Quick Wins and 'Low Hanging Fruit' - how do I identify them?

[AliClinks]

Hello,

I have fairly recently taken up a position as an in-house SEO, having previously had my own (not terribly successful) ecommerce venture, so my SEO experience is at beginner level.

I have read a LOT in coming up with a strategy (Laura Lippay's 8 Step Strategy, amongst so much more on here, has been epic), and have come up with something fairly comprehensive. However, it's taken me months! This is partyly due to other non-SEO responsibilities, and partly due to finding my way around all the tools & resources available, how everything fits together and what should be prioritised over what.

This is massively inefficient for future projects, or indeed if I ever got a job in agency, and so I need to get quicker/more productive. I keep reading about identifying and capitalising on 'low hanging fruit' - how does one go about this? Details would be hugely appreciated - starting from the bottom up, i.e. keyword research, competitive & backlink analysis, link building etc.

For the record, I have zero coding capabilities (something I plan to rectify one day soon) and so my strategy revolves primarily around content and outreach, rather changing site architecture. In any case, our website seems well put together, since new content is indexed very quickly.

Thanks so much in advance,

Ali (UK)

[Sebes]

Low hanging fruits are usually common errors/mistakes someone made. So for starters I would do the following thing:

Register with Google's webmaster tools.

Crawl your site with xenu's link sleuth (google it, its freeware).

• Look for 404s -> fix them
• Have a look at all titles of  you page: are they unique, short and do they have the important keyword in the beginning.
• Look at the depth of your page. Anything above 4 should be looked at.
• See whether all pages send the right status code (404, 200) and the right charset
• Analyze one page with Google's Pagespeed Browser Plugin, fix whatever comes up

[activitysuper]

Go into Google Analytic's, check out all the keywords generating traffic organically, export a csv of the data and copy all the keywords into Google keyword Tool.

If Google Analytic's says you have received 50 visits from 'fluffy bunnies' over a monthly period and the keyword tool says the local monthly search volume is 5000 searches, go into google and query 'fluffy bunnies', there is a good chance your result isnt that far into the results as you are picking up clicks off that term.

Thus low hanging fruit, if you work on the already ranking term, which might be on page 2 and push it through to page 1 your see a good increase in traffic for the term without to much effort (depending on the keyword).

You find 5 of these and work them up... well you get the picture.

[AliClinks]

Thanks Sebastian, this is good common sense advice that I really should have thought of already.

Hopefully I won't be fixing such errors for too long, since our site is an ecommerce one with many thousands of pages!

[AliClinks]

I've actually already done a very comprehensive click-through analysis of all our organic keywords, so identifying these shouldn't take much time at all.

Appreciate the wise words!

[activitysuper]

No worries, im pretty sure my reply is what there on about when they say low hanging fruit, although Seb's reply are good things to check.

I will say paying for the membership on here will be a good thing for the company you work for to pay for.

You wont find a better bunch of SEO pros (who know what there talking about) then on here.

Few places I like to check out and use are: copyblogger, myblogguest, webdesignersforum and viperchill.

[EGOL]

Most of the 'low hanging fruit' that I have picked has been figuring out ways to make more money from my current traffic rather than going out after new traffic.  If you are working on an established website with good traffic it will probably be easier to double your income from current traffic than it is to double your traffic.  Better ad placements, more effective paths to YOUR goals, more enticing descriptions, more obvious calls to action are examples.

Get Tim Ash's book... Landing Page Optimization.

Other 'low hanging fruit' has been simply knowing my products and discovering SERPs where I have no presence or an unoptimized presence and building an attack on them.

[activitysuper]

totally agree EGOL, but then your steping out of SEO and looking at UX Design - increasing CTR's with split testing etc.

[EGOL]

At my office we do not have any SEOs or designers or content writers or developers.

Everyone here is a "webmaster".  A job that requires broad expertise and responsibility.

Working in silos is ineffective.

[AliClinks]

Great advice, much appreciated.

Luckily we do have quite decent traffic already and so I can see good scope for improvement already.