DIY SEO: High-Impact Low-Effort Wins

A lot of clients ask for some “quick wins” when it comes to SEO. 

I am not a fan of the term, because, let’s face it, nothing is quick in SEO but there are a few things you can do to just about any site that are relatively easy and very impactful.

Here they are:

Add more internal links

Any site out there (including mine, I admit) is poorly interlinked. I have yet to see a website with a perfect internal linking strategy.

Internal links help Google discover more pages and prompt it to index new pages if they have enough internal links. 

Internal links also flow link equity throughout the site helping more pages rank.

A good internal linking structure inevitably increases long-tail search traffic and diversifies a site’s organic search ranking portfolio.

Contextual links work best because they also pass relevancy signals to the linked pages.

Encourage your writers to add at least 5 (or better more) internal links when creating or updating content. 

Interlinking medium or large sites manually is often not doable though. There are AI-powered interlinking tools that can help:

• Link Whisper is a Shopify app and a Wordpress plugin that identifies pages with 0 or too few internal links, and suggests where more links can be added.
• Link Storm crawls your site and suggests (1) immediate internal linking opportunities based on your current content and (2) more opportunities based on the additional copy you can add to each article. These potential opportunities are suggested based on the semantic similarity between two articles you can interlink.
• Link Actions is a premium tool that connects to your site’s Search Console to analyze the site structure and provide internal linking suggestions. You can also have it add internal contextual links automatically by using its code.

Beyond contextual links, you can improve your site’s internal linking structure and depth by adding widgets (related posts or related products), expanding your main navigation and adding product (category) link sets to your blog or articles.

Create more descriptive titles

I am aware of the controversy here: Lots of SEOs and SEO tools recommend keeping your title tags under ~75 characters.

While Google may truncate longer titles in search results, it will use the entire tags for ranking purposes.

In fact, longer, more descriptive titles can boost your long-tail search traffic.

Most SEO crawlers (including Screaming Frog) has a filter allowing you to see titles that are 60 characters long. Scroll through the list and decide your actions. For blogs, you may be able to edit them manually. For ecommerce sites, the solution could be to pull more specs (colors, models, etc.) into the product page titles.

Use keyword gaps

A keyword gap analysis allows you to identify search queries that drive traffic to your competitors but not represented on your site.

Most SEO platforms (including Semrush and Ahrefs) provide this analysis.

I usually look at this analysis not just for new content ideas. It is a great way to create a new SEO strategy, for example:

• Product categories missing on a site (while it has relevant products)
• Title strategy (e.g. when a competitor is ranking for product colors a lot and your site doesn’t include this spec in the title)
• Main navigation opportunities (for example, a client includes subcategories in the main nav and so ranks better for those)
• Etc. etc.

Looking at the bigger picture when analyzing keyword gaps is always a great way to boost organic search traffic over time.

Obviously, getting fresh high-quality brand-building backlinks would make these tactics really impactful. We can help with that.