SEO can be excruciatingly slow to take effect sometimes, so if you’re under pressure to prove the value of SEO early on, how can you speed up the time it takes to get results?

In this article, I’ll explain the framework and tools I’d use to approach quick SEO and the 8 methods I’d focus on first to get results quicker.

To accelerate SEO results, we need to be strategic. This starts by understanding what you can and can’t control in the process—and trying to speed up the former.

For example:

• You can control how much time you spend on analysis, so this needs to be as focused as possible (I’d suggest beginners use Ahrefs’ Opportunities report to identify opportunities quickly)
• You can’t always control how much time it takes to implement the changes

Here’s how I’d suggest you approach quick SEO using Ahrefs:

Now, let’s explore the specific methods you can use to accelerate your SEO results.

One of the biggest barriers to accelerating your SEO is waiting for search engines to detect and respond to your latest website improvements.

Google says it can sometimes take a few weeks to re-crawl your pages—ain’t nobody got time for that—this is quick SEO!

So what can you do instead?—use IndexNow.

Ahrefs has recently partnered with IndexNow, meaning that once you’ve added your IndexNow API key in Site Audit, any changes will be pushed to search engines instantly—rather than waiting “days or weeks” for them to be pulled from your dusty old XML sitemap.

This increases the speed at which you see ranking results from your SEO changes.

To set it up:

• Go to Site Audit’s Crawl settings and scroll down to the IndexNow section
• Click on Generate to create an API key or paste in an existing one

Here’s how IndexNow works when you combine it with Ahrefs’ Site Audit:

As Google doesn’t yet support IndexNow, it’s a good idea to resubmit any updated pages to Google Search Console as well.

“If a battle can not be won, do not fight it.”

Sun Tzu

Lower-difficulty keywords are easier to rank for because they require fewer links and are less competitive. If you play your cards right, you could rank on the first page of Google faster than ever before.

So, if you need organic traffic fast, pick your keyword battles wisely. But how can you do this?

Start by targeting keywords that are only low effort high reward.

Here’s an example of this in Keywords Explorer for the keyword “dresses.”

“Dresses” is a high-effort, high-reward keyword—no surprises there.

Ahrefs estimates it will take ~153 Referring Domains (RDs) to rank in the top 10 for this keyword. That’s a lot of RDs, and unless you have bags of money, then it’s unlikely you’ll be able to compete.

But if we add a Keyword Difficulty filter combined with a Traffic Potential filter, we can find the best opportunities related to this keyword.

You can see they have low KDs and high TPs.

But let’s go one step further.

Let’s add a Lowest DR filter to find only the “weakest SERPs.” AKA, finding the easiest battles to fight. In this example, I’ve set the Domain Rating (DR) to 10 to find the easiest possible keyword battles.

For example, the keyword “engagement photo dresses” has zero Keyword Difficulty and 11k Traffic potential.

Not bad for five minutes of keyword research in Ahrefs. You can apply this technique to any keyword and tweak the filter settings to your preference.

Rather than writing brand new content, which can take time to get indexed in Google, try focusing on updating your underperforming content.

The advantage of updating existing content is that it’s already indexed, and you’ll naturally have a better idea of what will work—which makes it faster than re-writing or writing a new article.

With some luck, you could get more website traffic in 24 hours.

You can do this by:

• Adding new information or subtopics to your content
• Consolidating similar articles together
• Comparing your article to the top-performing article for that keyword by doing a SERP analysis

Identifying underperforming content is easy with a tool like Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, as you can just plug in the URL of the content and check its performance over time.

Here’s an example of a blog post I wrote that was performing well, but recently has started to lose organic traffic.

This is the type of content that’s worth updating.

And how do I know this works? As an author at Ahrefs blog, I write and update articles every week, and it’s hard not to notice the impact of some of your updates when performance rockets into the SEO stratosphere.

In the example below, the dramatic rise in traffic happened 24 hours after the re-publish date—underlining how fast results can be from updating your content.

With the update, I focused on adding new information and subtopics and tried to retain the original structure of the post as much as possible.

