In many ways, 2012 was the year search engine optimization (SEO) really grew up. Google left us with little choice. But we evolved as an industry, striving to build high-quality content and focus on adding as much value as possible for our users, readers, and customers.
There was a lot of pain along the way throughout this growth process, and many are still cleaning up from the aftermath. For example, the gaps in Google’s algorithm have been closed to the point that any quick SEO tactic is likely to be just that -- a short-term fix at best, a potential cause of long-term damage at worst.
If you want to win in 2013, you must commit to a solid long-term strategy. However, that’s not to say you can’t build small wins into your long-term strategy to assist in developing brand strength.
The only real way to beat the well-known online brands is to become one yourself. But just because the more traditional SEO tactics from previous years are now areas to avoid in 2013, doesn’t mean there aren’t any quick wins out there.
Research and Analysis Wins
- Make a cup of tea and read through Google’s patents to figure out where they’re going next!
- Not a fan of tea? Take your client for a beer instead. Find out what else they’re working on outside of your campaign. There’s a good chance you’ll find information that can be of great assistance.
- Spend time with your dev team. Get to know them and figure out their difficulties and bottlenecks.
- Build a checklist scorecard of how well you know outreach targets, and map out stages of how you you can get to know them better.
- Find the top bloggers in your local city or region. Figure out where they hang out so that you can meet them (events, don’t stalk them on the way home).
- Even better, arrange your own meetup and invite key bloggers and journalists.
- Run an industry survey to collect data, which can then be used for content production.
Google+ and Authorship Wins
- Set up Google Authorship for your site, or if you have already, verify that it’s working.
- Arrange a seminar to demonstrate how your team can link up their Google+ author profiles.
- Encourage your team to build up their Google+ profiles and share other content.
- Have a blog? Find orphaned posts from ‘guest bloggers’ and move them under the relevant author profiles where you can map them up - same for ex-staff members.
Events and Sponsorship Wins
- Find local sports teams and events you can sponsor.
- Submit a speaker pitch for an industry event.
- Create a content plan around liveblogging an industry event.
Content Strategy and Planning Wins
- Be creative - brainstorm new product ideas to make them link-worthy.
- Acquire a company!
- Get sued! (Ok, maybe don’t.)
- Open new content angles by relating your niche to a different topic.
- Dig into your data - look over old company reports, white papers, etc. for key statistics.
- Schedule a team brainstorm to develop new content ideas.
- Share a Google Calendar mapping out your website content plan with auto-send reminders to the people involved with different areas of content creation.
- Aim to split opinions with your content and promote this to both audiences for a reaction. It doesn’t have to be controversial, just as long as you have no right or wrong answer.
Relationship Building Wins
- Follow up! Make the effort to stay in touch with key contacts via social, email, phone, and face-to-face.
- Become friends with key influencers and meet them in person - invite them to lunch or arrange a meetup.
- Reuse great outreach connections and build on-going relationships.
- Provide customer testimonials for your software, product, and service providers.
- Ask influencers to add you to their partner pages.
- Get your users involved. Build relationships and brand interaction by rewarding loyal fans.
- Ask your friends and family to link to you if they have personal websites.
Content Production Wins
- Take photos and make them available under a Creative Commons license.
- Write topical content about a trend from that day.
- Interview experts within your niche (ego bait).
- Craft an exclusive content pitch for a leading authority website.
- Focus on one piece of great content, instead of four average ones.
- Develop a content ideation plan for an infographic using data from within your company.
- Answer common questions asked within your industry. This can be a great method for brainstorming content ideas.
- Set up Google Alerts for these questions so when these are asked on blogs or forums you can reply with your opinion (and link to your content).
- Create and syndicate video content to target new audiences.
- Offer a discount promotion to get people talking, and so they are picked up on promo-code websites.
- Create a great 404 error page. Your users will love it, and it might get you some links for creativity!
Comment Marketing Wins
- Make the effort to reply to comments on all of your content (posts on your blog, guest posts, news coverage, etc.) to help build relationships.
- Find an active forum within your niche to start contributing and building profiles.
- Find two targeted blogs; comment where you can add value, and subscribe or follow them and their key writers on Twitter.
Local Wins
- Take photos of your office, or store and upload a minimum of six high-quality photos to help your local listing stand out.
- Ensure all of your company addresses are registered and up to date on Google+ Local.
- Design business cards that encourage customers to review your brand on Google, TripAdvisor, Yelp!, etc. Offer them a next-time discount incentive.
