6 advanced SEO tips and tactics you need to know
As a marketer or business owner, you’ll already know the importance of getting the most out of your marketing tools. And using advanced SEO tools is a sure-fire way to increase your traffic, optimise user experience, and boost that all-important bottom line.
If you’ve already mastered the beginner SEO tasks of maintaining a website, doing keyword research and using Search Console, you can then up the ante by adding more advanced SEO techniques to your toolbox.
So what kind of advanced SEO tactics are out there, and which ones will produce high-impact results for your business?
6 advanced SEO tips and tactics
Advanced SEO techniques are a step up from your standard SEO. While they require a deeper level of SEO knowledge and skills, these techniques will help you harness the power of performance through mobile-first indexing, page speed optimisation, and much more.
Basic SEO techniques certainly have their place in the online space, but businesses that are serious about staying ahead of the pack need to look past beginner SEO tactics.
When your company invests in advanced SEO tactics, it has a real opportunity to drive business growth and secure more leads and conversions. This in turn helps your company strengthen both its bottom-line and its brand reputation as you become the first port of call for your potential customers.
In this handy guide, we’ll be deep-diving into these advanced SEO tactics:
- Prioritising mobile-first indexing
- Optimising your site for page speed
- Updating existing on-site content
- Gaining more links with competitor backlink analysis
- Increasing SERP space with Schema markup
- Creation of content topic clusters and ramping up production
These powerful techniques will help your business take your organic marketing strategy to the next level.
1. Prioritise mobile-first indexing
We’ve known for a while now that Google prioritises mobile-first indexing. But does your business or marketing team also prioritise mobile optimisation?
Google’s mobile-first approach means you should focus on developing a responsive site that performs well in organic search on mobile devices. But this doesn’t mean that you should abandon SEO for your desktop site!
Ultimately, this process is about balance. The key to mobile-first indexing is to prioritise the content that will best help your website rank. We recommend using a responsive design and opting for content formats that are well-optimised for mobile.
As a result, effectively prioritising mobile-first indexing is about striking the perfect balance between having a mobile-ready design and website content that is optimised for search.
Keep things simple and focus on creating a highly responsive site that has easy navigational routes on mobile and a flawless mobile design. And remember to regularly check for crawler errors in your server log files.
2. Optimise site for page speed
53% of the online visitors leave pages that take longer than 3 seconds to load, according to a study undertaken by Google.
Not only can a slow-loading web page be damaging to your visitor numbers, it can also harm your organic search performance.
Google uses both site and page speed as important ranking factors. These ranking factors are predominantly focused on improving user experience (UX) on the web. Just like the above statistic shows, having a slow-loading website can cause your site visitors to leave your website, taking their custom elsewhere.
As user experience is something that Google is prioritising, you’ll also need to be clued up on Core Web Vitals, which are a set of specific factors used by the search engine giant to determine the overall user experience of your web pages.
Core Web Vitals measures your page performance based on three aspects of UX – loading, interactivity, and visual stability. This further highlights how page speed (and user experience) plays an important role in technical SEO.
If you’re looking to engage in advanced SEO techniques, it’s highly recommended that you evaluate your site performance using Google’s handy tools.
You can use the PageSpeed Insights tool to test page speed of your website and see what elements of your site are negatively impacting the speed of your website.
The Core Web Vitals report in Search Console is another insightful way to see how your web pages perform based on real user data. This report will soon replace the PageSpeed Insights tool as the go-to tool for measuring your page performance across both desktop and mobile. Analyse your results carefully, as this will help you identify opportunities for optimising your site further down the line.
3. Update existing on-site content
New content creation is often the first step in improving SEO, but updating existing content can often become the missing link for businesses looking to advance their traffic. This is why it’s crucial to integrate content updates into your SEO content strategy.
It’s likely that your site will have underperforming or outdated content- which are missed SEO opportunities. Shifting the focus to improving existing content can result in an SEO quick win, which boosts your site’s ranking.
When it comes to updating your existing content, you’ll need to use a variety of tactics. Optimising your keywords is always a solid start, but you’ll also need to look into updating media (images, videos etc.) and content formatting.
Think about the distribution and use of your sub-headers and bullet points, and update any outdated figures, trends, or statistics that are turning your content stale.
