SEO Tips to Improve Organic Traffic in Under 15 Minutes

SEO can take a long time to get any kind ofmeaningful results.

And while you can't “force” Google to rankyou high and fast, there are actually a ton of very quick things you can do to improveSEO for your website.

So today, I'm going to show you some low-hangingSEO tips that will hopefully give you a boost even if you're not an experienced SEO.

Stay tuned.

[music] What's up SEOs? Sam Oh here with Ahrefs, the SEO tool thathelps you grow your search traffic, research your competitors and dominate your niche.

This tutorial is all about quick wins so I'll cut the intro short and get straight to the tips.

One of the easiest things to do is improvepage speed with lazy load.

Lazy loading basically means to defer the loading of non-critical resources at page load time.

In other words, things like images or videos, will only load when they're visible on the page.

This will reduce initial page load time, initialpage weight, and system resource usage, all of which should positively impact performance.

Aside from the fact that page speed is a so-called”ranking factor, ” faster loading pages provide a better user experience for your visitors and as a result, can reduce metrics like bounce rate.

If you're a WordPress user, there's a free plugin called”A3 Lazy Load” which is basically plug-and-play.

And, if you're not using WordPress, you canuse the intersection observer API or search for plugins made for your CMS.

The next thing I recommend doing is improvingclickthrough rate for pages ranking on page one.

I'd say it's widely accepted in the SEO communitythat pages with a higher clickthrough rate can help increase rankings.

But even if that was all a myth, it doesn't reallymatter because more clicks equals more visitors.

So improving CTR.

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never a bad thing.

Now, since 75% of users never scroll pastthe first page of search results, I recommend focusing on improving CTR for your first-page rankings.

To do this, log in to Google Search Console and go to the Search Results or Performance report.

Make sure to click on the Average CTR andAverage Positions boxes, which will add additional data points in the table below.

Next, set a Positions filter to only show keywordswith a ranking position of 10 or lower.

Finally, I'll sort the table by impressions indescending order, and also change this filter to show at least 100 keywords per page.

From here, just skim through the list, andlook for keywords that a) make sense, b) are not branded terms for other company names, c) have a reasonable number of impressions, and d) have a lower than average clickthrough rate.

Alright, so here you'll see that we rank for “seostrategy” with an average position of around 6 and an average CTR of just 1%.

According to AWR's CTR curve for this position, CTR should be around 2.

8 to 3.

5 percent.

So I'd probably want to focus on possiblytweaking the title tag to get more clicks.

Now, it's important to note that when optimizingyour title tags, you should be looking for the primary keywords you're targeting.

For example, SEO strategy is clearly the keywordwe're targeting for this page.

We wouldn't change our title tags to “SEOmarketing strategy content template” because that's not what the article is about.

Another key point to take note is that SearchConsole only shows you average positions.

This data can sometimes be misleading sincepositions can jump in and out of the top 100 or anything in between at any time.

You can get more precise keyword ranking positionsusing Ahrefs' Rank Tracker tool.

Alternatively, you can use Ahrefs' Site Explorerto see data on any website.

Just enter the domain or subfolder you wantto research.

Then I'll go to the Organic Keywords report.

Next, I'll set a filter to only show pagesranking in the top 10.

And just like that, we have a list of keywordswith exact ranking positions based on these dates and also have the option to see historicalranking positions for any keyword.

The next tip is one of my favorites and that'sto send emails to everyone you link to.

With link building, you need to find prospects, vet them, find their emails, and somehow naturally ask them to link to you.

But by using this simple 10-minute outreach strategy, it cuts out a lot of steps in the link building process.

Now, while the intent of the email isn't to actually build links, it's a great way to passively earn them and grow your network while you're at it.

Here's how it works in two steps.

Step 1 is to take note of all sites you're linking to.

Afterall, you'll probably only link to pageswhen you respect their content.

Step 2, find their email addresses and just sendthem a quick note just to let them know that you've linked to them.

Now, while this doesn't usually result inimmediate links, it helps you start a conversation, and it can open up opportunities to have influencers recognize your work.

For example, you'll see in our SEO tips postthat Josh wrote that Buzzstream is the best tool in the industry for managing, and keepingtrack of scaled outreach campaigns.

In this case, he could reach out to the blog editor, marketing manager or social media manager and say something like: Hey [name], Long time Buzzstream user and superfan of your tool.

Just recommended y'all as the best outreachtool in our SEO tips article.

Hope it sends some well-deserved customers your way.

Cheers, Josh From my experience, sending conversation starterswithout an ask is a great way to increase reply rates.

And hey, if your content is unique and well-written, you'll often get compliments, which can open up natural opportunities for you to guestpost or work together on another level.

If you plan to try this technique, I recommendwatching our video on using negotiation and persuasion when building links.

Next up is to add internal links to your new pages.

Internal linking is important.

It improves crawlability, gets your pagesindexed faster, improves topical relevance, and distributes PageRank to other pages so you can rank higher in Google.

So what I recommend doing is looking for topicallyrelevant pages on your site that you can link from immediately after you publish your new post.

Just go to Google and search for something like: site:yourdomain and then add a keyword that'srelated to your new page.

So in this case, you'll see that the searchresults show pages from our blog that mention the phrase “link building.

” Then visit relevant pages and look for placeswhere you can add links to your new posts.

Now, if you want to take a little bit moreof a strategic approach, I recommend using Ahrefs' SEO toolbar, where you can seethe URL rating for each page.