- Create landing pages with local intent. Submit them to Google Local if you have multiple addresses.
- Take a visit to your local library and dig deep into historical information about your local town or city. You might find a gem that hasn’t been written about online, which is great for picking up local citations and links. Michael Dorausch has some great tips in a local review of Tampa.
- Create a list of power reviewers within your sector and look to get on their radar.
- Make sure you’re listed on the key local providers, such as Yell, ThomsonLocal, ReachLocal, etc.
Blogger Outreach Wins
- Find two of the most authoritative bloggers in your niche and figure out the best way to connect. In all likelihood, they’ve added that to their “About” page.
- Pick up the phone and speak to top influencers.
- Hire writers within your niche and leverage their contacts for outreach.
- Spend your hour carefully crafting a great content pitch and make it personal and original.
- Give bloggers and journalists a product they can use or test in exchange for a review (use with caution, and make this well-targeted and selective).
- Write for authority sites within your niche. Build strong relationships and strengthen your reputation by leveraging the audiences of well-respected industry blogs.
- Get your client to create a company email address for you with their domain so it’s clearer when you’re sending emails out on their behalf.
Penguin and Panda Penalty Review Wins
- Perform a content performance ratio analysis to figure out how much content you need to clean up.
- Build a list of top sites you want to remove links from.
- Clean up your own internal anchor text from over-optimisation.
- Reduce cross-linking from other sites you own. Link from partner pages, rather than sitewide.
- Clean up any links from your social profiles and author bios.
On-Site Optimisation Wins
- Prioritise a list of key actions, and assign responsibilities and deadlines.
- Install SEO WordPress plugins to optimise your blog.
- Optimise page title tags. It’s the oldest quick SEO win in the book, but it still works!
- Test pay-per-click (PPC) ad copy as title/meta description to lift organic click-through rate.
- Review navigation structure such as breadcrumbs and internal linking.
Productivity Wins
- Use tools. I could fill another 96 points here, but I suggest discovering which two or three make you more efficient. Then spend the time to really get to know how to use them fully.
- Start to document your delivery process. This will save you a lot of time in the future when training your team.
- Run a knowledge share session with your internal team and/or client. Try to make sure they know what you do, then you don’t have to do it all yourself!
- Learn how to get things done. Watching this video takes 45 minutes -- you’ve still got 15 minutes left. So you’re instantly more productive!
Link Removal Wins
- Analyse your backlinks to find off-topic, poor anchor text links.
- Analyse the market to find the percentage of exact-match anchor text for key competitors.
- Clean up any obvious paid or over-optimised links.
Link Reclamation Wins
- Google Operator Query “Brand Name” “Key Person Within Organisation Name.” Then ask to be credited with a link within article if not already given.
- Google Image search for your infographics or photos. Ask for link credits where these are not provided.
- Find broken links pointing out of site with this tool. This is another easy fix to clean up and makes your site look good.
Competitive Analysis Wins
- Research competitors’ top pages in OpenSiteExplorer to get content ideas.
- Review brand traffic history in analytics to measure the impact of offline brand signals.
- Think of creative ways you can get more people searching for your brand by joining up with offline advertising.
Public Relations Wins
- Bring your PR and social teams together to understand what they are doing and how they can help each other by working more closely together.
- Sign up for PR service HARO (Help a Reporter Out) to become a link source for news articles.
- Build a list of key journalists and media contacts you want to influence.
- Enter relevant industry and local awards competitions.
- Brainstorm ideas to connect offline with online tactics. How can you get more people searching for you (sending brand signals to Google)?
Technical Wins
- Create and submit an XML Sitemap to keep this up to date in Google Webmaster Tools.
- Check how your website displays on mobile and tablet devices, and plan to create platform-specific sites if you don’t already have them.
- Fix duplicate content homepage: www vs non-www.
- Check for external duplicate content.
- Make sure the geo-targeting for your international site is set up correctly in Google Webmaster Tools.
- Optimise your site for mobile. Do it in less than an hour with a plugin.
Analytics and Measurement Wins
- Start developing a strategy around your top 20 PPC spend/converting keywords.
- Find your top converting landing pages. Optimise them and update the content to attract new links.
- Ensure all your analytic goals are in place to measure both micro and macro conversions so you can report on revenue, leads, and ROI to your boss and/or client.
- Talk to your clients and learn about their main business.
- Finally...spend your hour writing a report making a business case for the value of SEO to get extra resources allocated. Because really -- an hour's just not enough!
