SEO low-hanging fruit: How to make the most out of a small budget

People who have been active in SEO for a few years will be familiar with the term “low-hanging fruit.” In this article, we show you some useful tips on how to make use of them.

What is the low-hanging fruit?

People who have been active in SEO for a long time know the term “low-hanging fruit.”

Newcomers will also come across the term sooner or later. But what exactly does this mean? What is low-hanging fruit (referred to from now on as “LHF”)? And even more importantly: can I quickly achieve success in SEO even with a small budget through LHF optimization? Especially for newcomers or companies that don’t have a big budget, these quick wins have the potential to make a big difference.

We can subdivide the topic into two areas: firstly, focusing on weak competitive search terms (e.g. longtail terms), and second on rankings between positions 10 and 20. Why? If you already rank on the second page of the Google SERPs, it’s clear that your page is relevant – even making just small improvements might help you reach the first page.

Low-hanging fruits also exist outside the SEO industry. In business, the focus is on the cost-benefit ratio – achieving above-average success with little effort. This is exactly what SEO is all about: improving positions with little effort!

Optimization for low-hanging fruit can be divided into three phases and mapped in one process: analysis, merging and hygiene, and optimization.

Phase 1: Analysis or “finding the fruit”

Let’s concentrate on LHF optimizations with existing rankings. In the practical examples, I will focus on free tools; after all, low-hanging fruit is about making the most of a small budget.

You should use the Google Search Console to analyze your ranking positions between 10 and 20. The Google Search Console always provides you with the most valid data and best insights.

Figure 1: Identifying low-hanging fruit in the Google Search Console

In the Google Search Console, go into the report “Performance on search results”, and set filters for keywords in the last 12 months between positions 10 and 20. Filter in descending order.

Look at the impressions of these keywords – these provide valuable conclusions about the search volume. (However, you should use the Google Keyword Planner for accurate data about the search volume of certain keywords).

Now you can look at a URL that is relevant and has a lot of potentials. You could also do this via “queries”, and then filter the URL directly.

If you click on a URL, and then on “queries”, you can see all the keywords that rank for this URL. If these keywords are thematically suitable for the URL, you should optimize the article for these keywords.

Tip: Use Ryte’s Google top 10 tests and underperformer report to identify more low-hanging fruits.

Phase 2: Merging and hygiene, or rather “Picking the first fruit”

There are many different ways and possibilities to optimize keywords or topics. However, essentially you should optimize for topics, and not keywords. This means that you should always be optimizing for your user intent. You might end up optimizing 5 or more keywords per URL. You should also be aware that different areas of business have different ranking factors.

Regarding user intent, you should always keep the following points in mind:

1. Display thematically closely related search terms on a URL
2. know the user intent of your search terms
3. know the SERPs of your search terms (e.g. ranked featured snippets, images, etc.)

That leads us to the first point on the to-do list

The focus of this phase is on merging and cleaning up URLs. URLs that deal with very similar topics can be “merged” together to create one piece of content. Make sure the topics are similar, and that the old URL is redirected to the new one via 301-Redirect. This avoids the cannibalization of the URLs and strengthens the focus of the topic. Deleting URLs can also increase your SEO performance, but you should make sure that the URLs are redirected to a thematically similar URL via 301 status code. URLs that have not been used for years can be removed!

Measures for the merging and hygiene can include:

• Deleting and redirecting irrelevant URLs that do not “pay in” to your company’s goals.
• Delete and redirect URLs that have had no traffic for 12 months
• Merge URLs that are thematically very similar and represent an identical user intent.
• Delete or extend thin content URLs with content
• With the tools Google Analytics, Ryte, or ScreamingFrog you can collect the data quite easily and combine them in Excel. You can also combine crawl data, Google Analytics data, and Google search console data directly in Ryte using Ryte’s data explorer.

Figure 2: With the Ryte data explorer, you can combine crawl data directly with Google Analytics data and Search Console data to identify low-performing pages or keywords.

Phase 3: Optimize or “Go! Pick the fruit!”

The last step gives you an overview of the classic possibilities in optimization. Theoretically, you could skip the second step “merging and hygiene” and start right here. But since it makes more sense from an SEO point of view to first clean up and get an overview, you avoid the danger of making work double or even pointless.

Now let’s take a look at the points you should tackle:

1. Adjust your metadata to improve the relevance and click rates

The simplest measure is to adjust meta-titles and meta-descriptions. The meta-title and the meta-description are becoming increasingly relevant. This is partly due to the fact that Google has been focusing on user intent for years, so try to use your most important search terms here and describe the topic in a meaningful way. The title should not be longer than 60 characters.

A helpful tool to check this is the Ryte platform or the Google Snippet Optimizer.

Figure 3: View meta title and descriptions in Ryte Search Engine Optimization

2. Revise your headlines to increase the relevance

A further measure would be to adapt the headings within an article or text. Check whether the topic is sensibly described in headings, and use your semantically similar search terms to increase relevance. This can achieve quick results, especially in areas that are rather news heavy.

3. Revise or extend content: keep content up to date

A little more work, but definitely worthwhile, is expanding more content. Take your text and extend it with relevant topics. Add paragraphs that semantically fit the topic.

Also, check whether any featured snippets rank for search terms. If so, you can optimize your content for Direct Answers and benefit from it as well.

Figure 4: Featured snippet in the Google SERPs

4. Adapt internal linking: strengthen pages internally

Internal linking is still an important part of SEO, and shouldn’t be neglected. A quick win could be to increase the number of internal links to a respective URL. Use the links report in Website Success and check how many links refer to the URL to be optimized.

Link the URL of other relevant pages from the content. This classifies the URL as more relevant for search engines.

Figure 5: List of all links in Ryte Search Engine Optiization

5. Optimize loading times for a better user experience

Optimizing your loading times and website speed is more important than ever before. SEO aside, improving the loading time can achieve a lot. For example, it can have a very strong influence on the conversion rate and your overall Website User Experience.

Quick wins for website speed optimization:

• • Use images in the required size (e.g. image is displayed at 800 px, but the original image has 1600 px)
    Compress your images with tinyjpg.com before you use them. There are plugins for WordPress, e.g. the EWWW Image Optimizer.
  • Enable browser caching on your server
  • Reduce, if possible, the number of requests, and remove resources you do not need.

Figure 6: Ryte offers a report about the loading performance of your website under “Web Performance” > “Web Vitals”

Conclusion

There are many more ways you can optimize low-hanging fruit. But, for now, the measures described here will be sufficient to achieve the first success. Depending on your objectives, you will reach your goal with a small budget. Don’t forget to monitor your success – there are plenty of tools out there, including the Google Search Console, to help you with this. Then all that remains to be said is: Have fun picking fruit!

This post was originally published in December 2018 and has been updated in March 2023.