50 Advanced SEO Tips to Drive More Traffic!

Over the past 10+ years of working in SEO in Australia & US markets I always find it is good to document effective strategies and tactics for clients and employees.

I have put together a list of 50 quick SEO tips and techniques that you can implement right away to increase your rankings and drive more traffic to your business.

Keyword research and usage

1. Only target appropriate keywords with decent demand for your business. Don’t be afraid to target more longtail keywords that have lower traffic volumes but less competition. If you’re on a budget, use low-cost/free tools such as Google Adwords. Professionals may consider going for more advanced options such as SEMrush.

2. Google’s related searches can be a great place to begin your keyword research. You can find these terms at the bottom of the first page. These related searches can give you really nice ideas for other keywords to target.

3. Always try to be the first to target upcoming keywords that show some potential. You can use Google Trends to find out about how a particular keyword is faring. This way, you can begin optimising and ranking for these keywords way before the competition.

4. Interested in finding out popular autocomplete results for a particular keyword? Ubersuggest can assist you in collecting autocomplete suggestions from Bing. All you need is to enter a keyword and the free tool generates various longtail keyword ideas for you.

5. Aim to consolidate thing content into larger assets. Having several pages ranking for the same keyword can lead to keyword cannibalisation. In fact, Google could end up picking the wrong page to rank which of course will negatively affect your SEO campaign.

6. Include LSI keywords and synonyms in your content as this will help to reinforce your topic to search bots. For LSI keyword ideas, consider using LSI Keyword Generator (a free tool).

7. Set up a Google Search Console account. Use this tool to find out, among other things, the keywords your website is ranking for and the incoming links and their sources. You will also get lots of feedback from Google on the improvements your website needs.

Content

8. Consistently create new, original content. Write for the reader, not for robots, proofreading everything for grammar and syntax errors. Content that is newsworthy will have a high life and can be shown to users in other marketing channels.

9. Blog regularly and consistently. Consider user intent when writing your pieces and including keywords. Post new content after every 2-3 days or at least once per week. In addition, keep your content fresh and up to date to help you boost your search traffic.

10. Include high-quality images and optimise them with alt-tags. However, be sure to use copyright-free pictures or remember to give credit. Images should be relevant to the content.

11. Whenever you make a claim or an important statement, back it up with reliable data to help build authority and trust among your readers. You can link such content to scientific studies or expert reports.

12. Use numbered lists. They not only appear attractive to your readers but can also increase the odds of your content to show up in Google’s Knowledge Graph.

13. Minimize the use of stop/joining words in your page titles to save on space and make your titles more attractive. Besides, Google tends to ignore these words in search queries which therefore means they add no value to your titles. Words to avoid include a, and, is, of, with, on, etc.

14. Look for ideas on popular/trending content on forums like Quora or Reddit. You can also find questions being asked by users on these forums and answer them with high-quality content.

15. Add multimedia to your content including slideshows, videos, and infographics. This makes it more engaging and shareable. Besides, some of these multimedia such as YouTube videos help to keep visitors on your website for longer.

16. Never use Google Translate to translate content targeted at international audiences. Hire local translators instead for quality content. There are a number of great website’s which provide these services at a nominated rate.

Competition

17. Use Ahrefs to spy on your competitors’ new keywords in real time. By setting up an alert in Ahrefs, you will receive an email summary of all new keywords that your competitor is ranking for. This will help you keep up with their content strategy.

18. You can determine how many of your competitor’s pages are indexed for your target keyword by using “site:www.website.com.au” syntax. This can be used in the major search engines, such as Google and Bing

Link building

19. Use Ahrefs to find out more about where your competitors are getting their links from. You can then pitch those websites too and let them know they should consider linking to you too. However, it’s important that your content is better and provides more value than that of your competitors.

20. Avoid building too many links to your website within a short period especially if it’s new. This can raise suspicion with search bots. Links should be natural in nature, so any link profile which seems unnatural could cause issues.

21. Avoid building links on de-indexed websites since most tend to be worthless. A link profile review would be able to see this.

22. Reach out to relevant websites for inbound links. Learn how to pitch other businesses so they can agree to link back to your site.

23. Want to check and audit your backlink profile? Consider using tools such as remove’em and Ahrefs. They will help you check for any low-quality or suspicious links that could be a threat to your link building campaign.