Whew! I could go on and on, but hopefully you get the point. And a big thanks to Ryan Gibson, Amrit Gill, Paddy Moogan, Danny Ashton, Matt Sawyer, and many more for their helpful responses on Twitter.
Let’s hope this is enough to keep you busy for the first 96 hours. Then you can use the 97th to plan the rest.
I know I am not satisfied with 96. I want to know -- what else would you do? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!
I must admit I smiled reading this:
"Acquire a company!"
Personal experience, Kevin? :)
Jokes apart, this is really a great checklist.
Thanks Gianluca - absolutely! I'm sure a bit of Techcrunch coverage never does any harm :)
Yes! After reading this list I'm going to go buy a company today! :)
Make sure you do the whole thing in an hour or less.
Thanks Kevin for sharing the quick wins.
I have one question regarding quick win No.55
Give bloggers and journalists a product they can use or test in exchange for a review (use with caution, and make this well-targeted and selective).
Can we include a link back to our website from the blogger? If so, then Google thinks it's bad link scheme according to their Google Webmaster Link Schemes
https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356
"sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link"
If we don't include the link back then how come it will be beneficial from SEO point of view.
or we can be beneficial by citation or mentioning of the website/brand with the services they offer without hyperlinking or adding anchor text ?
Another really amazing post Kevin!I cannot wait to see you at IonSearch, booked my tickets and am ready to learn from an expert i highly admire and respect for your amazing work and research and even more so that you share your knowledge rather than keep it bottled up like most SEO Companies/Individuals :)
Excellent post Kevin. RE: "62. Clean up any links from your social profiles and author bios" is there a known penalty for these links? For instance, I would think links from social profiles, especially Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook business and personal pages would help, not hurt. Is that not the case?
Hey Rick - what I meant was if you've built social profiles for the sole purpose of SEO and building links, then it's unlikely to be having a great impact. In which case it's probably a good time for a cleanup.
However - if you're actively using social sites and have built up a strong profile that's completely different. In that case you fully deserve the link credit ;-)
That make's sense Kevin. Active profiles can be a great source of links, but many links from inactive profiles are an easy signal for Google to spot, especially if you have 8 profiles from the same social network, with 0 post/shares/like/+1/tweets/retweets/etc. then that would be a potential penalty. Thanks for the clarification.
I agree with Rick. Kevin, what do you mean poiting this tip?
Thanks so much!!! I am now a marketing analytics student, I learned some skills about the SEO, and one of my course requires our project team to set up a blog, in which using "Wpaboli" and "Bkrungu" as the keywords to apply the SEO skills. There is our blog: https://wpabolibkrungu2013.wordpress.com/ , we set it up yesterday, so can you just give us some advice to improve the rank in the google search result? Many thanks!
Great advice all around. And thanks for including more offline driven things like hosting/sponsoring events of meetups. I think a lot of businesses fail to understand that EVERYTHING they do to market their brand can be harnessed for SEO one way or another. Even offline events can generate links if you take the right approach!
@Nick - exactly!
How many links does running an event like MozCon or BlueGlassX drive for example? What we're talking about here is building a brand (and links should always be the by-product of this, not the main goal).
In my opinion you still can't beat getting out there and meeting people face-to-face - which is why I'm a big fan of conferences and meetups - it definitely pays off if you can think about ways you can make that online/offline connection.
Reading, listening and getting more information win
Responsible seo attitude win
Nothing can do in one hour
Few minute will take checking email
10 more minutes will take checking and moderating comments
More than 10 minute will take to check Analytis, Web Master tools
10 minutes may be for sign in with twitter, facebook, stumble upon
(5 minutes saved as not signing in with digg)
Check SERP in Google, Bing, Yahoo for most prime keywords
5 minute to relax from the desperation if some of the listing gone down
Hey Kev!
Wicked list...thanks for that. Superwell written and very nice visualisation!
Cheers for that
Hi Kavin,What a great article.. really awesome post.I just gone through all points but bit crazy about 'Link removal wins' 74. Clean up any obvious paid or over-optimised links.I did as much, hut how it's possible to remove all? because still not sure the web admin (from where I have a back link) will remove my link or not. yes, requested 2-3 times and disavow as well.
Still struggling to release from penguin.
Best!Manoj
Hi Kevin, awesome list mate! will take a while to master all 96. After G algo the biggest win for me was on-site optimisation win, really got me back in the rankings!
Thanks once again brilliant post!
