For most companies and brands, your website is your public presence and your main digital marketing focus. Whether you’re in e-commerce or SaaS, getting your website seen often relies on how well you rank with search engines. The first step in ranking well is targeting smaller, quickly achievable wins.
In psychology, there’s a concept called the “progress principle” that finds that even quick, small, and easy wins build momentum and boost morale, which fuels your team to overcome bigger challenges.
While SEO is more like a marathon than a sprint, racking up quick wins using low-hanging fruit SEO tactics can help you make small gains that set up bigger wins later. Those initial wins help keep your team excited and moving forward efficiently.
We’ll walk you through finding low-hanging fruit SEO opportunities and using them to capture more website visibility wins.
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What Is Low-Hanging Fruit SEO?
Low-hanging fruit SEO opportunities are easily achievable optimization tactics that can quickly boost your website’s search engine rankings. These tactics focus on addressing simple, often overlooked tasks and practices that can make a big impact on your website’s visibility.
Unlike complex, long-term SEO strategies, such as updating core website coding to implement technical SEO best practices, low-hanging fruit tactics usually require minimal effort and resources to implement. They’re a great option when you want to keep publishing new content but have fewer resources to commit to production, such as during an economic downturn.
Low-hanging fruit SEO tactics help your business get the small wins and start seeing results fast, preparing your website for bigger challenges, like ranking for high-difficulty keywords.
For example, low-hanging fruit keywords have relatively low competition and can help increase traffic and attract a more targeted audience to your website.
While a lot of low-hanging fruit SEO work is keyword-related, it’s not the only quick-win SEO-building strategy. We’ll delve into more of these strategies in the following section.
Low-Effort, High-Impact Content Strategies
The goal of low-hanging fruit SEO strategies is to get the most results for the smallest investment of time and money.
We refer to these opportunities as the three main pillars of SEO:
- Content (On-Page SEO): Optimizing existing content that’s already ranking on the first few search engine results pages (SERPs), as well as refreshing and updating both high- and low-performing content.
- Website Technical Structure (Technical SEO): Fixing and addressing simple technical issues on your website.
- Backlinks (Off-Page SEO): Finding sources where you can obtain backlinks with minimal effort or lengthy processes.
Leveraging On-Page SEO
On-page SEO involves tasks you complete on your website and offers some of the most lucrative low-hanging fruit SEO opportunities.
Search Intent
As Google continues to refine its algorithms to better understand user intent, ranking volatility has become increasingly common. Keyword rankings can fluctuate over time. You need to monitor which new competitors are ranking for your keywords and assess how to better align your content over time to address evolving user intent and remain relevant.
For example, if a person searches for “How does life insurance work?” your article should answer that question to address the underlying search intent. Someone searching this term may be considering a purchase but is in the initial stages of understanding how life insurance works and is expecting a guide.
If your article promises to answer the question but then talks about alternatives to life insurance, it will likely be penalized by Google.
Underperforming Pages
Check for page killers that might be holding your content back. These include broken links, content that doesn’t adequately address user intent, insufficient internal or external links, and on-page SEO elements that need optimization.
Additionally, there might be gaps in your content that leave readers with unanswered questions.
Addressing these issues can quickly boost your page’s performance.
High-Performing Content
Don’t overlook your high-performing existing content. Its success indicates a prime opportunity to convert more readers. Update it for recent search engine changes, refresh it with new sources and statistics, update the graphics, and align it with your current brand tone and voice.
These updates can give your high-performing content a new boost in search rankings.
Website Ecosystem
Your website should cover all facets of your business or product, and articles should work together.
Review your website content and consider if:
- Your content covers the full scope of your business.
- Articles naturally logically lead from one to another.
- The different stages of the buyer’s journey are addressed.
For example, you might create a series of how-to articles that walk your customer through using your product step-by-step.
Duplicate and Plagiarized Content
Much like content cannibalization, duplicate and stolen content needs to be fixed to avoid search engine wrath. Use tools like Copyscape or Grammarly to identify any plagiarized content you need to remove. Without a process to catch them, unintentional similarities can crop up in content — you may not even realize these issues exist if you work with others and don’t check before publishing. Also, implement canonical tags for similar pages on your website.
