SEO Quick Wins For 2024

It's a running joke that the answer to any SEO question is 'it depends' and that's pretty crap to be honest. The industry can do better.

Although SEO is a long-term marketing strategy, that doesn't mean that you can't generate improvements quickly on existing websites.

I've put together some ideas around the quick wins that I'd look for if I was looking at an established website with some traction in terms of traffic.

Quick Win #1 - Broken Backlinks

You'd be so surprised at how many hard earned backlinks end up becoming broken, meaning that they don't pass authority to your website anymore. It's so easy to find them too.

Simply open your backlink checking tool of choice (we use ahrefs), enter your website into the search bar, then go to Backlink Profile > Broken Backlinks and you'll see a list of links that are pointing at pages that don't exist anymore (404s).

Now, you just need to work out where the content has moved to (if it still exists), or some other relevant content and add a 301 redirect.

Quick Win #2 - Unlinked Brand Mentions

If you're working for a well-known brand, the chances are that it's mentioned in the press quite a bit. Unfortunately, this doesn't always mean that it's linked to.

Again, using ahrefs, go to Content Explorer and enter your brand name into the search bar and change the dropdown to "in content". You'll also want to add -site:yoururl.co.uk to the end of the search phrase (this excludes your own website).

Once you've run the search, click "Highlight Unlinked" next to the filter button and enter your domain name.

This will then return a list of content that mentions your brand name, but doesn't link.

You can now go through this list and contact the authors asking them to link out.

Quick Win #3 - Low Hanging Keywords

If you've followed me for any amount of time, I'm sorry, I know I go on about this all the time!

Low hanging keywords are keywords that rank between positions 4 and 20. This means that Google already likes your content to some extent, but there are probably optimisation opportunities within it.

Because we're looking at quick wins, I'd probably suggest limiting these keywords to the ones in positions 4-15.

Here's how to find them with ahrefs:

1. Put your website into the search bar
2. Navigate to organic search > organic keywords
3. Add a filter to position and enter from 4 to 15
4. Export the list to CSV and work through the highest ranking terms first

With your list, you'll want to have a look at how the content that's ranking can be improved to cover the search intent better.

Some things I'd look at would be:

• Is the keyword mentioned in the page title?
• Is the keyword mentioned in the meta description?
• Is the keyword mentioned in headings?
• Is the keyword mentioned within the content?
• Does the content also mention similar phrases to the keyword you're looking at?

So, there we go: three simple and quick SEO strategies you can apply right now, delivering results without the long 12-month wait.

If it all sounds a bit too technical for you and you'd like a company to do this for you, I run Imaginaire - where we specialise in helping ecommerce brands to get more search traffic through SEO and PPC.

We'd be more than happy to have a quick chat with you and to look into some of the opportunities we could help you seize.

Either visit our website, or send me a DM and I'll be happy to help.