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

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.