1. Do a Content Audit
Content audits are the single best way to expose high-impact issues that are likely harming your SEO performance. The truth is that many websites online are littered with thin, low-quality, and even outdated content.
When your website becomes "bloated" with these types of pages, it's going to hurt your performance over time.
What does that mean?
Deep, meaning that you educate the searcher to the fullest extent. Your information should help them solve a problem, help them make a buying decision, etc.
This isn't just a good SEO practice, it's a good business practice.
The second part of this equation is making sure that your website is lean.
Lean, meaning that every page has a purpose. You should never have pages just to have them.
An effective content audit will help you identify pages that either need to be deleted, redirected, or improved. I won't be able to show you how to conduct a complete content audit right now, but I will tell you when you should delete a page.
You should delete a page if it's thin if it's outdated if it isn't getting conversions if it doesn't have backlinks if it doesn't have user engagement, and if it doesn't have social signals. A page that has these characteristics (or lack thereof) is likely adding no value to your website. I know it can be hard to delete a page that you created, but it's necessary for long-term SEO performance. If you're procrastinating on letting these pages "go", then read about the Endowment Effect.
2. Target Low Hanging Fruits
One of my favorite methods for getting quick SEO wins is to target low-hanging fruits.
What does that mean?
It means that you identify pages on your site that are ranking on the second page of Google. After you identify these pages, you need to make an effort to "beef them up". That means improving the quality of the page by either adding more words, adding video, adding audio, or improving the overall readability and design of the page.
A combination of all of these elements would produce the best results.
In addition to improving the quality of the page, you should always try to acquire some quality backlinks and real social signals to your newly improved page. Improving the page will be responsible for most of your upward movement if you do it right.
Backlinks and social signals will throw more fuel on the fire and should give you the push you need to hit the first page.
Now, you're probably wondering, where can you find these "low-hanging fruits"? The best tools to use are Google Search Console, Ahrefs, and SEMRush.
3. Care About Technical Performance
There is a tendency in the SEO industry for people to overvalue backlinks and undervalue user experience.
This is backward because, in the end, all that matters is user experience.
If the experience is bad, users will leave your website and your conversions will suffer. The only reason to do SEO is to get qualified traffic to your website so that it can convert into something deeper such as an email subscriber, a lead (phone call or contact form), a new customer, or even to promote your brand on social.
None of these user actions are possible if your website experience repels them.
You need to value user experience.
A positive user experience starts with the quality of your content. After that, you need to audit your website to avoid many of the technical issues that can damage user experience.
Here are some technical elements you need to audit:
- Your website loading speed - this one is huge. Nothing will repel a user more than a slow loading website. Try to achieve a 1-3 second website loading speed and you'll be good to go.
- Your mobile experience - most searches are done on mobile. At this point, it's crazy to not have a mobile-friendly website. I personally prefer responsive designs because creating a separate mobile website will spread your website authority too thin.
- Broken links - every website will have some broken links from time-to-time. That's why it's important to audit your website for them. To keep it simple, broken links are a buzzkill.
If you handle these three technical issues, your website will have a strong foundation for performing well in organic search.
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