Keyword cannibalization occurs when multiple pages target the same keywords, fulfill the same intent, and cannibalize each other’s rankings in Google.

Although you can spend time carefully consolidating multiple pages into one “mega page,” the fastest way to reduce keyword cannibalization is to 301 redirect similar or duplicate pages to a single primary page. This method consolidates the authority into a single page.

So, what does keyword cannibalization look like?

To identify potential cannibalization, go to Rank Tracker and head to the GSC overview in the sidebar.

Once you’re there, you’ll see a Potential cannibalization box. Click the View All button to get a list of all potential cannibalization issues.

You’ll need to review the list, but it’s useful for identifying potential cannibalization issues across your website.

Once you’re sure you’ve identified a potential cannibalization issue, you can start consolidating pages by redirecting an old, outdated page to something more relevant that you already have or combining multiple pages into something new.

In the end, it may look something like this:

Once you’ve consolidated your pages, remember to resubmit your updated page to Google.

Strategic internal links for SEO are one of the best ways to direct visitors and Google to the most important places on your side.

They speed up your SEO because you’re not making human visitors or Google hunt for your most important content—you’re giving it to them on a plate.

Highlighting lesser-known pages that have value drives traffic to them quickly.

 

“You should look at it in a strategic way and think about what do you care about the most and how can you highlight that with your internal links.”

Not linking to these pages will make them orphan pages, making them harder for GoogleBot and human visitors to find.

If you don’t know where to start adding internal links, the best approach is to run a Site Audit and then go to the Internal link opportunities report.

In this report, Ahrefs has done the hard work for you and highlighted the suggested internal links in the Keyword context column.

You can then Export the report, review it, and implement it on the website.

Making incremental changes to your on-page SEO is a useful way to help accelerate results.

Here’s an example of a page where I changed only the title tag and saw a small bump in traffic.

We can see in Page Inspect, that all I changed was the title.

On-page SEO is a big topic, but there are other elements that you can tweak quickly.

For example, most people don’t read articles in a linear way from start to finish—they scan them. As such, your headings often play a big role in grabbing your readers’ attention.

Adding a logical hierarchy, like the one below, will make your articles easier to skim and read.

Another thing you can tweak is your meta description. It’s your shop front on search engines, so if you make them more enticing and clickable, you’ll probably win more clicks.

Once you’ve tweaked your on-site SEO, remember to resubmit your page to Google.

Link building is often a slow process, but by fixing broken links to your site, you can quickly reclaim that authority and traffic and send it to where you want rather than a 404 page.

You can do this by checking the Broken Links report in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer:

1. Plugin your domain into Site Explorer — I’ve used Ahrefs.com as an example
2. Select Dofollow (You can check other links afterward)
3. Select Best Links: Only
4. Filter from highest to lowest on the DR filter

In four quick steps, we’ve found many high-DR sites that we could have linking to us.

This works especially well for big websites, sites that have migrated, and sites where SEO has been neglected over the years.

Once you’ve identified the broken link, you can reinstate or redirect it.

In this particular example, we could probably redirect this product page to the homepage, as the anchor text is the brand itself.

Here’s a flow chart that shows you how to make the decision of whether to reinstate or redirect:

Reclaiming unlinked brand mentions is a relatively fast and cost-effective way to acquire links from websites that have already written about your brand—but didn’t link.

In the past, I found that website owners were more responsive to requests for edits from brands they know rather than those they didn’t.

Identifying unlinked brand mentions takes time, but using a tool like Ahrefs’ Web Explorer speeds up the analysis stage.

Here’s how I would use Web Explorer to identify unlinked brand mentions for Ahrefs.com.

This searches for pages that mention “Ahrefs” but don’t link out to the Ahrefs website, and aren’t ahrefs.com.

Once you’ve got your list of websites, you can drop them a templated email using a tool like Buzzstream to reclaim links to your unlinked brand mentions.

Final thoughts

If you want to put the pedal to the metal with your SEO—take a more strategic approach. By doing so, you’ll get results sooner rather than later.

