Discover Quick Win Keywords

quick win keyword finder

Jake Sheridan

Jake is a freelance marketer and occasional spreadsheet wrangler @ Sheets for Marketers. He's a big fan of dogs, SEO & pizza. Sometimes at the same time.

If you’re lazy efficient, APIs are designed for you.

Add in a spreadsheet and you’ll get a lot more done.

Like, a lot more.

In this article I’ll be walking through how I use APIs + spreadsheet to find quick win keywords to go after for as part of an SEO campaign.

That’s why I decided to build this tool (***cough***, spreadsheet) to speed up keyword prioritization for me.

So I can spend more time working on an SEO strategy (producing content, building links and drinking coffee).

Some say lazy, I say efficient.

quick win keyword finder

Grab the ‘quick wins’ workbook through the link below.

I’m not asking for your email address because I know that’s annoying. But if you do get value from this post, I’m hoping you will check out my YouTube Channel where I have even better tutorials.

Let’s get into it!

What are quick win keywords?

“Quick win keywords”(aka low hanging fruit) are queries you currently rank in positions 5-20. Making small improvements to these pages can result in big changes in organic traffic.

Moving up from position 5 to position 3 could double your traffic for that page, overnight.

Moving to position 1 from (position 5) could 6x traffic.

keyword CTR by position

Chart source

How do I find “quick win keywords”?

You can use Google Search Console’s performance report to see the keyword rankings of each page on your site. While effective, this process is tedious as you have to comb through each page and query 1 by 1.

google search console performance report

Enter, Sheets automation

We built this Sheets template to automate the “quick win” process. By pulling data directly into Sheets from GSC, we can find quick win keywords in bulk.

I really like quick win keywords. Often, you can just make a few tweaks and some some good results. These are really good terms to go after in the early stages of a campaign to show a client you know what you are doing.

It’s not a guarantee though. Uber competitive keywords are still going to require more work. There is no magic SEO pill.

Just a couple of things you can do to optimize your pages for quick wins:

How it works & setup instructions

Grab the ‘quick wins’ workbook through the link below.

To get it working, you only need 3 things to get the tool setup:

If you don’t know what Google sheets is, why not? Start using it now. That’s an order. Go checkout the the CIFL lessons to supercharge your laziness digital marketing.

Sheets is great, it’s a cloud based spreadsheet that you can use for loads of different jobs. There’s a great library of free add-ons available which really boost what you can do within a spreadsheet.

Speaking of which…

Next up is a really great add on for sheets called: Search Console Add-on for Sheets. Seriously, it’s great.

This is a free add-on for Google Sheets. It lets you schedule the backup of Search Console data into a spreadsheet. For free! Go get it here, you’ll need it to build you Priority Machine. Did I mention it is free?

The sheet works in two ways:

  1. Automated via Search Console.
  2. Manual via rank tracker of your choosing.

 

Automated setup

1) Install this add-on to pull in Search Console data: searchanalyticsforsheets.com

2) Configure the add-on:

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3) Go look at your quick win keywords! ????

The Quick Wins tab will show you keywords ranking positions 5 – 20. Go and check on-page SEO, improve content, add internal links, or start link building to improve these pages.

 

Manual setup

If you don’t want to use Search Console data, you can also use this tool manually.

Just export your rankings from your tool of choice.

Make sure you only have  3 columns of data:

  1. Keyword
  2. URL
  3. Rank

Paste these 3 columns into the MANUAL tab.

Once you’ve pasted in your keywords, your data will populate in Quick Wins [Manual].

But what about results?

I can already here the nay-sayers…

Quick win keywords sound great, but do they actually work?

Let’s look at some results from a recent SEO client I was working with.

So in January 2018, armed with my quick win keywords, I began improving the existing ranking content.

The effects on organic traffic and keywords were really good:

alt text

I didn’t do anything fancy, just improved the readability of the content by breaking up large bodies of text and a better use of subheadings. Where it made sense, I added some extra content.

Overall, I just ensured that the content addressed the search query that would of brought the potential customer to the page via Google.

Quick win keywords FTW!

Wrapping up

Grab the ‘quick wins’ workbook through the link below.

I’m not asking for your email address because I know that’s annoying. But if you do get value from this post, I’m hoping you will check out my YouTube Channel where I have even better tutorials.

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