With each year, SEO is more competitive than ever and it is always more difficult to execute. The fact that search engines are always evolving also contributes to this fact.
With that being said, we will need not only a solid SEO strategy but also advanced tactics to outperform our competitors.
In this guide, we will share four of these advanced tactics that can turn your SEO efforts into the next level.
Without further ado, let us begin with the first one.
I. Effective Content Development
A huge, if not the most important part of any SEO strategies is your content. While there can be many different strategies for SEO, arguably they will all boil down to just one: developing a site that is better than what is currently ranking for the keyword, and especially with better content pieces.
Generally, here are the key principles of content development for SEO:
- Prioritize human readability over keyword density. Your content should be valuable for human readers first and foremost, before Google algorithm and search bots.
- Your content pieces should be unique, relevant, and informative. They should solve your audience’s problems and/or improve their quality of lives
- Your content should have the possibility to earn inbound links
- Your content should be high-quality enough you can confidentiality promote them through various marketing channels, including your own site
Furthermore, here are some key considerations you should have:
- Identify relevant target keywords with enough search volume. You can use various tools to achieve this from Google’s Keyword Planner, SEMRush, and Ahrefs among others. Plan relevant content topics based on these keywords.
- Check top-ranking sites for the keywords with a simple Google search. You can use the aforementioned keyword analytic tools to check the number of inbound links. You can pursue the same inbound links or find other relevant ones.
- Also, check how these top sites are approaching their content development: what types of content pieces are they publishing? How many words? Are they using audio/video/visual or other media?
- Develop better content pieces than your competitors
- Reach out and build relationships with the sites who have shared and linked your competitors’ content. Aim to get their backlinks
- Promote your content through various channels. Check out this guide by
Moz on how to promote your content pieces.
II. Featured Snippet Optimization
In recent years, Google SERP has evolved to feature several types of rich snippets besides organic results and PPC advertisements. With that being said,
featured snippets deserve a pretty special place.
It was often referred as the “rank #0”, simply because they are prominently placed above the 1st ranked result. So, if your site is featured as the featured snippet, you can get a dramatic increase in traffic.
Google determines the featured snippet based on which site provides the best answer for a specific question. The summary of the site’s content is shown as the featured snippet.
Based on this concept, there’s a common misconception that featured snippets will cause a decrease in traffic, since (most valuable) part of the content is featured as the snippet. This is not actually the case. Featured snippets will ALWAYS translate to
more traffic.
So how can we get featured as feature snippets? Here are some ways to optimize your site to increase the chance:
- Identify keywords where you are already ranking below the 20th position, even better if you are on the first page. Google only picks featured snippet from the top 10 results. So, you will first need to optimize your page to reach that position.
- Check each query, and find the ones with featured snippets. Take notes of your pages that are currently ranking for these queries.
- Check the content currently featured as featured snippets, and re-optimize your content to be better:
* Optimize overall user experience, readability, load speed, and so on.
* Develop a better overall content compared to the currently featured site.
* Focus on giving a better answer for the specific question. Extra-optimize this section so Google can easily summarize it
* Build more inbound links for the page, and also use more links (both external and internal) within the content
III. Optimizing Crawl Budget
Google assigned different crawl budget for different website. Meaning, there’s a maximum number of time Google will index a specific site.
Crawl budget is mostly based on the authority and popularity of the site, and the size of the site also matters.
By optimizing for higher crawl budget, you will have more chance to be indexed, achieving our SEO results faster. More often than not, optimizing crawl budget is about prioritizing: making a choice about which specific pages require more indexing.
We can do this by optimizing our site structure, and making sure our key pages are optimized for both human readers and Google bots. Here are some key considerations:
- Make a list of your currently indexed pages, and comprate it with your total number of pages (check your sitemap). Monitor the pages that are crawled daily, and take notes of the average number of pages.
- Optimize your content with more internal links for better perceived architecture.
- Make sure your site is well organized and have a central theme. You might want to check this guide about
SEO siloing.
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Block crawlers from pages with low-quality content, faceted navigation, and so on.
- Improve the site’s overall load speed, as it is a direct crawl budget factor
IV. Re-optimizing Content Pieces
There are always cases when your content isn’t exactly performing as desired. These content pieces with poor performance can affect your SEO results, as well as your overall perceived credibility, branding, and ultimately, traffic.
These pages could be:
- Pages that are targeting keywords with good search volume, but have low organic traffic and engagement
- Content pieces that covered important topic related to the industry/niche, but are already outdated
- Fairly informative and relevant content pieces that failed to get quality inbound links
We can re-optimize these content pieces to turn them into valuable assets. Here are a few things you can do:
1. Revamping your content pieces, mainly to improve site structure. You might also want to update the information within.
2. Build relevant, contextual internal links
3. Optimize META description and title tags to improve click-through rate
4. Analyze Google Search Console to figure out high-traffic secondary keywords. Improve secondary keywords targeting.
Bottom Line
SEO success is first and foremost about having the right mindset: SEO is not a get-rich-quick scheme to quickly get a traffic increase. However, it is actually a long term game where you can also have a long-lasting result.
