Discover Quick Win Keywords
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.
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.
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.
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:
- Check On-Page SEO: Make sure your pages are optimized as they should be (title tags, keyword placement in headings and subheadings, copy, alt tags).
- Improve content: Rework, rewrite or just make your content more relevant.
- Internal Links: Grab a list of the most linked pages of your site (HINT: in Search Console). Add links on those pages back to the pages you want to rank higher. Make sure to take care with your anchor texts.
- Link Building: Links, go build them. Point them at the URLs you want to rank higher. Don’t overdo it with exact match anchors and try to be natural.
- Get Social: While social shares isn’t a direct ranking factor, good content gets shared.
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:
- Google Sheets
- Search Console Add-on (for sheets)
- And a website (with GCS setup obviously)
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:
- Automated via Search Console.
- 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:
- Authorize your sheet
- Go to Add-ons >>> Search Analytics for Sheets >>> Open Sidebar
- Make sure your Google account is authorized to use the Search Console property you want to back up!
- Authorize.
- Choose your site.
- Add Query & Page to the Group By box:
- In Results Sheet, select ‘RAW DATA’ :
- (If you don’t select the RAW DATA tab, it won’t work. ????)
- Request data. This will get the spreadsheet goblins working and you should see:
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:
- Keyword
- URL
- 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.
- Their website was targeting both B2B and B2C terms
- I had a small budget, most of which went towards producing informational content
- This wasn’t flashy content. Just articles that answered a query directly related to a question a potential customer might have
- Without the budget to push some links at these pieces, the results were ok, but not great
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:
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.