Low-Hanging Fruit Keywords
Keywords signal topics to search engines. Carefully selecting the keywords you use in your articles improves your ranking chances. Targeting low-hanging fruit keywords that don’t have heavy competition allows your business to achieve quick SEO wins, building momentum for your overall strategy.
These easy-to-reach opportunities offer several benefits, including:
- Increasing organic traffic quickly
- Establishing a foundation of traffic for targeting competitive keywords later
- Enhancing overall SEO performance
- Gaining visibility across more search terms
- Demonstrating SEO value to stakeholders
- Improving your ROI by generating faster results
- Reducing SEO costs due to lower competition and fewer backlink requirements
- Attracting a more targeted audience interested in specific queries
How To Find Low-Hanging Fruit Keywords
Finding low-hanging fruit keywords requires understanding your business topics and is made easier by using a few handy tools.
Start searching for low-hanging fruit keywords by:
- Analyzing your website’s current keyword rankings. Knowing the keyword difficulty your website can realistically rank for could help you strategize how far you can push target keywords with varying difficulty for your pages.
- Identify long-tail variations of hot keywords for your topics that have lower competition and good search volume.
- Look for People Also Ask questions in the dropdown menu when you type in Google search.
- Check the Google Related Searches.
- Do a competitor analysis using tools like Ahrefs’ Content Gap to find low-competition keywords your competitors are targeting.
- Research low search volume keywords, as they tend to have lower competition.
Take advantage of low-hanging fruit keywords by:
- Optimizing existing content for keywords where you currently rank on the second or third pages of the search results.
- Creating additional content for keywords you are already winning with first-page placements.
- Creating new content for newly identified keywords and linking it back to existing content.
Conversion Optimization
While not directly related to keywords, improving conversion rates can be a quick win. Based on data you’re already collecting (from Google Analytics or a similar tool), you can fine-tune your content to get even better results.
Some strategies you can incorporate include:
- Adding clear calls to action (CTAs).
- Incorporating relevant graphics.
- Optimizing page layouts to boost engagement and conversions.
Internal Linking Opportunities
Next, search your content catalog and identify pages that should refer to each other. Creating a strategic internal linking structure can distribute link equity more effectively and improve user navigation.
Here’s some additional internal linking guidance from The Blogsmith’s style guide:
- Aim for two internal links per 500 words.
- Don’t link to the homepage — it’s already your website’s most-linked page.
- Try to link to pages that don’t see as much traffic and could use a boost.
Readability
If a reader clicks on your content and immediately clicks away, it can hurt long-term SEO performance. A great way to keep readers on your website longer is to ensure your content is well-organized and easy to read.
Review your existing content and add the following features as needed:
- Table of contents
- TL;DR summary at the beginning of longer articles
- Short paragraphs (no longer than three or four lines)
- Bullet points or numbered lists to highlight important information or tutorial steps
- Images or infographics to illustrate complex concepts and break up text
You also can use Grammarly or Hemingway to check and improve your content’s readability score.
Other On-Page Optimizations
Ensuring everything on your website is easy to find and adequately labeled helps search engines and users. Within articles, how you structure your titles, images, URLs, and headings affects how search engines interpret your page.
- URL structure: Create descriptive short URLs that include target keywords so readers and search engines understand what the page is about — for example, www.example.com/small-business-accounting-tips. Leave out unnecessary words and dates, and use hyphens to separate words — not underscores.
- Title tags and meta descriptions: Craft compelling, keyword-rich titles and descriptions for underperforming pages to improve click-through rates.
- Headings: Rather than simply bolding section titles, use H1, H2, and H3 formatting to help search engines quickly pinpoint the main ideas in your content. Ensure your subheadings are clear, descriptive, and engaging, and include relevant keywords for the best results, including a shot at a coveted Google snippet feature.
- Images: Images need to be appropriately sized, in a web-friendly format (such as JPG, PNG, or WebP), have descriptive file names, and include alt text for screen reader compatibility.
Technical SEO: Quick Fixes for Big Gains
Even without a big IT department, there are simple technical changes you can make on your website that improve SEO. Search engines consider several website technical aspects, such as page load speeds, in their ranking factors. Making these small technical changes is a powerful part of low-hanging fruit SEO tactics.
