12 Advanced SEO Techniques (To Get More Traffic from Google)

If you want higher rankings and more traffic to your website, you need an efficient SEO strategy, which includes (but is not limited to): 

• Targeting the right keywords
• Using relevant meta tags
• Creating high-quality content
• Building quality backlinks

However, every marketer follows these strategies. So if you want to dominate the SERPs, you must go beyond these basic strategies and implement advanced SEO techniques.

This article will introduce you to 12 Advanced SEO Techniques, which help crawlers understand your content better and improve its potential to rank higher in the SERPs.

While some are a bit technical, I have kept them simple, actionable, and super easy to execute.

With that, let’s begin.

Advanced SEO Technique 1: Optimize for Google Discover

Have you ever visited the left-side panel of your Google App?

It looks something like this:

This is called Google Discover.

It looks like a social media news feed containing videos and articles, which Google curates based on your interests.

The links featured in Google Discover receive an average CTR of 11% and drive significant traffic to their source domains. 

If you want your content to get listed in Google Discover, you must follow these practices:

• Use high-quality cover images
• Write compelling and convincing titles
• Optimize the meta description 
• Create content on trending topics
• Ensure your site is mobile-friendly

How To Optimize For Google Discover?

You can optimize for Google Discover by maintaining content quality, using high-quality visuals, implementing AMP, and following Google’s algorithm updates.

Here are some factors that can improve your Google Discover visibility:

• Content freshness & Quality: Google prefers showing the latest information to its users. When it comes to the Discover feed, it shows the most recent posts on topics of interest. 

Therefore, posting content regularly on your site increases your chances of showing up in Google Discover.

• Real-time engagement: By default, Google promotes engaging content in the search results. Discover is no different. 

If your content is interesting and people interact with it, Google will show it to more people (who might be interested in it). 

You can generate real-time engagement on your content and drive more traffic from Google Discover.

• User’s browsing history: The key to Google Discover is a user’s interest. Someone who recently browsed a topic matching your site’s content is likely to see your recent posts.

As a rule of thumb, creating content on popular topics increases your Discover visibility.

• Page loading speed: Google’s recommended page loading speed is between 0.5 and 2 seconds. If you have a mobile-friendly site that also loads quickly, your chances of ranking in Google Discover increases.

• Multilingual content: Google users are located in various geographic locations. So, creating multilingual content removes the language barrier. 

Your multilingual posts will reach more and more people if it matches their interests.

• Mobile-friendly: Google Discover is a mobile-specific feature, so this one is obvious. If users’ mobile experience is poor, Google will stop showing links from your site in the Discover feed. 

You can check your site’s mobile experience using RankWatch’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool. If it needs improvement, try making changes.

Recommended Reading: How To Effectively Optimize Content For Google Discover

Advanced SEO Technique 2: Use Structured Data and Schema Markup

You’ve probably noticed rich results or schema-optimized results in the SERPS. If not, they look something like this:

Compared to standard Google results, schema-optimized results offer more information. 

For example, the first result contains additional details, including product ratings, reviews, inventory details, and cost. However, the other result is missing that information.

Such information helps users as well as Google bots to understand your content better and rank it accordingly.

Besides the search enhancements, using structured data markup makes your website eligible for content-specific SERP results like:

1. Rich cards
2. Rich snippets
3. Enriched search results
4. Knowledge graph
5. Breadcrumbs
6. Carousels
7. Rich results for AMP

The enhanced display in SERPs can increase your website’s CTR and help your website rank higher.  

Moreover, research shows that schema-optimized results ranked 4 positions better in the SERPs than other sites. 

How to Implement Structured Data Markup?

You can implement schema markup on your website using Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper tool.

The tool will help you implement structured data on your site in three ways:

Part 1: Enter Page

• Select the data type from the available options.
• Enter the URL or HTML source of the page that you wish to mark up. 
• Click on ‘Start tagging’. It will take you to the URL to start tagging.

Part 2: Tag Data

• Highlight the text on the web page, right-click on it, and select the tag it corresponds to. 
• Click on ‘Add Missing Tags’ and add any other relevant field (if missing).   
• Click on ‘Create HTML’ once the tagging is done. 

Part 3: View HTML

• Generate the HTML markup script (or you can get it in JSON-LD).
• Copy the HTML script and add it to the head of the concerned web page.

To test if the markup is implemented correctly, you can use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool. 