Brilliant and comprehensive list! Definitely busy for around the next 6 months working through each item ( if I give up sleeping that is) I'm going to pin a hard copy to my office wall so I can have the satisfaction of highlighting each task off once completed :)
Mr.kevingibbons
That`s a very informative post including almost every thing I like it keep up the good work looking forward to it......!!!!
Thanks...!!!
I don't know if all of these quite count as "quick wins", but there are some fantastic ideas here and this is certainly a list to come back to for those folks who are stuck in a rut and need to diversify their tactics.
That is simply a day of forward thinking strategies! Thanks for putting this together!
Fantastic information! Thank you - will be implementing this asap :)
This is an excellent share, and well worth bookmarking. Within SEO, there are 100s of things that need to be done in a campaign, but as this post highlights, there are "quick wins" that can be done in a short space of time. I think my favourite "area" of SEO can sometimes be the technical side. I't rewarding to be able to see what's lacking in a website (such as a sitemap) for example, and then implement followed by changing results. Checklists like this post are essential for SEO.
Some pretty list you shared. I'd like to try a few of them one at a time.
all in one hour? You are fast!
Kevin, Good insight!
I'd appreciate your efforts specially local wins and content production. Great!!
Thanks for such great and informative article Kevin, specially the Content Strategy and Planning section, in SEO unique and quality content is very important as it is key to improve your online presence.
Great post Kevin. Lots of great content in brief! Much appreciated as we try to create a few local strategies for our business and clients.
Great list that I agree on. Many methods are really a long term strategy tactic and will be crucial in defeating the competition.
However, most people are afraid of investing in a long term strategy, as it does not gives fast noticable results, which often are in demand by the client.
I am currently struggling with getting a client to understand the importance of a long term marketing strategy, and forget about "quick fixes", but that is a quite a task.
There is great information in this article, Thank you Kevin this post have greater value. This post considered to be very helpful. You discuses about one-page wins, local wins, competitive analysis wins, public relation etc. that are very helpful for SEO beginner or experts.
Hi Kevin!
This post is very helpful to many. Thanks for sharing :)
Very good reference article, one that is certainly bookmarked, revisited and duly shared on https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/114057592582343346337
Fantastic Article Kevin - Hoping to see you at IonSearch :)
Hello kevin... you have extracted a lot out of seo techniques, covering all possible aspects from research and analysis to analytics and measurement. i have read it scrupulously and i hope it will help seo learners alot... many likessss... :-)
Noteworthy tips to apply. Thanks
Thanks, Kevin! I love they way you have presented so many points with clear visuals - a good collection for SEO beginners and professionals. What I like most about your post is that it does give an impulse - "You can get more out of your working time!"
Thanks Iness - as SEOs, I'm not sure we're every short of ideas and things to do - but the important bit is the prioritisation of those tasks into a strategy. So if you can spend a bit of time on each, you can then plan our how to execute it all afterwards!
For image place I have always been under the impression that an image with ALT TEXT should be at the top so search engines read it as your keywords {since they can't read the image if optimized that is what they see}. Someone mentioned that photos should go after the first paragraph.
Your thoughts?
Great tip, reading this again and I never knew this about it
Nice list. Though not sure if all that can be done in 1 hour :p
What a fantastic list of tips!
Google authorship looks set to take off this year, so it's very important for people to get that sorted on their site (and guest posts that they submit). It makes all the difference.
It's also a great idea to take a look at old links on a site and remove any unrelated links. It may take a while to do, but Google are starting to crack down on unrelated links, so it's worth the effort.
Definitely - good tip Matt. I'd recommend using tools like www.brokenlinkcheck.com now and again just to make sure you're still linking to active URLs.
Excellent post Kevin, thanks for putting this together.
Loads to go at there.
good post! 96 tips... that is... WOW
You couldn't think of 4 more to get to 100??? I kid! Great stuff. I think I'm going to enter quite a few of these into my project management tool as a task each month for my clients. It's a good reminder to ensure I'm doing the most I can and following best practices. Thank you!
Thanks - I had to draw the line somewhere and 100 seemed a bit much :)
That's a really good idea, it's definitely worth remembering which SEO tasks are more than a one-off job and re-visiting them at a scheduled time to keep an eye on progress.
It will need more than 24 hours to follow all the mentioned 96 rules but yes i agree that all the mentioned points are very effective and definitely can produce desired results if we follow them effectively.
I can't do all 96 suggestions in an hour! :-b But seriously, nice job. It's a good reminder that there's always something we all can do to improve our inbound marketing.
