Introduction
The benefits of a good SEO strategy are many and varied, but the most important one is this: better search engine rankings which lead to increased traffic for your site. As we all know too well nowadays if you want any chance at success every inch must be optimized!
In today’s highly digitized world, the prevelance of businesses on the internet cannot be overstated. Naturally, any enterprise that desires a modicum of visibility on the search engine results pages (SERPs) must have an online presence. However, achieving this feat is far from a walk in the park, and this is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) steps in as an indispensable tool. As an integral aspect of any online marketing campaign, SEO is pivotal to the success of any business in the cut-throat world of the internet.
As vital as SEO may be, comprehending its intricacies, especially the advanced techniques, can be a daunting task, and it is imperative that one is well-grounded in the rudimentary aspects before delving into the complexities. Therefore, for SEO newbies, it is highly advisable to peruse our other SEO-oriented blogs before tackling the following ten must-know concepts in advanced SEO that we are about to discuss.
10 essential concepts that every marketer should know about advanced SEO:
Advanced SEO Concept 1. SEO Forecasting
SEO forecasting, a crucial aspect of digital marketing, is a complex process that entails predicting your website’s future performance in highly competitive SERPs. This is accomplished by scrutinizing intricate past data and trends, recognizing elusive patterns, and leveraging them to gain insights into future behavioural trends.
There are several factors that can be analyzed when forecasting SEO performance, including:
• Search volume – The number of individuals searching for a particular keyword or phrase, serves as a powerful predictor of your website’s ranking and overall performance in the search engine results pages.
• Click-through rate (CTR) – Another essential factor that cannot be overlooked is the click-through rate (CTR), which measures the percentage of individuals who click on your listing when it appears in the SERPs. The click-through rate, another vital aspect of SEO forecasting, is a critical indicator of your website’s overall performance and relevance to the searcher’s query.
• Rankings – Furthermore, rankings, yet another fundamental factor to be considered in SEO forecasting, provide insights into where your website appears in the SERPs for a particular keyword or phrase. Ranking performance, coupled with intricate and dynamic search volume and click-through rate data, is a critical aspect of forecasting SEO performance and developing effective SEO strategies.
Using these factors, you can develop a forecast of how your website will perform in the future and make changes to your Advanced SEO strategy accordingly.
For example, if you see that your website’s CTR is increasing but rankings are stagnant, you may want to focus on improving your website’s title and meta description to encourage more people to click through. This will ensure you have a foolproof strategy even if you are on the verge of a breakdown.
Advanced SEO Concept 2. Website Migrations
The intricacies involved in the process of website migration cannot be overemphasized. This is the process of relocating your website from one domain to another, and it is a task that requires a great deal of expertise. It is not uncommon for novices to encounter several hiccups in the course of this arduous process, and the consequences of errors in execution are dire, including the loss of traffic and rankings.
Hence, it is imperative to have a deep understanding of this process and a wealth of experience to execute it seamlessly without errors or flaws in your workmanship! Because many SEO professionals who work exclusively brand-side may find they have not had the opportunity to carry out so many website migrations, you must take on board any such project with care.
Remember these when migrating your website:
• Redirects – Now to begin with, all the old URLs should be redirected to the new URL to avoid 404 errors or missing content. This will enhance website ranking on search engine and will prove you set as a knowledgable competitor in the market.
• Change of Address (COA) in Google Search Console – Inform Google of the website’s change of address (COA) in Google Search Console to let the search engine index with the new URLs, ensuring that your website’s search engine performance is not impacted by the migration.
• Backlinks – All your backlinks that have been existing before will need to be updated to point to the new URLs.
• Internal links – Finally, along with backlinks you should also update all internal links on your website to point to the new URLs. This process will ensure that users are directed to the new pages accurately, and your website’s performance and functionality are not compromised by the migration process.
If you are planning a website migration, it is important to plan and execute it carefully to avoid any negative impact on your Advanced SEO strategy.
Advanced SEO Concept 3. Log File Analysis
Log files, the holy grail of website analysis, contain a trove of invaluable information, ranging from the date and time of visits to the IP addresses of visitors, the pages they accessed, and even the referrer URLs.
With such comprehensive data at your disposal, you can leverage it to unravel the mystery of how people find your website and what they do when they land on it. Simultaneously you can also fine-tune your website and optimize it to better serve your audience.
Logfile analysis can be used to improve your website in several ways, including:
- To elevate your website’s search engine performance and garner more organic traffic, it is imperative to undertake a meticulous process of scrutinizing and optimizing pages based on their accessibility and referral sources.
- This process involves identifying pages that are frequently accessed and ensuring their optimization for SEO standards to maximize their ranking potential in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
- Simultaneously, it is equally vital to detect pages that are not being accessed frequently and initiate changes to improve their visibility and relevance to the users, thereby increasing their chances of appearing higher in the SERPs.
- Furthermore, scrutinizing and analyzing referrer URLs is pivotal to ensure that they are redirecting high-quality traffic to your website, enabling you to garner maximum organic traffic and enhance your website’s search engine authority.