• Enter the URL of the web page
• Run the test
• See the marked tags

Recommended Reading: Quick Schema Markup Guide For Small Businesses With Single Location

Advanced SEO Technique 3: Build Site Structure To Get Sitelinks

Some SERP listings contain hyperlinks to their subpages below the main URL.

These subpages are called sitelinks.

Sitelinks are links to other pages or sections of a page on your website. In most cases, these are the most regularly visited pages of your site.

Nearly 67% of all organic keywords for Wikipedia contain sitelinks for the same reason.

Users jump to the page or section they want to read from the SERP directly.

While sitelinks have evolved over the years, the following 3 formats often appear in SERPs:
One-line sitelinks: Contains up to 4 links in a single line below the meta description.

Mobile sitelinks: Have up to 6 links in a drop-down below the meta description and appear on the top search result.

Sitelinks search box: Allows users to search and jump directly to the search results for the domain.

The presence of sitelinks increases your search real estate. Let’s quickly see how you can make the most of it.

How To Optimize For Sitelinks?

Google algorithmically generates sitelinks in organic search results to enhance user experience.

Here’s how you can influence the sitelinks for your website:

• Create structured navigation using HTML features like unordered lists and text links.
• Organize navigation to display a smaller number of links (most visited pages on your site).
• Draft unique (and informative) meta titles and descriptions for the home page and pages linked to the home page.

Advanced SEO Technique 4: Get Higher CTR for Ranking Pages

Ranking pages are a bonus to drive traffic from Google. However, achieving a higher rank in SERPs is useless if users don’t click on your results.

CTR and search rankings are closely related. If you don’t have a good CTR, search engines can demote you. 

An analysis of 5 million Google search results revealed that moving up one spot in the SERPs increases the CTR by 30.8%.  

Other key findings include:

• Title tags between 15 to 40 characters receive the highest CTR
• URLs with a keyword receive a 45% higher CTR
• Meta descriptions attract 5.8% more clicks to pages

How To Optimize Your Ranking Pages For Higher CTR?

Optimizing your ranking pages for the title, meta description, and URL will help you drive more traffic.

Here are a few points to bear in mind:

• Craft compelling title tags with your target keyword.
• Write meta descriptions that are customized to inform visitors.
• Create a URL structure with your target keyword and no stop words (a, an, the, etc.).

Advanced SEO Technique 5: Optimize for Page Loading Speed

Google rankings are directly related to page loading speed.

Google recommends having a page loading speed between 0.5 to 2 seconds. As the page loading time increases, the site’s bounce rate increases. 
You can check the page loading speed of any URL using Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool.

Enter your website’s URL to check its page loading score:

• 0 to 49 (red): Poor
• 50 to 89 (orange): Needs Improvement
• 90 to 100 (green): Good

If your site’s score is between 90 and 100, it loads fast. If it’s lower than that, your website needs attention and optimization.

The page speed test report lists the issues responsible for your page’s slow loading speed under ‘Diagnostics’ and suggests ways to fix them under ‘Opportunities’.

How To Optimize for Faster Page Loading Speed?

A click only counts if the visitor lands on your page. Hence, it is necessary to optimize your page loading speed.

Here are some tips to enhance your page loading speed:

• Enable compression of CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files that are larger than 150 bytes.
• Reduce your code by removing code comments, spaces, unnecessary characters, formatting, and unused code.
• Reduce redirects to avoid additional waiting time (till the HTTP request-response cycle completes).
• Implement browser caching and allow browsers to save information about your website.
• Improve server response time and bring it under 200ms.
• Use Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) to divide the load of delivering content.
• Optimize images in PNG (graphics) or JPEG (photographs) formats in required sizes.

Recommended Reading: How To Improve Your Page Loading Speed?

Advanced SEO Technique 6: Get Mobile-friendly

Google’s mobile share of the organic search engine visits for 2013-2021 is 59%. That means more than half of its users are performing searches on mobile devices.

If you have a mobile-friendly website, it will:

• Not hide content on any screen size
• Load quickly across all networks 
• Offer great user experience

And because mobile-first indexing is a ranking signal, it can help you achieve higher spots in the SERPs.

How To Optimize For Mobile Devices? 

To optimize your website for mobile devices, you need to have a responsive design with a good loading speed.

It will ensure that your page’s layout and content adapt to every device (a tablet, mobile, and even a desktop). Plus, render quickly.

Using a responsive web design have the following advantages:

• All content stays on a single URL.
• There are no duplicate content issues.
• Mobile user experience is top-notch. 
• Redirection is not required.

You can run the Mobile-Friendly Test using RankWatch to gauge the mobile-friendliness of your site.