24. Try to diversify your anchor text to avoid getting penalised by Google Penguin. Make sure that only around 1 in 3 of your links include your primary keyword. Branded anchor texts are usually your safest bet.

25. Be on the lookout for broken backlinks and fix them as soon as possible. You can do this by reaching out to the linking site and requesting them to update. Alternatively, set up a 301 redirect. Some of the tools to use here include Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool and Ahrefs Site Explorer.

26. Avoid engaging in casual link exchanges with fellow webmasters as this can easily raise issues with search engines and potentially the links may be removed in the future without you knowing.

27. Add in-content links to relevant pages on your site. This can help to pass authority and even give hints to search engine bots regarding the pages to rank for particular keywords.

28. Diversify your link profile. As such, strive to look for links from different websites and mix both do-follow and nofollow links. Never rely on one technique here since Google might easily consider this as manipulation.

Monitoring traffic and rankings

29. The first step here is to sign up for a Google Analytics account for your website. This tool emails detailed reports that are easy to interpret and follow. Reports can be sent in certain timeframes, such as weekly or monthly.

30. Use SEMrush to monitor your rankings. This tool also helps you find the right keywords for your SEO campaign, as well as what your competitors are up to.

User Experience

31. Wondering why and where your visitors are abandoning your page(s)? Use a scroll map tool such as Crazy Egg to collect relevant data. Crazy Egg also allows for heatmap testing on web pages which can come in handy for testing.

32. Set up a user-friendly 404 page that directs visitors to relevant pages and ultimately minimises bounce rate. This can include highly visited pages, with the aim of keeping users on the website.

33. In 2017, Google stated that Chrome would display warnings on websites aren’t running on HTTPS.  Use an SSL Certificate on your website to boost not only its safety but also its ranking. You can use Let’s Encrypt which offers a free SSL certification service. This is a great signal to users and search alike.

34. If you’re moving your website, it’s important to ensure that you have in place the correct 301 redirect mapping; otherwise, you could end up losing traffic and ranking.

Social media

35. Make it easy for visitors to share your content by displaying social share buttons in prominent positions on your pages. Pro tip: use social sharing buttons that follow users down the page.

36. Follow your competitors’ followers on Twitter to help you quickly grow your presence on the platform. Remember, this is a special group of people who are likely to show more interest in your products and services.

37. Make use of Facebook posts and sponsored stories to promote new content and amplify your reach. Testing ad content and images is highly regarded to maximise click and budget.

38. Want more shares for your content? Use tools such as Click To Tweet to ask your readers to tweet a specific image, tip, or even a quote.

Additional tips

39. Try tapping into reverse guest blogging. For example, you can reach out to an influential blogger in your niche and request them to write for you. This could help drive some traffic from their readership.

40. Create a correct sitemap for your website and make it accessible to users. Verify it regularly for errors.

41. Provide correct information for these four key pages; About Us, Terms of Use, Contact Us, and Privacy Policy. Ensure that users can access them from the landing page. Having these pages makes your website appear “real” and legit.

42. Want to build more lasting online relationships with others in your niche? Don’t just email them. Phone them also.

43. If you’re conducting an outreach campaign and have a large prospect list to contact, consider using Buzzstream, a neat tool to help you send emails at scale.

44. Write unique, compelling meta descriptions that contain keywords and call to actions. Limit them to 155 characters to minimise truncation in search results.

45. Avoid placing too many ads in your header or above the fold as this can annoy visitors and significantly increase your website’s bounce back rate.

46. Are you finding it difficult getting contact details for people you’d want to reach out to? Use tools such as Email Hunter or VoilaNorbert to find their email addresses. Of course, you won’t get a result every time you use these tools, but the success rate is quite high.

47. Check your website’s loading speed using Google Page Speed Insights and try to implement as many recommendations given as you can.

48. Worried about your website or ecommerce store having pages with similar content? Add canonical link elements to help signal preferred URL for such pages.

49. Use robots.txt to block crawlers from accessing sensitive parts of your website like the admin page.

50. Above all, keep everything simple and stick to a particular SEO strategy. Remember to focus on results driven work which has a white hat focus.  Do not take risks with short term quick win strategies which may have a long term negative impact on your domain and business.