Whether you have a business website, a blog or an (online) store, chances are you have a lot to do. You’re probably busy running your business, blogging, or making your customers happy with necessary goods. SEO may not always be a priority. However, you also know that higher rankings would most likely benefit your business. So how do you make SEO efficient? Here we give you some tips on how to save time on SEO!

Disclaimer: It is a known fact that this is what SEO stands for Seriously complex optimization, so that only the necessary work will get you to the top. You should focus on the things that matter (creating great content, making your website fast and providing the best user experience, such as doing holistic SEO). The biggest time saver is choosing the right SEO tools to help you complete these tasks.

1. Unlock time-saving optimization with AI

Use Yoast SEO Premium’s cutting-edge AI capabilities to streamline your content optimization process. This powerful feature effortlessly generates titles and meta descriptions for your content. When using WooCommerce SEO, the benefits even extend to your product meta descriptions.

By using AI, you can say goodbye to hours of brainstorming catchy titles and compelling meta descriptions. Let the AI-powered tool do the heavy lifting to ensure your content is search engine friendly while saving valuable time. You can focus on delivering high-quality content to your audience while our generative AI feature takes care of the optimization.

2. Improve existing content

Are you thinking about writing another post on topic X? Think again. Before you write something new, please check what posts you already have on this topic. Can you find anything similar that you wrote two or three years ago? You can update the existing post instead of writing a brand new post. Add new insights, add a hook to breaking news, improve the quality and merge it with another post on the same topic on your site. Update it and you can even share it again in your newsletter or on social media.

This is advantageous in several ways:

• It prevents keyword cannibalization: If you have several similar posts on the same topic, your ranking for that query may decrease.
• They removed this old article and showed users the best and most current content. This serves both your users and Google!
• And of course, you save time by reusing content. In most cases, rewriting and updating content takes less time than writing something from scratch.

If you want to update your content smartly to improve your SEO, check out our blog post on updating your content in 10 steps. A tool that saves time in the update process is Yoast Duplicate Post. This free plugin allows you to duplicate and rewrite an existing post as a draft. When it’s ready, you can just click republish (or schedule it). No more copying and pasting or laborious work in documents!

One of the first things many SEOs do when reviewing a website for the first time is reviewing a website’s internal linking profile. You could write a thousand articles, but if they don’t get links (external and internal), not many people will find them, so all the writing you’ve done will be a waste of time. A good site structure can improve your ranking, especially if you structure your site using the cornerstone content principle.

In short, the cornerstone content principle means linking to related posts. And most importantly, link these posts to the best, most comprehensive article you have written on the topic. This is the article that touches on all aspects of the topic. It’s the article you’ll surely want to rank for! Because this post (or page) receives the most internal links, it sends signals to Google that this is the most important post on the topic.

Internal linking with Yoast SEO Premium

Without any help, implementing it is a lot of work: figuring out which posts are related, making sure they’re linked, and manually checking that they all point to a cornerstone article. Luckily, Yoast SEO Premium has an excellent feature to help you save time: the internal linking suggestion tool. Suggestions for related articles to link to will be found and displayed next to the post editor in the Yoast SEO sidebar. Choose the ones you think best fit the context of your post.

Additionally, Yoast SEO allows you to mark your posts as cornerstone content on the backend. Once you’ve done this and write a related post, this cornerstone article will appear at the top of the suggestions. So don’t forget to link to it!

Of course, for SEO you need more than just internal links. There is nothing like an external link from a high authority website to boost your authority (part of EEAT). Therefore, building backlinks remains the key to achieving good SEO results. Unfortunately there is no shortcut here. Nowadays you need outstanding and truly original content to earn backlinks. Additionally, you need to put in the necessary publicity to spread the word about the amazing things you do, create, or write.

SEO can be overwhelming. With SEO you are never done and the tasks you want or need to complete can pile up. The result is that you lose track of everything that is on your plate, which can even lead to paralysis from overwhelm. It’s stressful and not helpful if you want to save time. It’s good to get an overview of the SEO improvements you want to work on to avoid feeling overwhelmed or regaining control. Productivity tools like Trello or Todoist can help you gain and maintain this overview.

Once you’ve organized your board, you need to prioritize. But you may be wondering: What tasks on your board come first? Well, as always with SEO, the answer is: it depends. Are significant technical flaws preventing Google from properly crawling and indexing your site? The obvious answer is to start there. Do you use huge images on your website that cause pages to take forever to load? That could also be a good starting point.

When it comes to content improvements, it’s impossible to give one-size-fits-all advice. A basic recommendation, perhaps even the obvious: make sure your priorities align with your business goals. Are you currently focused on driving more sales? Optimizing your product pages probably makes sense. Do you want to establish sustainable growth? Focus on the long term with sustainable SEO.

Still feeling overwhelmed? Then it might be a good idea to start with smaller, easy-to-do tasks. Getting into the flow of accomplishing things and completing tasks can give you the positive energy you need to tackle the more important tasks.

5. Optimize your post for synonyms and related keywords

What if you want to rank for multiple searches with one post? That would be a huge time saver, right? The good news is that you can and maybe you already are. Of course, there is one major limitation: the queries must be very similar. For example, when you write about it sustainable hen housesit might be worth optimizing for a synonym like eco-friendly poultry houses to. Using synonyms is a best practice not only for SEO but also for readability. In general, people don’t like reading the same word over and over again in a text.

Using synonyms also helps Google understand the topic better. They give you more context on the topic, making it easier to identify the entity you are writing about. The same goes for related keywords. This gives Google the context to display your post or page for the right search query. If you want to optimize your post for related keywords, our SEMrush integration can save time searching for those keywords. Related searches to your focus key phrase will appear with search volume.

Yoast SEO Premium allows you to set key phrase synonyms and related key phrases. SEO analysis takes these phrases into account when analyzing your text and gives you feedback so you can optimize for these phrases too. As explained, this leads to more natural writing and a better understanding of the post’s topic by Google. And it can save you time since you won’t be writing essentially identical posts. As a bonus, you won’t create duplicate content or cause keyword cannibalization.

6. View your social media post in the admin area

We believe that sharing your content on social networks should be part of your SEO efforts. If you’ve written a blog post and plan to share it on social media, you want to make sure it looks good on your timeline. However, if you have to do this on the social media platform itself, it will take some time. You have to switch back and forth between platforms, adjust and upload enhanced images, etc.

A small but simple time-saving feature in Yoast SEO Premium is our social media preview feature. It shows you what your post looks like when shared on Facebook or X. Does the image fit and does the title look good? When you use it, you’ll no longer be in the dark about the appearance of your post on your timeline. And you save time switching between platforms and copying and pasting URLs.

Additionally, you can even set default templates for specific post types. At Yoast, for example, we set these for help articles. We don’t share these frequently on social media, so we won’t be creating individual images for all of these items. However, setting a good replacement image will prevent these posts from looking fake when shared by someone else. Learn more about our standard social media templates.

Save time on SEO

That’s it. These are our tips for saving time on SEO. The most important thing is to concentrate on the essentials and use the right tools. Over to you! Do you have any great tips for saving time? Please share in the comments!

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