Hello. 

Seb here. It’s Issue 3: The one with the hairy chest.

Today I’m going to discuss low-hanging fruit. Not the brown, smushy apples that have suddenly started appearing in gardens across the UK. I’m talking about keywords.

Imagine a small room packed with 50 people. 49 of them sell shoes. 1 of them wants to buy shoes. If all 49 of the shoe sellers are shouting the same thing, how can the customer pick which one to buy from?

This email will help you to figure out what you ought to be shouting instead.

Low-hanging fruit keywords.

What are they?

They’re keywords that your content is already ranking for, but not as high up as your top performing keywords. Think bottom of page 1, top of page 2 on Google search. That sort of zone.

How do I find mine?

Google Search Console is a great free resource for this, but other tools exist. Look at your keywords that rank between 6 and 15, which usually corresponds with the second page of Google. These are also often the easiest to promote to first page superstars.

What makes a good low-hanging fruit keyword?

There are three boxes we want to be able to tick here:

1) Does the content that’s ranking actually match the intent?

If you’ve published a blog post about the history of your product and that’s ranking for a keyword like “buy <your product>”, it’s not actually delivering on the intent of the search. The intent behind the keyword should match the content it ranks for.

2) Does your keyword have a good number of impressions?

This is all relative, so judge it based on a % of your total impressions. Anything more than 5% is definitely worth targeting.

3) Can the page actually be improved?

If we want this page to rank even higher for a keyword, we’ll need to be confident that improvement is possible.

If the answer is “yes” to these three factors, we might be onto a winner.

What can I gain from them?

Look, you’re ranking for these keywords anyway. Google already likes the cut of your jib. So the additional effort required to rank well for these keywords is smaller than it would be if you were starting from scratch.

It’s an easy win. And we’ll always take an easy win if we can get it.

What do you do once you’ve found a low-hanging fruit keyword?

Just like any other SEO effort, it’s important to incorporate your new found keywords into every aspect of your website. That includes your H tags, image alt tags, meta tags and within the content itself.

In other words: make it really easy for Google to smell what you’re cooking.

We recently did this for our client, ACI. We spotted a low-hanging fruit keyword “who is responsible for using a fire extinguisher”.

Then it was just a case of repurposing a relevant blog to target this search term:

The result was an increase in search rank from the second page to 7th, depending on when you look. It’s an easy win.

Remember, Google is always changing, so be sure to check for these low-hanging fruit keywords on a monthly basis.

Plug alert: if you don’t have the time/will/expertise to do this, we can do it for you. Just reply directly to this email with the word “help” and we can talk.

Until next time?

We’ll be back again next month with some eCom wisdom.

Speak soon,

Seb at eCom for Humans