You can learn to easily identify simple ways to find SEO opportunities for quick results to improve your site’s ranking, and I intend to share what I have learned with you here.

Focusing on SEO is no easy task, and SEO is constantly evolving, becoming more complex to achieve results, and there is more and more competition every day, making your SEO goals more difficult to achieve.

Mostly, due to the fact that it takes time to see the impact or the actual value from the work done in the first place.

So, whether you’re looking to increase your brand awareness or SEO, you need to start looking at your efforts like investing in the stock market.

And, as I’m sure you are aware, most often, you don’t buy stock today and have it double in value over night. Right?

Of course not.

It takes TIME… and so does SEO when done correctly.

It’s fundamental to setup a framework in order to prioritize your SEO activities, based on the influence and effort you are seeking.

To first execute the SEO activities with high impact and low effort… and to see results faster, here’s a recommendation prioritization template that was created by Aleyda Solis.

You don’t need to simply rely on this one template either.

There are simple ways that you should assess your site’s SEO, and these methods offer the HIGHEST impact for the LOWEST effort.

Therefore, determining your niche’s “low hanging fruit” should be your first priority.

Most times, all you need to do is to think like a buyer in order to discover your niche’s opportunities. For example; what would a buyer possibly search for that you want your content found in search results for?

Then, create that content if it isn’t already on your website.

This tidbit of information shared with you here, helped an American businessman out rank a major company in NEW YORK CITY folks.

Doing this is no joke.

It WORKS!

Doing this could easily help you to:

Mitigate your impatience with your business appearing high in search results.
Show the value of your SEO implemented, as stated here so far.
Minimize concerns of complex implementation by starting with easiest actions.

Let’s go through some of the top “low hanging fruit” to prioritize their assessment.

Improving the click through rate (CTR) of your top ranked pages

Find out what popular and relevant terms your pages are already ranking well for but have a low CTR. Then decide how you can improve that content.

Below is an image depicting some frequent situations that you should be able to identify and easily fix quickly.

These are issues you can see and fix with your present content, which can have an important influence in your top queries CTR and ultimately, your organic search traffic.

Now you can also identify your CTR opportunities for free with Search Analytics for Sheets by importing your website metrics by device and page.

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Using this spreadsheet, you can get the terms for which your site is ranking in the top 10 (Google page 1) already, and be able to identify those that have worse CTR with the highest impressions.

I will let Google Career Certificate detail how to do data analysis using Google’s spreadsheet.

You can also use Google’s Data Studio, if you prefer.

To find out if your CTR is poor and if there is room to improve, simply take note of the Advance Web Ranking CTR per device, industry, search features and the query intent.

However, if you prefer to automate this process, you can use tools such as; ChatGPT, Ryte or SEOtesting.com that can be integrated with your Google Search Console and provide you with your CTR Opportunities reporting.

Once you are equipped with this information, you can identify which meaningful terms that you want to target in order to rank with the relevant page.

Now you can discover why your relevant pages for your meaningful terms with high potential have such a poor CTR in the first place.

Simply access your pages using the following:

Verify how descriptive and long your page title tags and meta descriptions are… and if you are using H1 tags properly.
Validate if your title tags, meta descriptions and that your H1 tags actually include the terms that you want your content ranked for.
Visually check to see if your titles and descriptions being displayed in ranked SERPs (Search Engine Results Page), or are they being replaced by Google for less important titles and descriptions?

You can verify and compare your posts in bulk using SEOWL Rewrite checker for free.

You can also use Sistrix for any of your ranked pages where you can segment those queries with highest search volume and better rankings too.

Google now tends to show headings more often instead of title tags, especially when they are more descriptive and shorter.

Unfortunately, apparently this change means a worse CTR for pages in some scenarios; especially pages that have a call to action, which are seen as not highly unique or descriptive by Google, and are therefore replaced by Google.

Optimize your pages to be more descriptive, attractive yet short, in order to avoid Google’s replacing, and thus improving your CTR.

