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A lot of SEO advice is based on complicated strategies that you will have to implement over the course of months or even years. These are all valuable – but often, simple SEO optimizations are what give you the edge over your competition.

This podcast was produced with the following equipment:

Alesis Multimix 4 – Behringer Ultravoice XM8500 – Samson SR850

In this episode of Marketing in Minutes you will learn:

• Why it’s sometimes better to not concentrate on high-traffic keywords
• Three simple optimization tactics for existing content.

All in under 10 minutes.

More Information on simple SEO optimizations:

For in-depth information on how to prepare your blog for SEO, see this post: How to make Your WordPress Blog SEO Ready

For SEO traffic hacks including how to use long-tail keywords and how to work with search console data see this post: 3 SEO Traffic Hacks Every Blogger Should Know: Bigger Results, Less Work

Episode #5 of Marketing in Minutes (this podcast!) will teach you exactly how SEO works: Marketing in Minutes: How does SEO work, exactly? – Podcast Episode

Episode #6 tells you exactly how link building works: Marketing in Minutes: How to build great links for SEO? – Podcast Episode

Are you struggling with your SEO? Do you think you have done so much but somehow your blog traffic from Google search is stagnating? Do you need some help with setting up your blog for SEO? Are you not sure how to build links to your blog?

We have got you covered!

We created a free email course about SEO for your blog – or SEO with a blog. Join today for 4 days and 4 emails and learn about on-page SEO, Google Ranking factors, link building tactics and how to find keywords even you can rank for. Join our (free) email course about Blog SEO today!

Episode Transcript

Below you can read the full transcript of this episode of Marketing in Minutes.

Episode 15: Low hanging SEO fruit…

SEO takes time and effort… But sometimes there are quick optimizations you can do to improve your results.

Today you are going to learn about some of them.

I’m Jonathan Gebauer and you are listening to Marketing in Minutes.

Welcome to Marketing in Minutes, the podcast that focuses on one Marketing topic in every episode.

I’m your host Jonathan Gebauer, and today, you are going to learn some simple ways to improve your SEO results.

Most people think that SEO is difficult, complicated, and hard to get right. That’s not true.

In fact, SEO is pretty straightforward. If you don’t believe me, please listen to episode 5 of this podcast in which I explained in detail how SEO works.

But what’s also true is that SEO can eat up a lot of your time and is very competitive.

Google only has 10 spots on the first page for any keyword you can optimize for. And if you only rank on page 2 or lower, you don’t get as much traffic as your content probably deserves.

But the way to outperform your competition is not to use very clever tactics and complicated strategies.

Most of the time you can increase your rankings and your click-through-rates massively by implementing simple optimizations and repetitive tasks. And if you haven’t been doing this often enough, chances are your competition is missing out on these as well.

Look at our blog – we’ve been competing in the hardest niche on the web – marketing.

We are stacked up against every single online marketing blogger on the web. Those people that you ask for help with your marketing are our competition.

And we began to rank for most keywords we rank for almost by accident. We didn’t really focus on SEO for a long time. We knew we were late to the game. And what we did best was social media traffic generation.

So, we focused on that.

SEO was an afterthought. We only did the optimizations we could do with a limited amount of work.

And still, we started to see traffic through SEO.

So how did we do that?

Since our focus was social media marketing at first, we only focused on things that didn’t involve a lot of effort in SEO.

Here is what we did to see these surprising results.

When we started this blog we simply didn’t have time to wait for SEO results. We had just lost a business – and we needed to make money fast. So, we focused on social traffic.

And it worked well. But although we skipped on long-term SEO tactics, we did the basics and concentrated on easy SEO optimizations.

We did all the preparations – we installed all the necessary plugins and did basic site optimizations. But we didn’t have fancy linkbuilding strategies in place or anything like that.

One thing we focused on was long-tail keywords.

These are keywords that don’t have a lot of traffic because they are very specialized. Most of the time these are keyphrases that result from combining a high-level keyword with more specialized terms.

So, for instance, instead of trying to rank for a keyword like “Content Marketing” we would try to rank for “Content Marketing Case Studies.”

And we would try to rank for multiple keywords of this kind with each post.

There are several easy and quick ways of finding long-tail keywords, for instance, you can use the autocomplete and similar searches on Google’s search results pages to get ideas.

I’ll link to a post with more infos on this in the shownotes.

What’s great about long-tail keywords is that the traffic you get through them is highly targeted. Someone searching for “Content Marketing” on Google will often only have a general interest in the topic.

But when someone searches for “Content Marketing Case Studies in Automobile,” this person has a very specific interest – and you can work with that.

You can also use long-tail keywords to get more traffic to your existing posts – simply add a few long-tail keywords and update your posts.

But that wasn’t the only optimization tactic we used. When we started to see some SEO results, we knew we would get more traffic when we implemented more simple tactics.

SEO is not just a game of thinking in complex structures. Instead, what you should do is focus on outperforming your competition by simply doing more than they are.

And that means that simple tactics are often better, simply because you can implement them faster.

One thing you can do regularly and without a lot of effort is optimizing your existing content.

Optimizing existing content pieces starts with watching your results. The two tools you absolutely need for that are Google Analytics and Google search console – and you should connect those two services. Again, take a look at the shownotes for more info.

And then, what you do is watch that data and optimize your content accordingly.

If a post doesn’t rank as well as it should and is already a couple of months old, you can update that post. Just add a little bit of additional information to it.

The reason for that is that Google believes that content that is regularly updated is better than content has been untouched for years. Update one post every week, and you will see some improvements in your rankings.

Another thing we look for in the data we have is posts that rank well but don’t receive as many clicks as they should. If a post ranks on page one but has a click-through-rate below 5 percent, we will try to improve the meta description.

That’s the snippet that Google shows in search results for your post.

And if that doesn’t speak to the actual person searching, that person won’t click. You can change that snippet using the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress for instance.

And a third optimization you can easily do is putting internal links into your existing posts. These are links that link to your own content on your own site. And contrary to what most people believe, Google doesn’t just count external links but also internal ones.

And it’s really easy to do – whenever you write a new post, just link to a few older pieces. And when you publish a new post, and it is related to an older post, just open the old post and link to the new one as well.

It’s tactics like that that let you outperform your competition – and not complicated SEO strategies that take months or even years to work.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you should throw your SEO strategy away. But simple tactics that you can perform over and over again are what will give you the opportunity to outperform your competition.

And if you are only doing what everybody else is doing as well, you won’t be able to get the results you need.

That’s all I have for you today – I hope you enjoyed this episode of Marketing in Minutes and found it useful.

If you like this podcast please share and subscribe. If you don’t like what I told you in this episode, please let me know what I can improve.

And if your favorite podcast app let’s you review podcasts, please write one! It really helps me to get more listeners!

For more information on SEO, take a look at the shownotes, which you can find at blog.thesocialms.com/MiM-15. I put links to in-depth SEO information in there.

And for step-by-step instruction on how to do SEO for your blog, take a look at our SEO workbook for bloggers!

I’m Jonathan Gebauer and you’ve been listening to Marketing in Minutes.

That’s it for today – take care, bye!

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