitemaps like any other page with internal links. I have always found that HTML sitemaps get the websites I work on discovered much faster and better. I will write a deeper newsletter in the future about how I used HTML sitemaps to double site traffic on large sites, but in the meantime, check out Linekdin’s sitemap for inspiration of how you can add every internal link to a sitemap.

Remove dates from blog URLs

This is potentially more work than the other ideas because it requires a redirect and migration to new URL’s, but having blog dates in any URL automatically makes the content dated and not evergreen. Even if you update it in the future, the content will always be tied to its original publication date because of that dated URL. Avoid this problem by never using dates in a URL at least moving forward but consider deleting dates on existing URL’s.

This is less prevalent now for many popular CMS platforms, but it still not extinct.

Low hanging fruit is in abundance

For many sites, there are a lot of other ideas on how you can quickly grab more search traffic. Create a backburner of ideas that can be actioned on any time there’s spare bandwidth from marketing, engineering, or whoever supports SEO. With your list of ideas, you can continue to ship little modifications that add to the bottom line even as you wait for the big projects to land.

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