Most SEO agencies over complicate SEO and drown customers in reports, data and jargon. A fundamental concept we try to get our SEO Audit customers to understand is that SEO is simple, but not obvious. Here are four simple, not obvious SEO tactics that in some cases can have a dramatic impact on rankings and SEO traffic.
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Renew your domain for 10 years or the maximum your registrar allows
Downtime equals zero speed, and one of the most common causes of downtime is domain names not being renewed.
Your entire SEO and online marketing strategy runs on top of your domain name, and because domain renewals are so cheap, domain name maintenance and management is usually completely neglected.
A simple fix for this is to renew your domain for as long as your registrar allows. For .com domains this is typically 10 years. You will often get a discount for renewing so far into the future too.
No page, no rank, and your homepage does not count
If you do not have a page for something on your site you cannot rank for it. No page, no rank. You would be surprised how often we see this issue in our SEO audits.
There are some weird technical and edge case examples where this rule is not 100% true, but broadly speaking, if you are a dentist and want to rank for searches relating to teeth whitening, then you need to have a page on your site for teeth whitening.
Each page on your site can only rank for one theme or topic too. Your teeth whitening page is not going to rank for “dental implants”, and stuffing 15 services onto a single services page does not work either.
A simple action step we try to have all customers do is to list out all the products and services they sell, along with all their physical locations, and then make sure there is a page to match each one. Often, by simply adding a page for a product or service you will start to rank and get traffic.
Note that your homepage is a special page and does not count as a page in the context of this rule. Often it is the homepage itself that ranks, but the ranking is being driven by one of the inner pages.
If phone calls are important to you, add the phone number to your title tag and meta description
A simple one, and more relevant for local businesses or ecommerce businesses that take phone calls. Add your phone number to your title tag and meta description and you will typically see an increase in CTR (click through rate) and call volume.
A bonus here is that the phone number in the meta description becomes a click to call number, so you will often generate calls and leads directly from the search results.
Get detailed insights from your Google Search Console keyword data in under 5 minutes
There is a ton of valuable keyword data in Google Search Console (GSC), but pulling actionable insights from it can be very time intensive.
A simple, free shortcut we use to understand keyword data quickly is to export the keywords from Google Search Console and run them through a word frequency count tool like countwordsfree.com. This process takes maybe 5 minutes and can give you detailed insights on search intent and search volume without needing to use expensive tools like Ahrefs.
Bonus tip: GSC only gives you 1000 search terms when you do an export, but if you use the free Search Console Explorer Studio tool you can export 5000 search terms. This tool can help you understand and manage your keyword data much more easily than the GSC web console.
None of these four tactics need a big budget or a complicated tool, which is exactly the point. If you are looking for help with your site speed, Core Web Vitals or SEO, request a free site review and we will look at your site and tell you how we can help.
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