Pick the Lowest-Hanging SEO Fruit First

In SEO, on almost every site, there’s always a ton to do. The changes you should choose to make on the site are the ones that give the highest return relative to the effort. Once you’ve done that, you can move on to the next best investment of your time. Sounds obvious, right? So why do so many still do the opposite?

It’s easy to learn to follow some best practice document published on an American blog. You can easily find a list of 100 small improvements to make on a site and then grind through them. I’ve written similar articles myself many times. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with doing that, but I believe it’s our responsibility as an industry to be able to prioritize among them.

Many mistakenly believe that content is SEO

It’s a bit of an exaggeration when I say that many think working with content is the same as doing SEO. Content is of course important, and it’s part of almost every good SEO project. The emphasis should be on “part of,” because just like writing intros isn’t the whole of content marketing, content isn’t the whole of SEO. If you limit yourself to writing titles, headlines, and meta data in your SEO, then you’re only doing the easy part. There are a number of other factors that must be in place. A simple example: if Google can’t properly read your site because you’ve used some JavaScript solution to display the pages, then the content Google never sees doesn’t matter at all.

Things that need to be in place, before or during the project

Every SEO project is different, even if they have a lot in common. Some sites have a lot of authority from the start, some have 18,000 academic papers in your field, others have a million products. You don’t have to solve every problem in a project — only the ones that aren’t already solved. A site that’s indexed well, has a strong link profile, and exudes trustworthiness but has never had its titles reviewed can see record results just by fixing those. A site with decent titles, on the other hand, will barely see any ranking difference. There are a long list of “features” that need to exist on a site that’s expected to perform well in search results. Some examples include:

• Indexing / Rendering
• Handling of duplicate content
• Logical navigation and hierarchy
• Unique, interesting content
• A strong but not overly aggressive link profile
• Titles, headlines, descriptions
• Performance factors, like load times, uptime, etc.
• and more

So what should you fix first on your site?

Depending on the site’s history, in contrast to what I wrote earlier, it’s almost always titles and headlines that are the best and fastest change to make. The reasons I say this are the following:

1. It’s usually a very small effort to change a title
2. On a single page, having the keyword in the title is the single most important factor
3. It’s generally easier to understand how a title needs to be adjusted
4. It produces relatively quick effects

As mentioned, this is far from always true. The real goal should be to fix whatever will have the greatest impact right now, and for beginners, this can be very difficult. That’s why many often just do every change they can think of. To some extent, this works — if you work through everything that matters, sooner or later you’ll hit the right one. This can sometimes give the impression that a certain factor is the most important in SEO, when in reality it was only the most important for that site at that particular time. When you’ve fixed load times after sorting out titles, trust issues, and the link profile — and suddenly that makes a difference — it’s easy to think that load times are the be-all and end-all. It can be tricky to form your own judgment.

For beginners, it can also be complex to prioritize between these actions, something that rarely comes from anything other than experience — and experience requires room to practice. A good starting point can be to rely on yourself: what feels easiest to fix? If it feels simple, there’s a good chance it’s a solid return on investment, even if the results aren’t miraculous.