And URL Rating is an Ahrefs' metric, which represents the overall strength of a page's backlink profile.

Since Google doesn't provide public PageRank scores anymore, it's kind of our own way to measure page-level authority, which we've foundto correlate with search traffic quite nicely.

If you want to learn more about funnellingPageRank through internal links, I recommend watching our SEO strategy video usingthe middleman method.

The next tip is to become a power skimmerof HARO using Gmail filters.

HARO stands for “Help a Reporter Out.

” It's a free service where journalists canask questions, and anyone can respond and be a source for mega publications like The New York Times and Forbes.

HARO is one of my favorite ways to build authoritylinks and it's something I recommend to everyone at any stage.

The thing with this service is that they usually sendthree emails per day which can be quite overwhelming, considering 90% of the queries probably won'tbe relevant to you.

So a quick hack to make sure opportunitiesdon't get missed is to lighten the load with Gmail filters.

After you've created a HARO account, justgo to your Inbox and click on the caret to bring down Gmail's search options.

Next, set the From field to haro@helpareporter.

com.

Then, you'll want to set the subject to HAROwithin square brackets since all of their emails include that in the subject line.

Finally, set the Has the words field toany keyword you want to monitor.

And you can also use the OR search operatorto include multiple keywords or phrases.

Then click Search to see the results your searchfilters would include and check out some of the emails to ensure you're getting relevant results.

If everything looks good, click on the caretagain and then click Create filter.

You'll then have options to apply labels, mark it as important, or forward it to another team member to take care of.

The next tip is to perform an annual content audit.

A content audit is where you analyzethe performance of all content on your site to see whether it should be kept as-is, updated, deleted, consolidated, or redirected.

And it's not uncommon to get impressive results.

For example, we did a content audit on Ahrefs'blog and got a seven and a half percent increase in traffic after deleting 31.

7% of our pages.

Siege Media saw around a 50% traffic increasefor one of their clients after cutting around 15% of the content from the site.

And I've personally seen a traffic increaseof 80% after deleting 74% of my pages.

Now, content audits can take several hours to do, but we've actually created a spreadsheet thatautomates a good chunk of the process for you, so you can identify action items in under 10 minutes.

So rather than explaining everything again, I'll link up our content audit video which should help you get started in no time.

Finally is something we practice a lot at Ahrefs, and that's to repurpose your best-performing blogposts to videos, and your best videos to blog posts.

Now, there are a couple of great reasons torepurpose your content.

First, people enjoy different content formatsbased on nothing more than personal preference.

Some people I've met at conferences, they tell me that they always read the blog, but have never seen a single one of my videos.

And the same happens for people who've watchedall of my videos, but haven't read a single post.

People go to channels which they prefer andhaving both an active blog and YouTube channel, allows us to reach more people in the placethey want to learn.

On top of that, we're able to consistentlyreach a ton of new people every single month through both channels, allowing us to passivelygenerate new leads and customers for our tools.

Second, you can own multiple spots in Google Search.

Since videos are showing up more in Google's SERPs, we often try and own as much real estate as possible.

For example, if you search for “seo tutorial, “you'll likely see my videos as well as our blog post.

Search for “how to do keyword research, ” andyou'll see our image result, three of our videos, and our blog post.

Now, the actual work of repurposing contentcan take quite a bit of time, but strategically identifying the topics to repurpose can be done fast.

To put this into perspective, when I startedcreating videos for Ahrefs, aside from some initial product-related videos, eight out of myfirst 12 videos were repurposed from our blog.

Now, there are generally three ways I decide on which content to repurpose.

The first way is to repurpose blog posts thatare already getting consistent traffic.

Reason being, you can almost guarantee thatyou'll get views to your videos.

For example, we get a good amount of trafficto our post on free keyword research tools.

So we embedded our video there just afterthe introduction.

And since we only have the video embeddedon one page, we can attribute over 10, 000 engaged views from this post alone.

Another way to choose repurposable content is basedon search demand on both Google and YouTube.

For example, you'll see in Ahrefs' KeywordsExplorer that the query “youtube seo” gets around 12, 000 monthly searches on YouTube.

So I repurposed the video into a blog postsince it gets searched around 17, 000 times per month on Google.

And today, we rank #1 on YouTube for that keyword, own a spot in the video carousel on Google, and have a top 10 ranking for our blog post.

The final way is by using some common sense.

A couple of months ago, I repurposed our SEOchecklist from our blog.

There's decent search demand on Google, but basically no searches on YouTube.

But by analyzing other competing videos on that topic, I saw that this one was able to generate a ton of views likely through other traffic sources, likesuggested videos and browse features.

So after a few months, we've racked up over35, 000 views to this video.

A blog post we probably wouldn't repurposeis something like this one on meta robots.

YouTube is both an entertainmentand educational marketing medium.

And no matter how hard I try to make it super-entertaining or actionable, I don't think there's much I could do.

One final tip on repurposing content is togive the repurposed version a twist rather than directly copying it.

What I generally do is look at the subheadingsof the blog post, then put my own spin and angle on the topic.

So what you read on our blog won't be theexact same as what you see in our videos, and vice versa.

Now, I'd love to hear from you.

Do you have any low-hanging SEOtips you use to improve your SEO? Let me know in the comments and if you enjoyedthis video, make sure to like, share, and subscribe for more actionable SEO and marketing tutorials.

So keep grinding away and I'll see you inthe next tutorial.

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