Tools like Ahrefs help by highlighting important opportunities you might not have seen otherwise. Also, with Ahrefs’ IndexNow integration, you can instantly notify search engines when you’ve updated your site—so you’ll see results faster than ever before.

Got questions? Ping me on X.

Google announced an update to the advertising section within Google Analytics 4 (GA4).

The enhancement aims to clarify and align user counts eligible for remarketing and ad personalization.

Under the change, advertisers can now quickly view the size of their “Advertising Segments” within GA4’s interface.

These segments represent the pool of users whose data can be leveraged for remarketing campaigns and personalized ad targeting through products like Google Ads.

Improved Synchronization For Unified Insights

Previously, there could be discrepancies between the user counts shown as eligible for advertising use cases in GA4 and the Google Ads Audience Manager.

With this update, Google says the numbers will be fully aligned, allowing marketers to confidently make data-driven advertising decisions.

📢We’ve enhanced the Advertising section of Google Analytics 4! Now you can quickly see the size of your Advertising Segments – these are the users eligible for remarketing and ads personalization in Google Ads.

🔍How will this update help you? These numbers are now aligned with…

— Google Analytics (@googleanalytics) June 24, 2024

Expanding Advertising Segment Visibility

Along with the alignment fix, the update expands visibility into advertising segment sizes within the GA4 interface.

A new “Advertising segments” panel under the “Advertising” section reports the number of users GA4 collects and sends to ad products for personalization.

An “advertising segment” is a list of GA4 users synchronized with Google advertising products for remarketing and personalized ad targeting purposes.

Segment sizes can vary based on targeting requirements for different ad networks.

Why SEJ Cares

This update from Google addresses a key pain point for advertisers utilizing GA4 and Google Ads.

Full alignment between advertising audience sizes across products eliminates confusion and enables more data-driven strategies.

The added transparency into advertising segment sizes directly in GA4 is also a welcomed upgrade.

How This Can Help You

With aligned user counts, advertisers can plan and forecast remarketing campaigns with greater precision using GA4 data.

This unified view means you can make media investment decisions based on accurate reach projections.

Additionally, the new advertising segments panel provides extra context about the scope of your audiences for ad personalization.

This visibility allows for more informed strategies tailored to your specific segment sizes.

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Featured Image: Lightspring/Shutterstock

OpenAI acquired a technology from Rockset that will enable the creation of new products, real-time data analysis, and recommendation systems, possibly signaling a new phase for OpenAI that could change the face of search marketing in the near future.

What Is Rockset And Why It’s Important

Rockset describes its technology as a Hybrid Search, a type of multi-faceted approach to search (integrating vector search, text search and metadata filtering) to retrieve documents that can augment the generation process in RAG systems. RAG is a technique that combines search with generative AI that is intended to create more factually accurate and contextually relevant results. It’s a technology that plays a role in BING’s AI search and Google’s AI Overviews.

Rockset’s research paper about the Rockset Hybrid Search Architecture notes:

“All vector search is becoming hybrid search as it drives the most relevant, real-time application experiences. Hybrid search involves incorporating vector search and text
search as well as metadata filtering, all in a single query. Hybrid search is used in search, recommendations and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) applications.

…Rockset is designed and optimized to ingest data in real time, index different data types and run retrieval and ranking algorithms.”

What makes Rockset’s hybrid search important is that it allows the indexing and use of multiple data types (vectors, text, geospatial data about objects & events), including real-time data use. That powerful flexibility allows the technology to interact with different kinds of data that can be used for in-house and consumer-facing applications related to contextually relevant product recommendations, customer segmentation and analysis for targeted marketing campaigns, personalization, personalized content aggregation, location-based recommendations (restaurants, services, etc.) and in applications that increase user engagement (Rockset lists numerous case studies of how their technology is used).

OpenAI’s announcement explained:

“AI has the opportunity to transform how people and organizations leverage their own data. That’s why we’ve acquired Rockset, a leading real-time analytics database that provides world-class data indexing and querying capabilities.

Rockset enables users, developers, and enterprises to better leverage their own data and access real-time information as they use AI products and build more intelligent applications.

