Looking for SEO tactics with quick impact?
It’s true, the full payback period of an SEO investment can take a long time. But there are things you can do to see a relatively quick impact.
It can be demotivating when just getting into SEO to have to wait to see any indication of the effort you’re making.
Getting to page 1 in a week isn’t the norm when it comes to search engine optimization, but there are things you can do. That’s why we’ve gathered a list of the best SEO hacks for quick wins, according to expert SEOs.
We reached out to experts on SEO Facebook groups, Linkedin, Indiehackers, and other online communities, asking about the hacks they love to use that provide tangible results.
These hacks will help you not only generate more organic traffic – you’ll also improve your SERP ranking and user’s experience on your site.
The 9 hacks we’ll dive into are things you can include to get ‘quick wins’ with your SEO:
- Structure your keyword-rich headings
- Service area pages (SAPs)
- Systematic internal linking
- Image optimization
- Intent-driven SEO content
- Schema markups
- Re-optimize existing content
- Touch up your title tags
- Maintain high-performing content
Structure your keyword-rich headings
Headings help ensure your content is well-organized and easy to navigate. It creates flow and helps readers skim and get value quicker.
Subhash Kashyap, SEO Consultant, says “from my own experience, there is one simple SEO hack that can surely enhance the rankings. That is, optimizing the page with major headings (H1 & H2).
Anyone can do it as it’s easy and takes hardly a few minutes to break down the content into keyword-rich headings or subheadings.
Moreover, these elements are the very first key areas where you should spend time to create some eye-catching and SEO optimized captions.”
Headings are also a great place to include your primary keywords. This indicates to crawlers that these topics make up a decent chunk of your content, and allows them to better index your content.
Lindsie Nelson, Transistor Digital, VP-Head of SEO, says “good content structure. Taking a blog post or page copy and including true headings (h2, h3…) and structured content that answers all the questions a reader might have on the topic.
It’s easy to write a wall of copy but giving a beautiful framework will make it stand out above the rest.”
Service area pages (SAPs)
Service area pages are landing pages that have content for users searching for or from a particular city. This is particularly relevant to brick-and-mortar companies doing local SEO.
Including an SAP in your website can help show users the services that your business offers in that area.
Dustin Porreca, SEO Growth Manager at Droop SEO, says “one MAJOR win for local SEO? Create these little things called SAPs (Service Area Pages).
I’ve worked with countless local businesses all making the same mistake: they have one service page serving multiple areas. And that’s REALLY common for a lot of local businesses.
The ones spotting this issue and getting strategic with their service pages are winning BIG right now. Check this:
You’re a roofing company. Your competitors all have a service page, linking to 3 other sub-pages: asphalt shingle roofs, metal roofs, and stone-coated steel roofs, and that’s it. The services they offer and regions they cover are in the home-page copy.
Your chance to go one step further is by offering services in five counties – you create five service pages that are location-specific.
So we choose this method: you have (county name) services – this page links to three others:
- Asphalt shingle roofs in (county)
- Metal roofs in (county)
- Stone-coated steel roofs in (county)
And you do that four more times for each service and county you cover.
You just 10x’d your chance to rank for roofing contractor services across five counties with three services in each. You got super specific and supersized your lead generation rate.
It’s as easy as adding pages with purpose, and with a good team, you can do this in a week!”
The same applies to features if you sell a digital product or service—instead of having one page with all your features, build separate pages for each feature and optimize it around that single keyword.
Systematic internal linking
Creating a web of internal links throughout your site isn’t just a ranking factor that helps bots index your site.
By creating a strategy to organize your pages so they’re short, memorable, and informative, you can optimize your URLs so that both users and crawlers understand what a page covers and how the anchor text relates.
Paul Andre de Vera, Host and Producer at SEO Video Show, says “internal linking […]creates an excellent experience for your site visitors and search engines.
Internal link building shares ‘link juice’ across your site that help your target page rank higher on Google.
A quick hack to find potential internal links is by going to Google and typing this query in the search bar:
site:website.com ‘keyword’
This will bring up a group of web pages where your target keyword exists on your site and provides an opportunity to hyperlink the target keyword back to your target page you want to rank.”
Jon Goodey, Senior SEO Executive at Blue Array, says to “use a tool such as Moz or ScreamingFrog to analyze page depth.
Look for buried deep pages (more than 3-4 clicks from the home page), then create ‘Hub Pages’ for main topic areas so you can move essential pages higher up the site structure.
This technique will allow Google to index these ‘hidden pages’ more efficiently.”
Devansh Gupta, Founder of AI Advertisement, says that if you properly set up an internal linking system, “you can see a ranking boost within 2 weeks.”
Image optimization
Studies have shown that visuals can improve comprehension by up to 400%, so if you want your users to remember your content, incorporating elements like pictures and infographics can really help.
That said, images need to be crawlable—search engines don’t yet have the capacity to determine what a picture is by looking at it.
That means optimizing your images with schema markup and alt text to help bots understand what the image contains. .
Ben Guzovsky, Head of Content at Perrfy, says the best SEO hack is “more visuals. You’re competing for attention with YouTube and Netflix. Relevant images (or videos, if possible) will make your content more engaging.”
However, you need to make sure that you aren’t slowing your site down by overloading with large image files that take a long time to load.
Jason Hewett, SEO Specialist & Writer, says “aside from making sure you HAVE images and that they load quickly, use keywords to name your image files.
Some people avoid doing this because of snippets, but you’ll more than likely rank better in image SERPs and give customers more ways to discover your website.
This also tends to work wonders on ecommerce platforms, including Amazon, eBay, shopify, and more.
