The first 90 days: Pick the low hanging fruit
Change your approach to finding the smallest, easiest wins that you could execute on immediately. This is ripe and juicy low-hanging fruit.
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Pick the ripest, juiciest, low-hanging fruit
When I first started at SurveyMonkey, I tried to pick the biggest project I could find, but ran into a wall so fast my head was spinning. Read the story in my book.
Instead, I changed my approach to finding the smallest, easiest wins that I could execute on immediately. This is ripe and juicy low-hanging fruit.
Finding low-hanging fruit matters because it builds momentum and earns political capital. When you’re new, you need wins. It doesn’t really matter whether those wins are easy, since it’s far worse to be in the role for 90 days and have no wins at all. You do not want to have a conversation at the end of 90 days of the value you have provided, and have nothing at all to say.
Therefore, you need to demonstrate value quickly, build trust with your team, and prove that what you do works before you ask for budget and resources for the significant initiatives. A few quick victories in your first 30 to 60 days create the credibility you need to pursue longer-term strategies. You inevitably will need to make big asks, and you have to earn the right to make them.
Strategic organizational psychology
Grabbing early wins isn’t SEO; it’s a strategic approach to winning at organizational psychology. Every new role involves a transition period where everyone around you is constantly evaluating you. Your manager or executive sponsor, if you are a consultant, wants to know they made the right hire, and your team wants to see if you’re competent. Early points on the board answer all these questions before anyone asks them out loud.
Your first 90 days are foundation-building, not for SEO, but for you in your role. Master this and you are set for success. You’re building credibility and establishing relationships that will help you along the way. Quick SEO wins serve multiple purposes because they allow you to learn how to do things at the same time that they position you as an expert. This generates positive energy around you as a marketer, giving you breathing room to take on bigger bets.
Learn while doing
There’s a huge learning advantage to starting with smaller projects where you discover how decisions get made and where the political landmines are buried. You are better off tripping on a simple title tag suggestion than a massive redirect of a website that is the favored child of an executive. Going through the motions of suggesting changes and seeing them implemented will teach you more about the organization than any onboarding session ever could.
I once spent months negotiating for a title tag change because too many teams wanted to weigh in, but my cost of failure was only a title tag. Contrasted this with the time I tried to change a header navigation and was derailed halfway through by an international team that was very concerned about the layout of the menu items in Finnish. (True story).
Low-hanging fruit is always abundant in every organization, and the key is to reject your instinct to go big and instead make these your first projects. In many cases, these initiatives could be the things that you noticed the first time you Googled the business before taking that first phone call with them. Please don’t skip over them; fix them!
If you are drawing a blank, here are some ideas that I always share when I coach new people in an SEO role
Using Google Search Console, look at pages that already rank on page two of search results. They’re typically ranking between positions 11 and 20, which means Google already considers them relevant but not quite authoritative or optimized enough to crack the first page. (Disclaimer: I hate rankings as a KPI, but when trying to get a quick win, this is the only time I would recommend you look at this.) Come up with a brainstorm of things you could do on those pages that might move them to the first page of search results, which would then boost the traffic to the page.
Do a Google search on some of your favorite keywords. Look at what the pages ranking above you are doing differently. You might draw ideas from simple things, like whether they have more comprehensive content. Better structured information with clear headings? Are more relevant internal links pointing to the pages? An external link you might be able to snag?
Title tags and meta descriptions could be low-hanging fruit if you have pages with poor ones. Don’t get caught up in slight nuances of keyword targeting. What you are looking for here are titles that lack any good keywords or a meta description so horrible that no one would click it. Every site has these; run a crawl of the site and find them.
Internal linking is probably the most underutilized quick win in SEO. Most sites have strong pages that could be passing link equity to important but underperforming pages. There is no website with more than 1,000 pages that can’t improve its internal linking. Remember, this is about low-hanging fruit, so it’s not the time to suggest a dynamic link algorithm. What you want to do here to pick this low-hanging fruit is manually go into pages and insert links to the pages you want to target.
Find pages with thin content that have visibility on Google (as determined by Google Search Console) for multiple related keywords. These pages are performing despite being underdeveloped, which means there’s a real opportunity to drive more conversions or value. Brainstorm ways to boost the page with value and maximize the traffic you already have.
Broken pages and redirect chains are technical low-hanging fruit and worth addressing (if easy) because, even if the fixes don’t drive measurable value, you have a complex project to show as completed. Run a crawl and identify 404 errors, especially those with backlinks pointing to them. Set up proper 301 redirects to relevant pages. Find redirect chains where one redirect points to another, which points to another. Again, only do this if you are not wading into landmines of engineering debt. If it turns out to be more complex than you thought, run the other way.
Image optimization is often completely ignored. If your pages load slowly due to large, uncompressed images, you’re hurting both user experience and search visibility. Compressing images, adding descriptive alt text, and implementing lazy loading can be done relatively quickly and improve user performance across your entire site. Even the best-built sites can run into issues like this when multiple CMSs are in use. Again, if you hit an engineering landmine on this run, the other way.
Check your Google Search Console for pages with high impressions but low click-through rates. These pages are showing up in search results, but people aren’t clicking. This likely means your title or description isn’t compelling enough, or that your keywords aren't matching the wrong intent. Minor tweaks to better fix the title and meta description could go a long way.
Build allies
As you recommend and implement your low-hanging fruit, your goal should be to build a team of allies. Your role is to coordinate and collaborate, and you can never be successful without allies. You need engineers to implement technical changes, designers to improve user experience, content writers to create material, and project managers to green-light your requests.
These early wins give you paper credibility, but relationships are the real currency of your success. Help other people succeed with their KPIs, and they’ll help you succeed when you need a favor from them. Most engineers do not have an SEO KPI, so helping you when they are not required to do so will be out of goodwill. Earn it.
Cash in the capital
As you rack up small wins, you can start building toward bigger initiatives. These early successes will help you to make the case for more ambitious projects. Even if you come into the org as an expert, you are an unproven expert until you have work to show for it. When you make a recommendation that flies in the face of what others believe to be true, they will trust you when they trust your expertise. Many non-SEO practitioners hold beliefs about SEO that they have found online. They will not be dissuaded that these beliefs are not correct unless they can first believe you to be a bigger expert.
In addition to building your personal capital, you are also changing how the organization thinks about SEO. These quick wins start that shift when they demonstrate that SEO isn’t a black box and realize they have a role to play in SEO success. Therefore, you want to be as transparent as possible about the results of their contributions. I have consulted with many organizations whose experience with SEO consisted of us doing a lot of work, but we have no idea what happened.
Share everything. People are curious and want to get on board with interesting projects and contribute when they think they are making a difference. In many organizations, I shared a weekly update not about what I did, but about what others did. The best way to ensure your update emails are read is to have people check whether they were mentioned. Everyone likes an ego boost.
Pruning the low-hanging fruit isn’t about being lazy or avoiding hard work. This is purely strategic. Make a great first impression, and you will have a ton of bandwidth for the big tasks.
Start small, win fast. Start big and you might fail on the launchpad.
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