…Rockset’s infrastructure empowers companies to transform their data into actionable intelligence. We’re excited to bring these benefits to our customers…”

OpenAI’s announcement also explains that they intend to integrate Rockset’s technology into their own retrieval infrastructure.

At this point we know the transformative quality of hybrid search and the possibilities but OpenAI is at this point only offering general ideas of how this will translate into APIs and products that companies and individuals can create and use.

The official announcement of the acquisition from Rockset, penned by one of the cofounders, offered these clues:

“We are thrilled to join the OpenAI team and bring our technology and expertise to building safe and beneficial AGI.

…Advanced retrieval infrastructure like Rockset will make AI apps more powerful and useful. With this acquisition, what we’ve developed over the years will help make AI accessible to all in a safe and beneficial way.

Rockset will become part of OpenAI and power the retrieval infrastructure backing OpenAI’s product suite. We’ll be helping OpenAI solve the hard database problems that AI apps face at massive scale.”

What Exactly Does The Acquisition Mean?

Duane Forrester, formerly of Bing Search and Yext (LinkedIn profile), shared his thoughts:

“Sam Altman has stated openly a couple times that they’re not chasing Google. I get the impression he’s not really keen on being seen as a search engine. More like they want to redefine the meaning of the phrase “search engine”. Reinvent the category and outpace Google that way. And Rockset could be a useful piece in that approach.

Add in Apple is about to make “ChatGPT” a mainstream thing with consumers when they launch the updated Siri this Fall, and we could very easily see query starts migrate away from traditional search engine boxes. Started with TikTok/social, now moving to ai-assistants.”

Another approach, which could impact SEO, is that OpenAI could create a product based on an API that can be used by companies to power in-house and consumer facing applications. With that approach, OpenAI provides the infrastructure (like they currently do with ChatGPT and foundation models) and let the world innovate all over the place with OpenAI at the center (as it currently does) as the infrastructure.

I asked Duane about that scenario and he agreed but also remained open to an even wider range of possibilities:

“Absolutely, a definite possibility. As I’ve been approaching this topic, I’ve had to go up a level. Or conceptually switch my thinking. Search is, at its heart, information retrieval. So if I go down the IR path, how could one reinvent  “search” with today’s systems and structures that redefine how information retrieval happens?

This is also – it should be noted- a description for the next-gen advanced site search.  They could literally take over site search across a wide range of mid-to-enterprise level companies. It’s easily as advanced as the currently most advanced site-search systems. Likely more advanced if they launch it. So ultimately, this could herald a change to consumer search (IR) and site-search-based systems.

Expanding from that, apps, as they allude to.  So I can see their direction here.”

Deedy Das of Menlo Ventures (Poshmark, Roku, Uber) speculated on Twitter about how this acquisition may transform OpenAI:

“This is speculation but I imagine Rockset will power all their enterprise search offerings to compete with Glean and / or a consumer search offering to compete with Perplexity / Google. Permissioning capabilities of Rockset make me think more the former than latter”

Others on Twitter offered their take on how this will affect the future of AI:

“I doubt OpenAI will jump into the enterprise search fray. It’s just far too challenging and something that Microsoft and Google are best positioned to go after.

This is a play to accelerate agentic behaviors and make deep experts within the enterprise. You might argue it’s the same thing an enterprise search but taking an agent first approach is much more inline with the OpenAI mission.”

A Consequential Development For OpenAI And Beyond

The acquisition of Rockset may prove to be the foundation of one of the most consequential changes to how businesses use and deploy AI, which in turn, like many other technological developments, could also have an effect on the business of digital marketing.

Read how Rockset customers power recommendation systems, real-time personalization, real-time analytics, and other applications:

Featured Case Studies

Read the official Rockset announcement:

OpenAI Acquires Rockset

Read the official OpenAI announcement:

OpenAI acquires Rockset
Enhancing our retrieval infrastructure to make AI more helpful

Read the original Rockset research paper:

Rockset Hybrid Search Architecture (PDF)

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Iconic Bestiary