SEO Strategy: Advanced Tips And Techniques To Fuel Your Website

“How can I take my SEO strategy and results to the next level?” Name a business owner who does not want an easy answer to that question.

This blog post will explore, in detail, five areas you can leverage for ongoing SEO success.

Chances are you’ve already investigated how to get your website to show up in search engine results. You may have even completed keyword research and optimized webpage elements such as title tags, meta info, and URLs on your site.

But how are you ensuring that your search engine optimization strategy is still working for you? If you simply modified page elements at some point and never looked back, it probably isn’t.

Here are six components of a comprehensive website SEO strategy:

1. Website audit

Before you begin any new work, make sure all the SEO optimization you intended in your initial website implementation has actually been completed and is still relevant. You may find, in some instances, that you’re short a few keywords in the body copy, or that a title tag includes a keyword you decided you didn’t want to utilize.

Or, you may find that you’re in good shape and ready to continue with next steps. Either way, take a few hours to ensure that every detail and every element has been optimized with one of your target keywords so that you don’t have to continuously revisit this fundamental step when you’re executing more advanced techniques.

One of the most efficient ways to audit your website’s keyword optimization is to crawl the website using a free tool such as Screaming Frog. This can easily provide you with a list of the html elements on each page, and a summary of missing, duplicate, or poorly optimized page elements. The crawl will also identify any technical issues such as 404s or non-indexable pages.

2. Content development

If you’ve made it to the stage where you’re looking for more advanced optimization techniques, your website may already be rich with keywords on targeted pages. However, a very important factor in keyword visibility is, and always will be, fresh content. For those of us who sell an established service, solution and/or product, it isn’t always easy to produce new web content. But this doesn’t need to be an insurmountable challenge. This list of methods can help you to develop new content quickly:

Expand your existing content

If you optimized one page around “SEO” think about how you can create a section that includes pages optimized on several variations of the core term. Focusing on long-tail keyword phrases, specifically those that answer user’s search queries with helpful, informative content, should help guide the creation of new content.

Create media content

Identify opportunities for content that can be easily created as well as easily syndicated through viral marketing and link building, including:

• Videos, photos, webinars, podcasts, and white papers
• Press releases: Companies often reserve press releases for breaking news. However, it might be time to revise your press release strategy if you’re serious about improving keyword visibility. Perhaps you’re releasing a new white paper, sponsoring an event or introducing a new partner. All these announcements are great fodder for press release content that could then be posted on your website and, yes, search engine optimized. Press releases are also a great way to keep the latest news section of your website fresh and up-to-date, whether this is featured on your home page or has its own place on your site. Ensure press releases are linking back to your main website with keyword rich anchor text. Be sure to select the right wire service as some only offer no-follow links, meaning they do not boost SEO.

Leverage blogs

Blogging is not only a great way to share relevant news, information, and thought leadership content, it gives you an opportunity to create new keyword-optimized content a few times a month, if not a few times a week. If you post your blog on your website domain as a subdomain or subdirectory, your website will get credit for all this great, fresh content.

3. Competitive analysis

When you initially selected your keywords, you probably went through several lists of words, several Excel documents of data and several tedious meetings. If you could have your way, the keywords you have in place today wouldn’t change for a very long time. Unfortunately, at any time your market may start referring to something that was once considered “a process” as “a function.”

A simple find/replace may not be sufficient to realign your keywords to what Google tells you people are searching for. And you don’t want to have to tell your sales team that website traffic and conversions are down this month because your keywords are outdated.

Conduct an ongoing competitive analysis, look at your website analytics, talk to your sales team, and talk to your field marketers to ensure that the keywords you have optimized for are still relevant (and don’t forget to write a blog post that addresses these changes)

There are many free tools that offer competitive SEO insights. It is helpful to review the keywords competitors are currently ranking for and to compare them to your own rankings to identify any relevant gaps. This opens an opportunity to target the keywords your competitors are missing out on. It can also be helpful to review the types of content competitors are creating and gaining traction on. Is there an opportunity to create similar, better content around the same keywords and topics?

4. External linking

External linking is an integral component of a search engine optimization plan, as it covers two different, but not exclusive, tactics—link popularity and traffic. When hunting for link-building opportunities, try to find websites with related content; a simple tip is to mine your competitor’s websites for their inbound links.

Link popularity is a device created by the search engines to help rank and categorize relevant sites within their index. Each link is essentially a vote for your site’s content. And the more votes your site has, the more popular you’ll be in search engine results. There are a few elements that you should keep in mind when building these links:

• Quality/Relevance: Google does not treat all links equally. Links from high quality, high authority websites that are relevant to your products & services will help SEO more than links from poor quality websites, focused on content irrelevant to your business. A good way to identify stronger quality websites is by checking the Domain Authority (DA) of the site for a high school, reviewing the sites own link profile (do they link to just anybody, or do they value who they link to?), or by auditing the website manually for quality assurance.
• Follow vs. No Follow: In your search, you may find several sites that will allow you to place a link back to your website and say to yourself, wow, this is easy. However, ask yourself this simple question first: Will Google care? Websites have the ability to put a no-follow tag on a link so that Google spiders will not “count” it as a link. There are several tools out there to help you tell the difference between a follow and a no-follow link. Try the Mozilla Firefox plug-in SeoQuake.
• Anchor Text: Including a keyword in your anchor text is a must. Google will not only see that there’s a link on a domain that leads to your website, but it also will see that the link itself includes the keyword, When others link to your context using keyword-rich anchor text, it indicates to Google that other webmasters find your website to be a subject matter expert in that area, which is a sign that your page should rank well in search results.

External linking should also be used for generating traffic. As stated above, there are several no-follow sites that may not get you link credit but can drive relevant traffic such as:

• Twitter
• YouTube
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Instagram

Search and social media signals are slowly merging as more and more users turn to their peers for gathering information. Sure, certain businesses lend themselves to success in social media and others don’t, but as the properties and the audiences in this space expand, so do the rewards for those involved. By sharing content on social media platforms, it makes it easier for others to find your content.

SEO’s overall goal is to increase website traffic, so don’t ignore some of these popular websites that, if used properly, can really help take your inbound traffic to the next level.

5. Internal linking

This is another piece of the SEO puzzle that will help increase your keyword visibility. Internal linking should be used throughout your website on optimized pages. Remember our “voting” analogy for external linking? The same can be said for internal linking. Include links to your most important pages to help spiders easily identify which pages they should pay close attention to. Visitors will also benefit from internal linking, since you’ll be promoting related or more in-depth information on a given topic. And, lastly, don’t forget to optimize your anchor text for links on your own site.

6. Site Speed

Google’s Core Web Vitals—a set of metrics used to evaluate user experience—show website speed and user experience are closely linked. The longer the site takes to load, the worse the user experience gets. And that negatively affects SEO since search engines are designed to present the best results at the top of the page. There are a number of ways to speed up a site, such as minifying coding, removing unused coding, optimizing images and videos by compressing them, installing caching at the application level, reducing redirects, and auditing plugins.

Final word

Search engine optimization should be treated as a living and breathing organism—it needs constant attention in order to be truly successful. By conducting ongoing analysis and leveraging these new and inventive ways to continuously improve your search engine visibility, you’ll stay a step ahead of the competition. In short, you have an SEO strategy that you can count on.