If there are issues, you can work on them and improve your site’s mobile experience.

Recommended Reading: How To Make A Website Mobile Friendly

Advanced SEO Technique 7: Use Different Landing Pages for Different Goals

Landing pages are designed for internet marketing campaigns. 

They are named so because visitors arrive here after clicking on a link on Google, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Referring Domains, etc.

Each landing page has a specific (desired) goal to achieve and one consistent CTA. 

The goals may include encouraging the visitors to:

• Explore your site and its content
• Buy your products or services
• Share their contact information (with permission)
• Get your site’s promo codes or offers
• Leave a comment or feedback on your site
• Subscribe to your updates

So, you need to create different landing pages for different objectives.

Using different landers helps you to:

• Optimize user experience for first-time users on your site
• Track and analyze visitor actions on your site
• Modify your site’s content as and when required
• Create more entry points on your sites
• Target specific queries (keywords) for your site 

How To Optimize Landing Pages?

Here are some tips for optimizing landing pages:

1. Filter long-tail keywords and use them in your page’s content.
2. Create a unique URL (containing the target keyword) for your lander.
3. Include keywords in your content strategically and avoid stuffing them.
4. Present the information attractively to retain more and more visitors.
5. Build backlinks to your page and give it an SEO boost.
6. Ensure page loading speed is fast, preferably between 0.5 and 2 seconds.
7. Implement UTM tagging to track visitors and conversions on your page.

Recommended reading: 7 Landing Page Optimization Tips For Better Conversion

Advanced SEO Technique 8: Gain Visibility with Local SEO

Google’s ever-evolving algorithm has a special place for location-specific searches. (Nearly 46% of all searches on Google have local intent.)

For example, you search for ‘bookstores’ on Google. (You would want to visit the nearest bookstore, right?)

So, the search engine will list the bookstores in your local area, along with their contact details, directions, and other information.  

You can easily find the nearest bookstore and visit it.

Local SEO involves optimizing your site to get the most out of relevant local searches. 

Businesses with a physical location like a grocery store, pharmacy, restaurant, office, hospital, etc., must optimize for it.

It will help them to:

• Drive & grow website traffic
• Generate quality leads & conversions
• Build a strong brand presence locally

Google has a unique set of ranking signals that influence local SEO. 

It considers the user’s location, NAP citations, online reviews, Google My Business listing, etc., while ranking sites for location-specific searches.

How To Optimize Your Website For Local SEO?

Local SEO is a great way to dominate search results, besides generating leads for your business.

A few tips to optimize for local SERPs are:

1. Create your account on Google My Business
2. Create your accounts on Bing Places
3. Claim and optimize your Apple Maps listing
4. Register your business on local directories
5. Optimize for voice search
6. Create posts with local intent
7. Use local keywords in your content
8. Have a mobile-friendly website
9. Build consistent NAP citations for your business
10. Get positive customer reviews on Google
11. Optimize meta titles and description
12. Create separate landers for each product/service

Recommended Reading: How Can You Leverage Local SEO For Dominating SERPs

Advanced SEO Technique 9: Fix Non-performing Content

You already know that all the content on your website doesn’t perform equally well in SERPs. Some pages rank higher than others, while some don’t rank at all.

So, fixing old content can boost your SEO. You can add new keywords, change the publishing date, improve your internal linking, etc. and receive significant traffic gains.

How To Optimize Non-performing Content?

While it is easier to create new content than fixing non-performing content, you should do the drill.

Here are three ways to optimize non-performing content:

1. Update: Add relevant, up-to-date information to your content. For example, replace old facts with the latest ones, add informative images, change the year used in the title to the recent one, etc.
2. Improve: Incorporate the ranking keywords in your page’s content. Using Google Search Console, find out the ranking keywords for a specific URL. Then, optimize your content to make it more relevant for search engines. 
3. Delete: Remove content from your site if it is not performing well. Head to Google Analytics, analyze the performance of your old content and list out the pages to remove. 

Recommended Reading: How to Update Your Old Blog Posts for Better SEO 

Advanced SEO Technique 10: Include the Right LSI Keywords

Google and other search engines used ONLY keywords to determine a page’s topic back in the day. 

Fast forward to today, Google aims to find out a page’s topic with the help of semantically related or contextually related words used in the content. 
Known as LSI keywords, these terms help the search engine understand the page and rank it better in the SERPs.

For example, you’ve created a blog post about building ‘making tea. 