Let’s look at an example. If you happen to have a blog post that focuses on industry news from 2020, you could update this piece with news, stats, and predicted trends for this year instead. This helps you keep content fresh, and demonstrates to Google that you’re staying relevant to search queries.
Veolia improved their 1st page organic rankings by 25% and increased their organic traffic by 128% by making significant improvements to their on-site content. By taking a strategic approach to their on-site content, we managed to reduce their reliance on Paid Search for traffic by prioritising the organic performance of their existing content.
When updating your on-site content, take advantage of Google SEO tools such as Search Console which will help you identify which forms of content need updating. You can also track performance data to suss out which on-site content is serving as your hardest hitter for SEO.
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4. Gain more links with competitor backlink analysis
Backlinks remain a crucial component of any SEO strategy.
When taking the plunge with advanced link building strategies in SEO, make sure you’re spending time on competitor backlink analysis.
For those unfamiliar with competitor backlink analysis, this refers to the process of reverse-engineering competitor backlinks in order to help your site build the same (or similar) links as your online competitors, and rank higher in search engines.
Ahrefs and Majestic SEO serve as great advanced SEO tools for this. These SEO tools can be used to analyse your competitors’ backlink profiles. Doing this will allow you to see where your competitors get links, what content types and topics get the most links, and whether there are any broken or lost links that you could acquire.
Conducting a competitor backlink analysis is not an easy feat. It requires a lot of analytical deep-diving but it’s a worthwhile task when it comes to highlighting missed content opportunities and ways to strengthen your backlink profile and, of course, boost your organic search performance.
Bear in mind that building a strong backlink profile is super important for SEO. Google considers links from reputable websites to be like ‘third-party votes’ for your site’s authority- which gives your site more credibility.
This is something we can help with here at Common Ground. Our team of Organic Search specialists craft advanced link building strategies to help businesses generate long-term quality traffic and leads.
5. Increase SERP space with Schema markup
Schema markup is an advanced SEO technique that specifically helps improve on-page SEO. It’s a semantic vocabulary placed on your individual web pages, which help search engines better read and represent your web page in search engine result pages (SERPs).
Adding Schema markup to your on-site content will improve the way your web pages show up in SERPs; complete with those all-important rich snippets. It also helps your site stand out on the results page and can improve your click-through rate.
You can use Schema markups to indicate articles, events and reviews – anything that allows a search engine to understand what your site is about. Take advantage of tools like Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper to tag data, and add to your website accordingly.
A study by Bing and Catalyst found that just 17% of marketers use Schema markup. Other studies put that figure at 31.3% but whichever way you look at it, it’s estimated that less than one-third of websites use Schema markup making it one of the less popular advanced SEO techniques.
So, if you’re looking to gain a competitive advantage for your online business, Schema markup one great tactic to have up your sleeve.
6. Create content topic clusters and ramp up production
We know that content marketing is a powerful aspect of on-site SEO. So much so, 61% of marketers see SEO as being the most efficient content marketing tactic and 83% of marketers measure the effectiveness of their content through organic traffic, making it one of the most widely used techniques for boosting SEO.
Try to refine your content production techniques by using content topic clusters to ensure that you are writing in more depth about a particular topic. By using content topic clusters, your site has the capacity to dominate keyword categories in SERPs for this topic – making it one of the most useful advanced SEO tactics in your arsenal.
It’s also helpful to increase your content production, as this enables your site to deliver more quality content to users. It’s been proven that the higher the content production, the better your SEO performance; research by HubSpot noted that brands wanting to increase organic traffic should aim to publish 3-5 blog posts per week.
Your content frequency should work in alignment with your overarching content strategy. Remember, it’s not just about quantity- it’s about quality too!
Advanced SEO tips and tactics: Round-Up
Try to keep in mind that SEO always goes well beyond keyword research. If you’re serious about maximising your revenue, your SEO strategy should include technical elements and will require constant analysis and refinement.
Competition in securing organic rankings is fierce, which means that you’ll need to pull out all the stops to land the coveted top spots. Take some time to familiarise yourself with the advanced SEO tactics we’ve covered in this guide, and don’t forget to stay on top of upcoming algorithm changes. You’ll then give your business the best opportunity to put its best foot forward on the path to organic search success.
Our Common Ground team can help businesses advance their current SEO performance to achieve the results they’ve always dreamed of having. If you’re ready to watch your company grow and thrive, reach out to our experts today.
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