5 SEO Growth Hacks that ANYONE can try out immediately!

I regularly get asked for 'quick wins' from clients looking to boost their SEO efforts; and as this industry is ever-changing it's hard to put your finger on exactly what action had the most positive benefit on a month-to-month basis.

However.... there are a few things that stand out among most clients' websites that literally anyone with CMS access can log in and tweak within minutes.

Hopefully, these 5 fundamentals will get you on your way to seeing some 'quick wins' in Google before looking to focus on outreach and link-building later on.

1: Remove unvisited or "Dead Weight" pages

Like most of us, your site is probably littered with multiple "dead weight" pages, these are offering no value to consumers/readers nor to search engines.

From rounds of monthly testing we've carried out internally, the results are clear that these dead weight pages are putting a serious dent in our SEO goals.

"Dead Weight" pages are pages such as:

• Old blog posts (blogs with poor traffic volume, or high bounce rates)
• Ecommerce product pages (product pages that don't generate sales)
• Archive pages (pages for "Posts Archive for October 2012" in Wordpress for example)

We've recently started going through this process with Limely's (fairly new) website and have already seen a large increase in organic traffic in a very competitive arena.

2: Don't flood URLs with too much junk

A few years back, longer URL's were the norm, a typical example would be:

www.myfitnesswebsite.com/01-01-2012/blog-category/try-these-20-great-tips-to-get-fit-and-back-in-shape

That might of worked back then, but these days, it's proven that long URL's confuse Google's indexing robots, so let's look at refining them a little bit...

The tip here is to focus on removing all unnecessary junk from your URL's and use only the keywords or proposed title of the page in its address.

For example, if my keyword was "get back in shape" I would use a URL like:

www.myfitnesswebsite.com/20-tips-to-get-back-in-shape

Now that it's much neater, Google and other search engines will appreciate it just as much as you do when trying to read it!

3: Link out to more authoritative resources/websites

This is super important!

Many SEO folk don't link out to other sites half as much as they should, the worry being that they'll lose "link authority" or bleed traffic through external sites.

However, the reality is is that Google wants to present its users with pages that are flooded with useful information for the keyword being searched and pages with links to other sites on this topic are classed as useful information!

It's thought that for every user you may lose from an outbound link, you gain 2 from the boost in the resulting organic traffic, certainly worth a try.

Try to include at least 3 outbound links to topical authoritative sites in every post.

4: Include "Modifiers" in your Title Tags

Take a look at your Google Analytics, I bet you at least 50-70% of your search traffic comes from long tail keyword searches.

A large portion of these long tails is between 6-8 words, phrases that will very rarely come up as suggestions in a keyword research tool.

But how can you optimise for them? Simply add modifier buzz words to your title tags. This will make them more visually engaging, more convincing and more likely to be clicked. Examples include "top","best","2016","solved" etc.

Looking at the earlier example, a title tag could be:

20 Tips To Get Back In Shape in 2012

5: Write more content, especially for pages you desperately want ranking!

This may go against what you've heard in the past, but as they say, results don't lie.

Every page that performs outstandingly well on one of ours or a clients' websites, proudly contains between 1200-2000+ words of unique, well-written content.

Many experts and most people with a brain will tell you no one online will read more than 400 words of content, but after a lot of testing, this doesn't seem to be the case any more.

When you produce a chunky resource or content piece on a topic someone is looking to research and learn more about, they actually ENJOY reading more about it as long as it's well formatted and broken up into digestible chunks, it works.

So if there's a page or post you're desperate to get ranked, revisit its content and discuss with your web designer or developer on how you might be able to include another 1000 words of copy – I'm sure they'll love you for that... :)

If you need any advice on SEO or if you want me to take a quick look at something you're struggling with online – feel free to drop me a message on Linkedin, I'm always happy to help!