SEO Tips: Twenty Quick Wins and Overlooked Fixes You Can Check This Month

Four tips buried in your own Search Console data

Every tip on this page is something we have not already covered at length elsewhere in the SEO guide, and each ends with a check you can run before deciding it applies to you. Do them in any order. Write the date beside each change, because the only proof a tip worked is a line in Search Console that moves afterward.

1. Write the words a page is already being shown for

In the Performance report, click one page, then open the Queries tab and sort by impressions. Look for searches where the page sits around positions 8 to 20 using words the page never says: a price question, a neighborhood, an equipment brand. Google is already guessing the page might fit. Add a short, plain section that answers that exact question. Check: five minutes per page, and a query list you can paste into the brief. The rest of the page-level work is in on-page SEO.

2. Pull every question with one filter

Add a Query filter, choose Custom (regex), and paste ^(how|what|why|when|which|can|does|is|should) followed by a space. Search Console now lists every question that showed your site. Each one with real impressions and no clear answer on your site is a section or a page waiting to be written, in the customer's own wording. Check: export the list and mark which questions you answer today. Grouping them into a subject is the job of topical authority.

3. See which page Google picked for your money search

Filter Performance to your most valuable search, say "water heater repair", then open the Pages tab. If the home page or a 2019 blog post collects the impressions instead of the service page, or two pages split them, Google is unsure which page you mean. Point your internal links, with descriptive anchor text, at the page that should win, or merge the two. Check: two minutes per search. When several pages fight over one phrase, that is keyword cannibalization.

4. Spend the links you already earned

Open the Links report and read Top linked pages under external links. The pages other sites chose to link to are often odd ones: an old coupon, a how-to post, a staff page. They carry standing your service pages do not. Add one descriptive link from each of them to the service it relates to. Check: ten minutes for the top ten. The site-wide version is internal linking and site authority.

Six corners of the site Google visits and you never do

5. Give the home page one address

Type your domain seven ways: http and https, with and without www, then /index.html, /index.php and /home. Every version should land on a single URL in one hop. Two that load separately split signals and reports, and every extra hop costs time on a phone. Check: watch the address bar, or run curl -I on each. The theory lives in canonical tags and the fixes in redirects.

6. Keep your site search results out of Google

Search your own site for nonsense and note the URL, such as /?s=blarg on WordPress. Google's crawling help lists an empty internal search result page as an example of a soft 404, and its manual actions help names internal search pages among the places spammers inject queries promoting other sites. Add a noindex to the search results template, keep it crawlable until the pages drop out, and only then consider a robots.txt block. Check: look for that URL pattern in the Page indexing report. More of this housekeeping is in technical SEO.

7. Retire archive pages nobody asked for

Tag pages holding one post, author archives on a one-author site, date archives and media attachment pages all get indexed and almost never deserve to. WordPress turned attachment pages off for new installs in version 6.4, saying in its 2023 developer note that they mostly add no meaningful information yet get indexed. Sites upgraded from older versions kept them on. Check: look for /tag/, /author/ and /attachment/ URLs among your indexed pages. Then drop them from the sitemap, as the XML sitemaps guide describes.

8. Get the price list out of the JPEG

Menus, rate sheets, service area maps and seasonal flyers are often uploaded as pictures. Google understands an image through computer vision plus its alt text, file name and the words around it, and snippets come mainly from page text, so a price inside a JPEG is nearly invisible as text. A crawler that reads only HTML gets nothing at all. Retype it as an HTML table and keep the image if you like it. Check: try to highlight a price with your mouse. Image details are in image SEO.

9. Diff your sitemap against a crawl

Export the URLs in your sitemap, crawl the site from the home page with any free crawler, and compare the two lists. URLs in the sitemap that the crawl never reached are orphans: pages nothing on your site links to. Google's link guidance says every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page. Check: a spreadsheet and twenty minutes. Repairing them is the subject of orphan pages and topic clusters.

10. Fix the links you send out

Old posts link to supplier pages that moved, manufacturer PDFs that vanished and county forms that changed address. A reader who clicks three dead links in your guide decides the guide is dead too. This one is about trust more than rankings. Check: most crawlers list external links with their status codes; filter for 404s and replace or remove each. Your own broken pages are covered by fixing 404 errors and broken links.

Old domains and other people's code: two leaks outside the page

11. Renew and redirect every domain you ever owned

Rebrands leave orphans: the old company name, a campaign domain, the misspelling someone bought in 2015. Google's site move guide says to keep redirects as long as possible, generally at least a year, and indefinitely from a visitor's point of view. Let the old domain lapse and every link pointing at it points at nothing, or at whoever buys it next. Google wrote an expired domain abuse policy because buyers reuse old domains for their reputation.

1. 1

   List the domains

   Ask the owner, the bookkeeper and the old web company. Search old invoices for registrar names.

2. 2

   Read the expiry dates

   In each registrar account, turn on auto-renew and make sure the card on file is current.

3. 3

   Test the redirect

   Load the old home page and three old inner URLs. Each should land on the closest new page with a single permanent redirect.

Check: fifteen minutes, once a year. If a move is still ahead of you, our website migration work maps every old URL first.

12. Count the scripts you did not write

Chat widgets, two copies of an analytics tag, a heatmap trial from three years ago, an ad pixel for a campaign that ended. Each loads code from another company's server and competes with your phone number on a slow phone. Open your browser's developer tools, choose the Network panel, filter to JS and reload. List every domain that is not yours and ask who still reads its data. Check: ten minutes; delete what nobody can defend. Deeper speed work is in our Core Web Vitals service.

Five local fixes that take less time than lunch

Three signals for machines: your logo, your dates and the AI answer

18. Tell Google your logo and your profiles

Organization markup on the home page lets you name your logo, at least 112 by 112 pixels per Google's documentation, and list your other profiles with sameAs: the Business Profile, the industry directory, the social accounts you actually maintain. It helps Google tell your business from another with a similar name. Check: paste the home page into the Schema Markup Validator. Types and rules are in schema markup, and the AI side in entity optimization.

19. Fix the date in the snippet

Search the title of your best guide. If Google shows a date from 2019 beside it, searchers assume the advice is old. Google's byline date guidance asks for a visible, labeled date, matching datePublished and dateModified values in structured data, and as few other dates on the page as possible. Its helpful content questions also ask whether you change dates to seem fresh when nothing substantial changed, so update the page before the date. Check: your top five articles. Refreshing them properly is content relaunch.

20. Ask the machines what they believe about you

Put two questions to ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI Mode: what time do we close on Saturday, and who would you recommend for our main service in our town. Wrong hours or an old address usually trace to a listing or page you can fix. Check: the free AI visibility check runs a customer question through the engines and shows who they name. When the facts are wrong, start with AI showing the wrong business information.

A tip counts as a win when Search Console agrees, not when the checklist is ticked.

Twenty tips in four sittings

Here is one way to fit the whole list into a month. The times are our rough estimates for a site of a few dozen pages, not promises, and a store with thousands of URLs will need longer for the crawl jobs.

Come back to the Performance report four to six weeks after each change. Google has to recrawl a page before anything you edited counts, and a few weeks of data says more than a few days.

What we left off, and why

Some favorite tips are missing on purpose. Either another guide covers them properly, or the tip stopped being true years ago and keeps circulating anyway.

If the list turned up more than a month of work, the free site audit checks speed signals, SEO, mobile, security and content and emails the fixes in order. Or hand it over: these checks are routine inside DataCram's SEO programs, which start at $575 a month with no long contract, depending on complexity, setup and budget, per our SEO pricing.