Google will first scan your page to check if you’ve used ‘making tea’, ‘tea recipe’, or ‘how to make tea’ in the title, meta description, content, alt text, etc., or not.

Secondly, it will look for LSI keywords like tea leaves, milk, water, sugar, gas flame, aroma, colour, etc., in your content. 

If these LSI keywords are present, Google will lock the page’s topic as making tea or tea recipe.

Next, it will rank it for all the appropriate search queries. Your page might also appear for keywords you never targeted (related searches).

How To Optimize For LSI Keywords?

When you have good knowledge about a topic, you naturally use a lot of LSI keywords while writing about it.

But, this might not be the case every time. So, it is best to research LSI keywords beforehand and use them in your content.

Here are some ways to find LSI keywords:

1. Use Google autocomplete to uncover LSI terms

1. Use tools like LSIGraph and LSIKeywords.com to generate ideas
2. Note down the bold terms in Google SERPs for your target keyword
3. Use Google Keyword Planner to find keywords by relevance
4. Take help from related terms of Google Image Search

Once you’ve found them, feel free to use them all over your content. 

Recommended Reading: How To Boost Your Search Rankings With LSI Keywords

Advanced SEO Technique 11: Create Videos To Drive Traffic

Have you noticed that Google is featuring videos in SERPs? That too in various ways to offer the best user experience?

If yes, you should see the opportunity here.

Nearly 55% of people spend time watching videos every single day. That means videos are surpassing textual content rapidly.

And Google knows it very well. You can do a regular search on Google and look at the organic video results.

You will find either of the 4 types in the SERP:

• Thumbnail Video: Search result with a thumbnail image and link to the domain where it is uploaded.
• Video Carousel: Collection of videos matching the search query, arranged in a row with links below them.
• Featured Video: Video displayed on the top of search results with a link to the source domain.

Suggested Clips: How-to videos answering the search query.

Also, you will find that Google’s Video Intelligence API reads video content. It decodes and extracts what is in the video. 

Then, it matches it with the search query to decide if or not to display the video in the search results.

Hence, it gives a huge boost to your SEO.

How To Optimize Videos For Maximum Traffic?

A study reveals that videos can drive 157% more organic traffic from search engines. But, only creating videos won’t do. 

Your videos should have valuable content, keyword optimization, etc., to gain visibility and rank in the SERPs.

Here are some tips to optimize your videos for search results:

1. Integrate videos on your website after uploading them to YouTube.
2. Place an attractive thumbnail image to get more clicks from the user.
3. Optimize pages with videos by adding keyword-rich text to them.
4. Add structured data on your video page for enhanced display in SERPs.
5. Use relevant keywords in your video’s title and description.
6. Generate user engagement on your videos for faster results.
7. Create video content that matches the user’s search queries.

Once you’ve optimized your website’s videos, you can check their performance in Google Search Console. 

Here are the steps:

1. Click on Search Appearance
2. Then go to Performance Report
3. Select Video Report

Recommended Reading: How To Improve Video SEO For Your Website

Advanced SEO Technique 12: Use Original Images & Infographics

Original visuals, which present content in an easy-to-understand and interactive manner, help SEO.

Images that appear in the search results attract users and entice them to visit the website.

And when users land on your website, images attract them and retain them longer. 

As the click-through rate rises and bounce rate goes down, your search rankings improve. 

Most websites create and use unique, simple, and informative visuals for the same reason.

But, creating and publishing visuals on your website is one thing. 

If you don’t optimize them, you might suffer a great loss on the SEO front. 

How To Optimize Images And Infographics?

Here are some image optimization tips:

1. Name the image properly: Assign appropriate names to your images, which look professional and SEO-friendly.
2. Use descriptive alt tags: Write descriptive alt text for your images so that users and bots can understand its content.
3. Use compatible file type: Prefer using images in JPEG, PNG, or GIF formats on your site so that they are easily accessible.
4. Keep image file size in the range: Keep the image file size as minimum as possible because small-sized files load fast.
5. Update an image sitemap: Create an image sitemap to help search bots find and index your images faster.

Recommended Reading: 10 Tips To Make The Best Out Of Your Blog Images

Organic Traffic Is An Asset That Yields Long Term Benefits

Google’s algorithms keep evolving and websites must also grow with it to keep their organic traffic coming.

Implementing advanced SEO techniques helps you keep up with the pace, strongly face competitors, and drive ever-lasting traffic.

What are you waiting for? 

If you have any questions or doubts, let me know in the comment section below. I’d be happy to help.