The ability to get SEO results quickly gives you a competitive advantage, whether you are doing SEO at home or as a partner agency. However, like many SEO managers, you sometimes feel frustrated by factors that slow you down or may be out of your control.  Then you can have a lot of impact on the speed at which you make meaningful improvements.

Need for Speed

Many SEO people even ask "How long does SEO take?"

Usually the answer is: "Somewhere between 4-12 months". In some cases, it can take up to 24 months for a significant return on investment to occur. With post-pandemic supply chain problems, severe economic downturns and rising labor costs, companies are closely monitoring any commercial investment. Justifying your client's contracts or even your own work can lead to how quickly you can show SEO improvements.

Stop creating an SEO checklist

One of the most common mistakes I've seen in creating SEO is practicing what I call an "SEO checklist." This is a method that believes that in order to have a well-optimized website, you need to check all the boxes from the complete list of best practices and diagnostics on the website. It also means that all sites require the same work, which is often not true. An SEO checklist is probably not a good way to approach SEO, as it does not encourage you to think about the different impact and difficulty of each field you are trying to explore in order to prioritize effectiveness.

Use the SEO impact grid instead of the SEO checklist

SEO Impact Grid is something we do to prioritize the tactics and efforts of an SEO client based on the expected effort and impact. To accelerate customer growth, it is important to focus on work that has a demonstrable impact.

To better understand what work you need to focus on, create your own SEO Impact Grid. The grid consists of 4 quadrants. You have your high impact items at the top, and your low impact items below. The left quadrant will contain lower effort items and the right quadrant will contain higher effort items.

Which items would you place above the left and right side (high impact)? What things would you do (low impact)? See below and ask, should we do all this during the first 3-6 months of this campaign? You should plan to look at ALL opportunities for one year, but if you focus on high impact things first, it will help you get SEO results faster. In this exercise, your goal is to identify high-impact, low-effort factors and address them first. Add any ideas you come up with that can help you, even if it's a much longer effort or small impact, but consider saving them for later in your SEO campaign.

Many SEOs start with a complete technical and in-depth inspection of the site. While this may seem like a good plan, in most situations it may not be the best approach. Many smaller sites that are built , WordPress or other common CMS platforms have a limited number of technical issues. 

Technical recommendations that take time to develop are often not implemented or remain for several months. I'm not saying that technical inspections are not worth anything. Conversely, you have to do such a job perfectly on every site you try to help grow. But always start with low-commitment, high-impact initiatives.

For example, if a page is never crawled or set to noindex, you are more likely to increase your keyword research, name and metadata optimization, and new content creation than fixing a set. in technical debt, such as the old redirection of internal links or page speed optimization.

Why is so much SEO starting there?

The chart below is an example of what we mentioned in our SEO Impact Grid based on the deliveries we implemented. These are examples of tactics and their relative effort and influence. These are intended as examples and may not be the same for every site or industry.

In this example, I'm also thinking about what we know as a direct rating factor from our own experience, or what Google says is a confirmed rating factor. Sometimes it also means checking what Google says about various factors. For example, Core Web Vitals as an evaluation signal. Google beats its drums if it wants to shake the SERP in a big way, but the impact isn't that big.

Implement SEO optimization faster

One of the other areas that SEOs encounter is not making recommendations, but implementing them on the web.

We recently published an SEO implementation guide that provides a framework for how to present and track implementations. Once you've gathered your recommendations, take a look at this guide on how to implement them.

Whether your SEO strategies are high or low on the impact grid impact, this can only happen if you can implement recommendations - which require a purchasing team, developer support, or a powerful implementation tool.

SEO as Page Improve.

With Page Improve, you can run SEO optimizations yourself

Page Improve is a new SEO tool that allows you to implement many of the most important SEO changes through a single browser extension. By manipulating the Document Object Model (DOM), SEOs can create a title, meta, copy changes, links, and other html attributes directly to a page without CMS access.

Document Object Model is a term that describes the compilation of HTML, CSS and JS that make up the final web page. If everything is technical, all you need to know is that you can make immediate changes that are indexed by Google and viewed by visitors. You'll need to install a snippet of java script (or have your development team installed) on each page of your site, but once we've seen it, our team has no code security concerns or worries about delays. instead, so install with confidence.

It is good to make recommendations, but it is even better to implement them. Page Improve allows us to go through some developers and work faster, which leads to faster results.

Perform an Agile technical Audit

In the world of web / application development, there are two models of team functioning. Talon and Agile. Agile methodology is based on sprints. In SEO, we usually work in a more waterfall way, where many recommendations are presented to the client as a development team as we move on to further audits or optimizations.

Approaching the waterfall may be easier than Agile, but you will leave the option to prioritize high-impact changes. Experience a more agile approach by constantly browsing and identifying key priority fixes. There are many sites audit tool is a good place to get a list of priority recommendations. Try only one or two of them to sprint when working with your clients. When you think of the impact grid, technical SEO may not be a big issue if you choose an agile approach that addresses one step at a time.

At Stella Rising, we start working this way with most of our clients, where we focus on only one important task or implementation that is based on our controls. We provide project management and implementation support for one task, then move on to the next. Initiative-based reporting

If you already have your customer or your own team that is finally implementing something, your job is to be a cheerleader.

Make a small case study of what you have implemented and the impact you have seen. This will help the rally teams make more similar changes, but will also encourage them to make your further recommendations.

If internal stakeholders or customer groups SEE the impact of your individual recommendations, something great will happen . They will be happy to do more. The time it takes to make changes will be shortened and your impact will increase over time.

Perform an SEO Test

SEO testing is something that was previously reserved for business organizations like Ebay that could invest in their own custom solutions. Despite advances in cloud hosting or Content Delivery Network (CDN) solutions such as CloudFlare, new solutions such as RankSense and Search Pilot have been implemented.

These platforms allow you to implement and test your SEO changes. There is only one problem . Implementation is quite difficult because you will need to use CloudFlare or other CDNs and development time or DNS record changes will be required.

Fortunately for us, Semrush has created SplitSignal, an SEO A / B testing platform that allows you to test SEO changes with a much faster single-pixel implementation that can still be implemented through Google Brand Manager.

SEO tests can help you get SEO results faster by showing you which changes have a positive impact compared to those that have no detrimental effect or can have. Knowing what changes will bring positive results before you use the resources of a developer or team to implement them will help you avoid wasting time and get results faster than when you're stuck in the dark. Even if you do not use SplitSignal, you will know something.