Add or Update SSL Certificates
Search engines prioritize user safety by ensuring that websites accessed through their results are secure. As part of its overall assessment of page experience, Google considers HTTPS a ranking signal. The lock icon at the beginning of a URL indicates that a website is using HTTPS protocol to protect data.
This security measure is easily enabled with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) through most web hosts, making it a straightforward yet important step in optimizing your website’s SEO performance and user trust.
Address Content Cannibalization
Content cannibalization is when multiple pages compete for the same keywords and search intent, potentially diluting your SEO efforts. This internal competition can confuse search engines about which page to rank for a given query, often resulting in lower rankings for all competing pages.
Identify these instances and decide whether to merge, redirect, or differentiate the content. When redirecting overlapping content, use 301 redirects to preserve SEO value.
Fix Broken Pages and Links
Over time, websites naturally accumulate broken links due to changes in site structure, deleted content, or URL updates. These broken links can negatively impact user experience and your website’s SEO performance.
Regular content audits are crucial to identify and fix these issues, ensuring your website maintains its link equity and search engine rankings.
Tools like Screaming Frog help identify broken links and pages, allowing you to update links or implement 301 redirects to active, relevant pages.
Improve Website Loading Speed
Your website’s page load speeds directly impact search engine rankings and user experience. Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool will test your loading time and recommend improvements.
Common fixes include:
- Reducing image size
- Enabling browser caching
- Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- Disabling plugins you don’t need or use
- Using a fast website host
Implement XML Sitemaps and Redirects
An XML sitemap is a standardized roadmap for search engines that lists each individual page for Google to crawl. Tools like XML-Sitemaps.com let you quickly build a sitemap that you can submit to Google for improved visibility.
The Low-Hanging Fruit of Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO requires a lot of time and energy, but you could use some easier methods to strengthen other promotional efforts you do outside your website.
Google Business Profiles
If you’re a local business, start by claiming and optimizing your Google Business Profile (GBP) listing, formerly Google My Business. Because GBPs appear separately to the right of regular search results, you can effectively jump the line and rank on the first page more easily based on your location.
Even if you’re not a strictly local business, GBP can help with:
- Increasing visibility in local search results.
- Improving credibility and trust with potential customers.
- Offering an easy way for customers to leave and read reviews.
- Giving your business free advertising.
Pro tip: Remember to add high-quality photos and respond to reviews regularly to maximize your GBP’s impact.
Backlinks
Building a network of other websites linking back to your relevant pages boosts your website’s authority and helps improve rankings quickly and effectively. While comprehensive link building takes time, some quick wins are possible.
Consider leveraging existing business relationships for high-quality backlinks, such as past and current partnerships or clients. You can also reach out to websites that mention your brand but don’t link to you.
Other backlink-building strategies include:
- Staying active on social media and in online communities to help build relationships and establish yourself, or your business, as an expert in your field.
- Participating in industry discussions and forums to build your network.
- Optimizing your social media profiles with up-to-date, relevant information and links.
Pair your easy-win backlink strategy with powerful, highly relevant, and authoritative links. Start building a diversified link-building strategy with The Blogsmith today.
SEO Tools To Help You Target Low-Hanging Fruit
These tools can simplify the process of tracking down low-effort, high-impact opportunities for your website:
- Google Search Console: Identifies keywords currently ranking just below the first page.
- Semrush or Ahrefs: Help you conduct competitor analyses and keyword gap research.
- Screaming Frog: Helps you perform technical SEO audits and identify quick-fix opportunities.
- Google Analytics: Helps you find your high-performing pages and give them an extra SEO boost.
- BuzzSumo: Helps you identify popular content in your niche for potential improvement.
- Moz’s Link Explorer: Shows you unlinked brand mentions and easy link-building opportunities.
Final Thoughts: Low-Hanging Fruit SEO Opportunities To Boost Your Visibility
Low-hanging fruit SEO opportunities are quick, easy fixes you can make today to start building your website’s strong SEO foundation. Each minor optimization contributes to your website’s overall strength and authority.
By consistently targeting these accessible opportunities, you create a cumulative effect that propels your website higher in search rankings. However, identifying and capitalizing on these SEO opportunities requires expertise and persistence.
At The Blogsmith, we specialize in bringing together low-hanging fruit tactics with a well-rounded long-term SEO strategy. If you’re ready to experience your website’s full potential, contact The Blogsmith today and start your journey toward SEO excellence.
