One of the easiest growth hacks is finding “low-hanging fruit.”
These are wins that are so close you could reach up and take them like a juicy pear from a flowering tree.
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But most people don’t know how to find them.
And even those who do, like me, often forget to look.
What I’m doing this week
Google gives people with websites a tool for accessing their index.
This is another thing that most people with websites don’t know.
It’s called Google Search Console.
You can use it to submit your site to Google, see what you show up on Google for, see who’s linking to you, and do tons of other useful things for getting more visibility from Google search.
I’ll cover the rest of those use cases in future articles. The one I’m concerned about this week is seeing what I show up on Google for.
I:
- Click “Search results” under “Performance” on the left sidebar.
- Click “Export” in the top right.
- Open my file up in my spreadsheet tool of choice.
- Filter the top row so I can sort through it.
Here’s my rankings from the last 7 days, unfiltered.
Here’s the same rankings filtered by:
- Top queries (keywords) do not contain “game” and “gaming.”
- Position (ranking on Google) is less than 26.
Right away, there are some interesting things that stick out.
Here’s one of them.
“Podcasts looking for guests.”
A search with Moz’s Keyword Explorer, shows this query gets a good amount of traffic.
And if you remember what I shared in a previous article, the actual clicks from ranking #1 for this keyword are more likely to be several thousand.
@build_in_public Explaining SEO while on a sunny walk through Poland. Most keyword volume estimates are heavily misleading. Ranking 1 for a keyword will give 10-200 times the projected search volume. #seo #searchengineoptimization #marketing #gotomarket ♬ original sound - Build in Public
Making changes
My existing article, “How to Get On Podcasts as a Guest,” is lengthy and relevant and would likely be a good fit for this keyword.
In the future, I may make a dedicated article called “How to Find and Engage Podcasts Looking for Guests in 2024.” But for now, I can spend five minutes and likely rank high on page 1 of Google for the keyword.
The change is simple.
The aforementioned existing article does not use the exact keyword “podcasts looking for guests” even once.
I added the following sentence to the introduction, “Initially, I thought about cold emailing different shows but quickly speculated there had to be tools for finding podcasts looking for guests. This hunch was right.”
And that’s it! This will likely be enough to get me into a good position for the keyword.
Will it be enough to get me to the first spot? It’s possible, actually. The keyword isn’t as competitive as it should be, given its high intent (people who are searching this already know what they want; it’s at the bottom of the consumer funnel). Anyway, my small change will take a few weeks at least to show.
However, I didn’t think of this keyword myself as being valuable. I didn’t know people were searching this.
Google Search Console showed me my site is in position 10 for it. Moz showed me a decent amount of people search it.
And as much as I explained this single low-hanging fruit keyword in this email, the download from Google Search Console showed me that there are hundreds more.
So often, we spend time on the hard stuff.
The new stuff.
And forget that we have existing opportunities just waiting to be taken advantage of.