Be sure to identify SERPs inclusion opportunities verses your competitors, scraping with two valuable tools: IMPORTXML and ImportFromWeb. Get the ranked pages for those top queries with poor CTR to assess in Google sheets verse your competitors.

Get and assess SERPs titles and descriptions of the best ranked pages and see how they are optimized when compared to yours.

You also need to verify if these SERPs are including features like Featured Snippets or Carousels (a carousel is a sliding row of images, which often times appears at the top of Google’s SERP, but can also appear further down as well) that you can easily leverage.

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These opportunities can be identified too by using tools like SEMrush with SERP features filtering for any website.

Now you can validate which of these have a higher influence in your search results that are relevant that you can leverage. Then simply prioritize these actions that will improve your SERP visibility for the highest impact on queries with your current content.

However, if you are already using schema on your website but you are not generating any rich results, then you should crawl, validate and fix any errors using a SEO crawler such as SiteBulb, which allows you to easily troubleshoot Google’s requirements.

When it comes to Featured Snippets, it is all about changing how your existing content is organized and structured.

You can also identify relevant popular terms that provide a poor CTR, which you wish to target and yet the pages you want used are not ranking. Then you will need to determine what the issues are, and then optimize those pages by consolidating or creating new content to help better your performance.

You can easily identify the cannibalization issues on your website with your Google Search Console data using Hannah Rampton’s free Data Studio Explorer, or use the pay-for tools like Ryte and SEOtesting.com to help you identify the pages ranking for the same queries.

Keep the pages that perform best and simply permanently redirect or merge those pages that are not performing as well.

Do be sure to monitor all of your changes by using SEO tests like those offered by Ryte and SEOtesting.com to keep track of your outcome.

By improving your internal linking of these pages that are almost ranking well to grow their popularity for queries of which you have more relevant content than your competition, yet with lower link popularity.

Simply get the backlink data from your Google Search Console and third-party tools like SEMrush and consolidate it, identifying those pages with backlinks that are triggering errors or wrongly redirecting, and fix those as soon as possible.

You can also get your site’s internal link data by using both your Google Search Console and performing your own site crawls.

Then you can integrate your backlinks metrics with pages and queries using a spreadsheet and querying VLOOKUP+IFERROR functions in Excel or Google Sheets.

This will make it easier for you to identify the pages that are not yet in the best position for popular internet search queries due to poor internal links and backlinks.

Simply start linking these pages from the pages on your website that have a higher backlink popularity. And, be sure to do it in a relevant or natural way.

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Then you can improve your internal linking to these pages with a secondary navigation system from different areas within your website.

Be sure to monitor search trends as well as your content’s freshness, and keep their relevance updated in order to improve rankings.

Last year proved that preferences, trends and searches tend to change really quickly, so it is critical to keep your present content updated to keep its relevance and/or to create new content in order to expand your reach for even more traffic, by addressing the new demands.

You can easily identify click irregularities when they happen in your Google Search Console automatically by using a tool like Ryte, that can also send you alerts about them. You can also use Google Analytics alerts to notify you when organic search traffic trends drop.

Use Google Analytics to Notify on Daily Traffic Changes

And, you can use rank tracking tools such as Advanced Web Ranking, for ranking drops for targeted tracked queries.

Then you can manually validate to check any changes in impressions, rankings, and CTR between any period of time within your Google Search Console.

You can use the IFS function in Excel or Google Sheets in order to be able to compare and easily check if it has increased or decreased, and verify which popular relevant terms have dropped in impressions, CTR and/or rankings.

Then analyze all of the content to see why this is happening.

Is it because the content is outdated or is it because there is new search behaviour that your content is not addressing?

You can also automate this process too by using tools like Ryte and SEOtesting.com.

You can avoid these types of drops by being proactive in identifying the change in search behaviour in your niche by leveraging tools that offer new query trend gathering industry data, as well as by leveraging your own Google Search Console Data, simply by looking for new query searches to see if you need to add content to address the change in trend.

It is all about validating the “low hanging fruit” that you will have chances to see results faster with the lowest amount of effort.