 Welcome to a new edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Alayda Solis. I am an SEO consultant and founder of Orientea and today I am here to share with you Long-Handed Fruit SEO. We all know that we want to maximize the opportunities, the chances for success in SEO. And for that what we tend to do is to prioritize those tasks, those activities that will tend to have higher output, a higher impact and lower effort. And although it's true that this usually depends on the context of our SEO process or project, the restrictions, the opportunities, the resources, the flexibility, etc., the reality is that it tends to be always this, let's say, strategic agnostic type of activities that tend to be always there for us to leverage, right? But however, what we tend to do in our SEO processes is this, right? We start the SEO process with audit research from keyword competition research to technical SEO, content-outed, competition analysis, backlink analysis, etc., and this tends to take a little bit of time, like for weeks or so, for example, let's say, then we need to analyze all of the data, etc., in order to generate actionable, prioritized SEO recommendations that at the end of the day are the ones that we share with our SEO clients or SEO stakeholders in general for execution, right? So all of this process tends to take a little bit of time. Unfortunately, the issue here is that after this time, we tend to face challenges about, like, yes, impatience of the stakeholders or the owners of the project, right? And it's natural, however, as I mentioned before, we can, and what I propose here is to develop this low-hanging fruit analysis in parallel of the usual SEO process, audit in order to detect these low-hanging fruits that we tend to have, and I will share later on which, in order to start implementation right away, right? This might seem counterintuitive because you may say, oh my God, I'll add that extra work besides the one of the audits, but the reality is that ideally here, we should set already some frameworks, some reports with data that we tend already, if you have in the SEO process, in order to implement this, right? And the benefits of this low-hanging fruit analysis and then implementation that we can start right when we are already doing the usual audit is that it will mitigate impatience from clients or stakeholders. We will start with those actions that will be much easier or simpler to coordinate, right? So what I'm talking about here about low-hanging fruit, realistically, I am going to go through three scenarios here of these low-hanging fruit opportunities that, very likely, will also be applicable for any of your projects, right? Improving the click-to-rate of top-rank pages. If we go and take a look of our current rankings, using whatever ranking tools that you use, Google Search Console even, you can take a look at which are those top-rank pages that are already ranking for relevant queries that are important, meaningful for you that have opportunities to improve their click-to-rates, that the click-to-rates are too low for the rankings of these pages and you can try to identify if some of the things off with the snippets, with the titles, with the meta-descriptions, for example, or if these pages are not maximizing the visibility because of the lack of structured data implementation and the reason why they are not generating rich snippets or including a very important meaningful relevance or feature, for example, and that is the reason of why the click-to-rate is too low and you can go and straightforward improve those, right? With the snippets too, I have to say, I have found many more scenarios in which Google was writing the title, which is now more common than before, and even if Google tries to write in a way that is still meaningful and relevant, the core key aspect of that particular page a few times have been eliminated or maybe the core page is still there but when you compare it with your top competitors, with all the pages ranking, in that same SERPs, you identify that they are actually showing additional data, additional insights that you are not because of being cut out and that is certainly a misopportunity for you. So go and take a look and prioritize the analysis, first straightforward analysis with the data that you already have for those snippets and those sort of features that you could be leveraging but are not. Then you want to take a look also at those relevant queries that you are ranking with non-relevant pages. Maybe in the past you created pages that better match the intent for those queries, not anymore, or maybe you created at some point many different pages talking similar queries that make sense in the past but not anymore either, right? And you may find scenarios of cannibalization issues or lack of content issues, right? And for that what I would highly, highly, highly recommend is to analyze for which of your relevant queries you are ranking with more than one page to identify, to assess if this is detrimental in that scenario, if less people are clicking or know where to click because of that if you could be consolidating these pages in order to run better, to pass the value to a single page and to consolidate all of the metrics in a single page instead and for that highly, highly recommend to check those relevant queries for which you have a couple of more than a single page, right? And then if, which is the right page to rank if it is better to just 1001 redirect to a single URL or to differentiate this additional page that you have there because you can identify that it might be also valuable to just tweak it a little bit or optimize a little bit to refer it and to rank to another query that is equally as relevant for you too. Second scenario here for low-hanging free opportunities is to optimize internal links of almost ranking pages, right? You probably have these pages that are not yet in the top three or top five positions as these others but are in the top 10 already, top six, top seven, et cetera, et cetera almost ranking for very, very important, meaningful, highly search, highly relevant and search queries but when you analyze these pages you identify very quickly that they are relevant, the content is okay but it's the lack of backlinks that is holding you back, right? So how do we do this? Whenever you're analyzing these pages you want to grab you want to take a look at all the backlinks per page like very quick backlink how did I hear all the internal links per page when you call your website you will see how many internal links each of those have from different, all of the different pages of your website and you want to pretty much consolidate this data in a single sheet to identify those cases of these pages for which you're in position four, position fifth, position six that potentially may have a lot of backlinks but very few internal links or vice versa you're linking from each of your internal pages but have very, very few backlinks so there might be opportunities here to and for that you should better link to almost ranking pages for popular queries that you're not internal linking well from the FUR for the top navigation from synchro diary navigations for example and for those popular pages that have a lot of backlinks for example but they're not necessarily passing well the value to those meant to be ranked pages you can leverage this to better crosslink to those right and for those that are what are they are lacking is not internal links but backlinks you already have great candidates to start your link building campaigns with already so this can also accelerate a little bit the analysis that you're doing in parallel last but not least detect search shift of content decay there might be content that you created some time ago some years ago that it was perfect at that time to target and to rank for certain queries but potentially Google later on betaed or shift the ranked pages for this query because they identified that the intent was different that they changed I have seen many scenarios in which very broad queries that used to list a lot of plp's probably listing pages are nowadays ranking more guides and far less produced in pages right so you want to identify these shifts also potentially some articles that you wrote like a few years ago that were like the top or the best tools for this or that or the top of the best product for this or that they did a little bit of update right and you forgot that they needed to be updated every year for example so these are the scenarios that I am talking about here and for this is critical to go and take a look at your again your run tracking data or even your Google search console identify like the number of clicks the number of the position and the click to rate that your top content your meaningful content through the customer journey have been getting in the last few months to see if it is going down if it is dropping right and if that's the case to go and take a look at it and see if there's opportunity to refresh or diversify a little bit depending on the scenario for which queries the content is dropping and they this existing content to keep its relevance based on the other top rank pages right if you see that you're dropping a lot and which are those of the pages that are like now are ranking you to identify the gap versus yours also create new content to better fulfill than it in case you identify that no no no no the page that I was targeting to rank for this query it doesn't make sense anymore because now Google is ranking much more informational content and this was much more commercially driven or transactionally driven right so you can again prioritize much more faster to the development of these other type of content so as you can see with this very low hanging food I will say with data that you tend to already have whether in the SEO analysis you can accelerate in parallel this analysis to identify low hanging food opportunity that you can start executing right away see results faster mitigate the impatient of your clients and all the gains much easier with your SEO process so hopefully this will serve to you to apply through the different projects that you work in and achieve results faster thank you very much