5 SEO Action Items To Boost Rankings in Only 1 Hr A Day

Search engine optimization is never over. It’s an ongoing process that requires integrating long-term goals with daily habits and inputs. The best search marketers know true growth and rankings come from consistently publishing relevant, expert-level content. While long-term SEO campaigns can be far more nuanced, the same logic applies. We each need to identify the daily inputs which will guarantee us steady growth in our long-term SEO campaigns. The trouble is identifying which daily habits and action items will inch you towards your long-term goal. In fact, it’s one of the biggest issues agencies face when communicating with clients. Luckily, there are thought-leaders and industry experts who are constantly publishing content about the newest and most effective tactics. Even more, tactics you can put in place today in your own campaigns. contextual backlinks would add one addendum to this. Even if I were to tell you five tactics guaranteed to improve your ranking, there’s no guarantee you even have the time to implement those five tactics. You have enough on your plate already. I don’t need to throw more SEO projects your way and leave you overwhelmed. Instead, we need to find the missing minutes in our day and start spending them on guaranteed wins and action items. So, for your benefit, here are five quick daily SEO action items that you can crank out every day in less than 1 hour! Whether you’re looking to market a unique brand of expertise or generate new backlinks to improve your website ranking, you’re going to want to take advantage of HARO. HARO stands for Help A Report Out. It’s a great tool for connecting industry experts with writers/editors looking for quotes/collaboration in their new articles. Quotes for writers, backlinks for marketers being quoted. This will get you an email every day at 2:30 a.m., 9:30 a.m., and 2:30 p.m. Each email will include somewhere between 40-60 different queries from editors looking to quote you. You can reply to these queries with short pitches and hopefully get yourself quoted in the article with a backlink to your site. I like to start each morning with a nice cup of cold brew while I comb through my morning HARO email. I shoot for 10 Haro pitches every day, with each pitch taking me less than three minutes to send. This means that - between two or three different sessions (if I feel like replying to the 2:30 am email) - I spend 30 minutes. That’s just three cups of coffee! And with a general success rate of only 10%, this daily action item guarantees I generate at least five new links for our site every week. For combing through an email drinking coffee, I’d say that’s a pretty massive ROI. How many minutes do you think you spent waiting for Zoom meetings to start? Or how long have you waited for your client to log in to the conference you scheduled right when the early morning lunch cravings hit? Let’s just say you can better allocate your time spent waiting and fidgeting towards your weaker performing pages. This is a tactic that can take less than five minutes and can actually make you feel more fulfilled with how you spend your time. As opposed to complaining about your client’s… 1. Start off by plugging your domain into SEMRush. 2. Then take a look at your Organic Overview to look at what pages are ranking for what keywords. 3. You can then set custom filters in SEMRush to only show you positions ranking between the 10 and 15 pos. This is a really important bubble zone in terms of ranking. 4. After you identify pages that are ranking at the top of page 2 of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page), you can now identify relevant posts that you can use as link fodder for those pages. 5. You’ll need to insert a backlink within that blog post that links back to the page you are trying to bump with the exact match anchor text for that page’s target keyword. This should enhance the page’s backlink profile AND keyword orientation. Which should bump it up a few ranks when repeated consistently. After you bump the page up to page 1 of the Google SERP, you’ll see it really start to generate traffic. That sure made waiting for your meeting a whole lot more efficient, didn’t it? But, you’ll still spend a few minutes every week either heating up a Lean Cuisine or refresh a cup of coffee. So why not spend that time bolstering the link profile of some of your more recent posts? I’m sure that you’ve heard enough of Brian Dean’s skyscraper technique by now. But if you haven’t, it’s an excellent way to improve your posts readiness to rank. Again, you’ll be using SEMRush for some basic keyword/SERP analysis. What you want to do is first identify the keywords in your recent blog post that you were trying to rank for. You can then check out those keywords in SEMRush in your Keyword Overview dashboard. Click through that actual keyword and you will see what posts are currently ranking on the first page of the Google SERP for that keyword. You’ll want to identify at least five posts on page 1 that can relevantly link to your post. Then, all you have to do is copy and paste those posts URLs into MOZ’s Open Site Explorer. MOZ will pull up any pages linking to or from that specific exact URL. If contextual backlinks want to rank in a similar spot to the page 1 post, you can essentially copy the backlink profile in your own. It’s not as easy as it sounds. It includes a lot of outreach to those specific sites that are backlinking to the post. But seo service ’re bound to land at least a few of the same links. It’s not the easiest optimization tactic, but it’s time efficient and guaranteed to improve rankings. I don’t know about you, but I think it’s safe to say the half hour after lunch is the least productive half hour of everybody’s work day. We’re full, we’re tired, and we probably haven’t made it to our third cup of coffee yet. But don’t let it mean you can’t get anything done. Instead of vaguely staring at the outline you wrote before lunch, pretending to look like you’re editing, why not hop on QUORA and answer a few questions instead? Question-and-Answer Forums like Quora are a great place to market your expertise and directly help users. At Directive Consulting we’ve seen a huge success from answering questions on Quora. It’s not only one of our leading social traffic channels. It’s also a great place to repost and promote your successful blog content to help users more. I like to set my quota for answering 5 Quora questions every day after lunch. You can follow specific trends or keywords and receive alerts when new questions are posted in your ideal topic. This way you have questions to answer flowing in every day. It’s an easy way to market your expertise as well as publish evergreen content that users can continually refer to for your helpful advice. And it makes you feel a bit more productive during that half-hour “post-lunch cat-nap” phenomenon. The last daily input I have for you is a given: Read. Read every day. Read every single day. The more you can learn - and the more you can engage with what you learn - the more of an expert you become each day. And testing provides you with content for blog posts and thought leadership. The more you learn the more your expertise and brand begin to market themselves. At Directive, our reading philosophy is LEARN - ENGAGE - CREATE. We don’t just skim 5 posts in a given topic and hopefully learn some new strategies for the post we’re writing this week. Instead, we find one post every day and we dive super deep into the one topic or one strategy. Try to limit yourself to one post a day to make sure you’re diving deep enough into each post to engage and learn the material like an expert. Don’t worry about learning in volume. One post a month means you are an expert of 30 new tests/tactics by the end of the month. That’s no small feat. Aristotle once said that “We are what we repeatedly do. He was a pretty smart guy. So I say we listen to him. Success isn’t going to come from working harder. It’s going to come from working smarter.