Thanks - and just pick one! Focus on quality over quantity every time - then you can move onto the next :)
Great post, Kevin. Need to spend some more time going through everything but after my first read through, it's awesome.
Excellent! Although, I'd have a few to add to this for "quick wins" - though many of these are too quick haha!
Thanks Michael - definitely feel free to add them :)
Wins for me :
I have not tried all things but few necessary things in SEO i do. But when my website start ranking the new update push me back
100 thmubs up post :) kevin you are just explaning the SEO things amazing as new tactics are concern for site promotion. I like your link removals point very much.
Kevin I have also question for point you mention in article that Reduce cross-linking from other sites you own. Link from partner pages, rather than sitewide.
As I am also doing link analysis work so want to clear about some important points here is the list:
1. Is Sitewide link is bad and its affect on ranking?
2. links which are come from Affiliate partners and Resellers websites are Good or not?( Is it need to ask them to add rule [rel=nofollow] for our links)
Thanks
Jemin
Hey Jemin - the point I was making was rather than linking external from your footer to an external site, it seems much better practice to link to a partners page instead (SEOmoz do this themselves). That way you're internally strengthening that page - and passing the link credit onto your partners via one strong link - rather than a potentially suspect 100,000+ links, so seems like a far more natural way of linking to your trusted partners.
Thanks Kevin.... to clear my doubt... for partner links...
Excellent post! The stuff on here is gold. I think I would have also included Analytics & Keyword wins as well. If you are ever revising the post let me know ;).
www.brokenlinkcheck.com is good but I prefer Xenu :)
Any other bot tips (excluding Screaming Frog)?
Thanks Giovanni - there's definitely a few tools you could use in an hour to give yourself a good idea on what needs to be fixed.
BrokenLinkCheck.com is one I've found myself using a lot more frequently actually - and Xenu/Screaming Frog are definitely the obvious ones because they do such a good job!
Besides the tools you mention I use Deep Trawl for even further insight and additional checks, like spelling and grammar. I do wonder how much grammar plays a role after seeing so many recommendations when checking various web content with Grammarly. Terrific post
Thanks Gregg - Deep Trawl and Grammarly look like great tools, I'll make sure to check them out in more detail.
Personally I'm always a bit sceptical about how much Google values grammar - in general I think it's fair to say better written sites are likely to have better content. But there's quite clearly a lot of exceptions to that rule, so it's always going to be one of the lower ranking factors in my opinion.
Very useful information and I loved the graphics and how you organized every tip on your post. I'm adding this to my bookmarks! Thanks for sharing this, hope to see more posts in the future.
Nice post! Thanks for organizing - we do "quick wins" for new seo engagements as well as for those clients we've been working on for a while - but I didn't have a list of 96 of them... until now. :)
That is one creative 404 page example!
Kevin: I am going to pass on #17 but the rest of the list is a good go-by to transition from short-term to long-term SEO.
The SEO profession is going to be a valued job
If you do hard work, you can get better results
If you try to do some tricks, will be punished
Only responsible, considering, hard working can survive
Great list Kevin - I've picked a few quick wins off the list to complete.
Thanks Mark - are there any that you would add to the list?
Xenu works well extremely, I preferred that tool to check your broken links as well as redirects etc.,
Indeed these all are SEO wins tips for everyone who involved in SEO .. Also I am laughing to ask you , have you satisfied yourself with these or wishing to bring more in this list. . . I know what you think now - -NOT! . .Excellent work kevingibbons!
Thanks for the link to the blog post on Google authorship - simple and an easy read helping me figure out something I've been wanting to do.
Hi Kevin,
This is a great list! Definitely something I'll be using for a long time. Thanks so much for taking the time to put this all together.
Kevin, this is an AMAZING list. Thank you so much for this, I'll definitely be able to make use of these!
I'm going to start with:
36. Answer common questions asked within your industry. This can be a great method for brainstorming content ideas.
I'll combine that with the new Q&A post on YouMoz and boom, two posts working together!
This list is huge & amazing! Thanks for compiling it.
Haaaaah!!! Lists are huge. I have book marked it and go through it once i have time. Now i am working with content writing team for one for client site.
Love the way you've chunked this into manageable sections. Makes it possible to just jump into a section and tackle something.
Definitely a post to save out and chew through a few steps at a time. Also useful for showing clients to demonstrate the scale of SEO and why it isn't just a "one & done" proposition.
Paul
What can I do in an hour? Watch an entire episode of 60 minutes!