If you don’t believe me, search for my name; you’ll find all sorts of links to things I’ve done on and off my website because I’ve always been clever about how I name my files.”
Intent-driven SEO content
Google’s ultimate goal is to provide the most relevant content to its users.
Declan Reilly, Head of SEO at Evoluted, says to “actually have a page about what your user is searching for: all too often I see websites that simply lack a page to specifically target a subset of search queries.
This doesn’t mean forcing keywords into copy, but aligning your pages with how your target audience is searching is still fundamental.”
Tommy Wilson, SEO Executive at Evoluted, says “remove content from a page that’s not directly relevant to the keyword you’re trying to rank for e.g. strip back the more tenuous stuff like ‘latest news’ widgets.
These aren’t helping Google figure out what the page is actually about. Sounds obvious, but sites can be full of content for content’s sake. Strip it all back and make it all relevant.”
By creating high-quality content that gets right to the point, you’re making your content more useful to your audiences. Search engines like that, and the algorithm will improve your ranking accordingly.
Stripping all your content back so it’s all relevant also optimizes your content for voice search.
Kevin Church, Director of SEO at IMPACT, says “you should always think about what your business’s differentiator is and how to best present it to users and the search engines.
I recommend employing the ‘They Ask, You Answer’ methodology in which you address common user questions in plain language on the page where they can serve the reader best.
This allows Google to see that you provide clear, concise answers (a great opportunity for featured snippets) and shows users that you understand their pains.”
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Schema markups
Using this code on your website can help you better target the right audiences for your content.
Mike Ciffone, Founder and President of Ciffone Digital, says to “optimize the semantics of your content to enhance how search engines understand its meaning.
You can do this by adding schema markup for key nouns – all of the people, places, and things that are cornerstone to a piece of content.
To ensure that search engines accurately understand the context, use microformats or RDFs in the HTML surrounding the text in the <body> instead of JSON-LD in the <head>.
The closer proximity between the schema markup and the actual content on the page can make a big difference in how search engines interpret meaning.
If you use a generator, you can do this in minutes!”
Re-optimize existing content
Kushal Desai, Content Marketing Executive at Growfusely, says “my favorite SEO hack is finding almost-ranking keywords and pages – the ones that rank from 5-20 positions (use tools like Ahrefs for ease).
The next step is to upgrade the content by adding examples, statistics, expert quotes, or better graphics.
As you rewrite, also add ‘people also ask’ and google auto suggest terms to gain better stretch out of the targeted keyword. Make sure to do these audits regularly.”
This hack combines a few separate search engine optimization hacks in order for marketers to take advantage of for better results.
Also, by doing regular audits like this for your content, you are creating evergreen content for your users to rely on as fresh and up-to-date.
Bart van der Meer, Owner of Klik Proces, says “optimize your page by adding extra/new keywords found via keyword tools or Google Search Console.”
Liam Carnahan, SEO Content Strategist and Writer at Inkwell Content, says to “use Reddit to find keywords. If there is a subreddit related to your industry, you can use your favorite keyword analysis tools to look at any keywords that subreddit might be ranking for.
This is one of the best ways to find new, high-volume/low-competition keywords in just a few short seconds.”
Related post: SEO Metrics: 10 Underrated Yet Deeply Meaningful Metrics
Touch up your title tags
Your title tags are the first thing searchers see to get an impression of your content.
Doing a good job optimizing your page title can indicate great content to viewers and determines whether or not they will visit your site.
Brian Harnish, Lead SEO at iloveseo.com, says “if you haven’t done much to optimize your title tags, and they don’t match user intent or include your branded keywords, optimizing your title tags to dial in user intent and targeted keywords can be a nice quick win.
This is an often overlooked low-hanging fruit quick win that can have a tangible impact on rankings for lower competition keywords.”
Maintain high-performing content
With regular algorithm updates and an array of different SEO trends to keep up with, it is important to make sure your content stays relevant. By performing regular content audits – removing broken links, updating old information – webmasters can easily increase traffic to these pages.
Matt Storms, SEO Expert Witness, says to “noindex all pages that have been on the site longer than 6 months without a visit from a human in Google.
Google will then give more effort to crawling pages that they deem appropriate for users.
This will increase crawl budget and rankings, which leads to more traffic and usually revenue.”
SEO Strategist Jill Caren says ”deleting or improving content! Clients are often surprised to learn that removing outdated or low performing content that has no value like traffic or backlinks can have a quick effect on ranking improvements.”
Growth and Marketing Strategist Adam Berguem says “going back and updating existing content. Whether that’s targeting a more specific keyword, updating the copy on the page, and/or even distributing old content can help.”
Liam Carnahan, Inkwell Content, SEO Content Strategist and Writer: “This is by far the easiest thing.
What you need to do, basically, is update the content with 30 – 40% new or changed content, and if it wasn’t written with SEO in mind in the first place, you want to update it with keywords, subheadings, metadata, etc.
When it’s all done, update it and change the date on the piece. (Changing the date is very important, because it lets Google know it’s fresh content.)
I have done this for clients, and in some cases have seen a 500% increase in traffic to the updated page. (I have a case study on my site that shows this, if you’d like to see).”
Takeaway
Not all SEO is built equal. Different strategies give different results, and some have a greater impact than others.
Although SEO isn’t something you should bank on working by only using quick-wins and ‘hacks’, it can be nice to occasionally see quick results.
These SEO hacks will help you with just that. Then, for the long-term strategies that SEO is known for, you can always enlist the help of a B2B SaaS SEO agency.