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Slow and steady wins the race. That is how SEO works. We enter into partnerships for at least a year, because it is a long game. Yet your first wins take nowhere near a year. There are faster routes. Below I discuss four of them.
The more keywords you have on the first page, the better, because almost nobody visits the second page. The good news is that you can find terms where you already sit just outside the top. Those you push up with little effort.
In Google Search Console, open Performance, click average position and then Pages. Look for the pages with a position between roughly 11 and 21, because they sit at the top of page two and move up most easily. Make sure the relevant keywords really appear on those pages and you perform better straight away.
You will be surprised how often you rank for a term that appears nowhere in your title, description or text. With natural language processing, Google reads exactly what your piece is about. Then work such a term into your title, description, URL and content. Your ranking gets a boost. If you change your URL, set up a 301 redirect from old to new and update your old links.
You publish new content all the time, yet it only really ranks with links around it. Backlinks take time to build, so grab a quick internal win in the meantime. Go through your older, related articles and add a few links from there to your new piece. That way the fresh page inherits authority and climbs faster. Keep it relevant with about three matching articles per new piece. Skip loose connections.
Your title, description and URL are fairly easy to sharpen. A few figures from Backlinko (updated April 2025, 4 million search results) point the way. A title of 40 to 60 characters gets 8.9% more clicks than a shorter or longer title. If the exact search query appears in your URL, your click-through rate rises by up to 45%.
A positive title, with a word like "best", scores 4.1% higher than a negative one. According to the same study, a question in your title adds little.
A year in your title works too, provided you keep it fresh. "How SEO is changing this year" stays accurate, while a fixed year forces you to update every year. So choose the current year, or leave the year out.
Content is and remains king. If you write it in half the time, you produce more and attract more traffic, provided the quality comes out well above average. A language model helps you get started, with a first draft and the right keywords. Just never publish that rough version straight away. Use it as a basis, add to it, sharpen it and turn it into something great. The goal of such a tool is a head start, never a finished article.
Since I wrote this, a fifth route has been added. Since October 2025, Google has also answered many questions in the Netherlands with an AI Overview at the top. In the US, around 68% of Google searches already ended before anyone clicked in early 2026. If you are mentioned in that answer, you effectively sit above position one.
The nice thing is that you get there faster than with a regular ranking. Give a clear, direct answer to a concrete question, back it up with real expertise and make sure your brand appears consistently everywhere. Those are precisely the signals an AI picks up to choose you as a source. That way you gain visibility fast, without having to wait months for position one.
Further in this series on SEO basics
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About the author
Dominic Pietersz
Your dedicated point of contact
Dominic helps SMEs grow through Google and other channels. With his international experience, he turns challenges into concrete growth.
Follow Dominic on LinkedInInspiration Β· On the train, I quickly typed out four routes that already give clients gains while SEO remains a long game. This piece came straight from those notes.