Log files are a great way to understand what pages search engine bots can or cannot access on your site. You may be able to spot spider traps that could prevent visitors from finding their way around, as well as identify where there might have been an error with how often certain areas of the page get crawled by Google’s robots (spider). And to get good at using them, you need a firm understanding of not just how they work but also what information is contained within and why that might be important for your business or organization!
Advanced SEO Concept 4. Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals is an indispensable metric that you ought to heed in 2022, given that it is a novel ranking determinant that Google will be employing. According to Google, Core Web Vitals will serve as a crucial barometer of your website’s user experience. Notably, Core Web Vitals encompasses several crucial components and metrics, including the trinity of:
The three core web vitals are:
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – The intricacies of optimizing website performance are multifarious, and delving into it entails a meticulous assessment of an array of intricate factors. One such factor is the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which gauges the duration of time it takes for the most sizeable element on a webpage to load, consequently influencing user experience.
• First Input Delay (FID) – Additionally, the First Input Delay (FID) metric, which scrutinizes the responsiveness of the page and measures how long it takes for it to become interactive, plays a crucial role in gauging website performance.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – Furthermore, an essential aspect of website performance analysis is Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), which intricately measures how much the elements on the page move around as they load. This dynamic factor plays a significant role in the overall user experience, and it is imperative to understand its effects.
To get a clear idea of how your website is currently performing and to develop strategies for improving it, it is essential to use powerful website optimization tools such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights. With its powerful analytics and comprehensive reporting, this tool can provide invaluable insights into your website’s performance and help you develop effective optimization strategies to enhance your website’s overall performance in the SERPs.
However, Core Web Vitals mainly focuses on critical elements such as the main content, advertising, mobile optimization, site speed, image compression, and other key components that can impact the user experience.
So, making sure your website is properly optimized for mobile devices and has a fast page load time should be a priority if you want to rank well on Google.
Advanced SEO Concept 5. Schema Markup
Schema markup is a highly intricate and sophisticated concept that forms an integral part of the Advanced SEO landscape. Essentially, it is a meticulously crafted code that is ingeniously designed to optimize your website’s visibility and searchability by facilitating search engines in comprehending and interpreting your content with exceptional precision and accuracy.
This dynamic and innovative form of structured data is specifically tailored to convey to search engines the nuanced intricacies and finer details of your content, enabling them to seamlessly identify and categorize it in a manner that accurately reflects its true essence and significance. This, in turn, empowers search engines to present your content in the most relevant and compelling manner possible, prominently displaying it in the coveted SERPs and dramatically enhancing its overall discoverability and appeal.
By harnessing the remarkable capabilities of schema markup, you can unlock an array of powerful SEO benefits, ranging from heightened click-through rates (CTR) to more immersive and engaging rich results, that can propel your website to the pinnacle of search engine excellence. It is an indispensable tool for any website owner who is serious about elevating their SEO to new heights of excellence and generating a tidal wave of traffic and engagement.
If you have not yet incorporated schema markup into your website’s SEO strategy, you are doing yourself a grave disservice and depriving yourself of an unparalleled opportunity to revolutionize your search engine optimization potential. Fortunately, adding schema markup to your website is a relatively straightforward process that can be accomplished with the assistance of a user-friendly plugin or by manually inputting the code onto your site.
To learn more about the intricacies of schema markup and how to leverage its capabilities to unleash the full potential of your SEO, be sure to check out our comprehensive guide “A Complete Guide To Using Schema Markup For SEO”.
Advanced SEO Concept 6. Breadcrumbs in SEO
Breadcrumbs, while ostensibly a rudimentary aspect of SEO, can be deceptively complex, given the multifarious and intricate dimensions that this concept encompasses. In the Advanced SEO domain, breadcrumbs represent a potent and indispensable tool for enhancing the usability and accessibility of your website, augmenting the likelihood of users successfully navigating and locating the information they seek.
Moreover, they confer a variety of benefits that amass to the SEO prowess of your website, facilitating search engines in assimilating and comprehending the structural framework of your site and the dynamic interplay between its various pages.
Breadcrumbs can be used to:
Breadcrumbs are a versatile and powerful instrument that can be wielded to deliver a panoply of potent SEO advantages, including, but not limited to:
- Improving the navigational fluency and ease-of-use of your website, enabling users to traverse through its labyrinthine recesses with consummate ease and alacrity.
- Enhancing the search engine-friendliness of your website, by furnishing search engines with a granular and nuanced understanding of the intricacies of your site’s structural hierarchy and the relationships between its various pages.
- Amplifying the click-through rate (CTR) of your website by providing users with an immersive and compelling preview of the content that awaits them, inspiring them to explore further and delve deeper into the engaging content that your website has to offer.
Using breadcrumbs in your Advanced SEO strategy; on your website is easy-simply add a few lines of code to your pages. The code is as follows:
<div id=”breadcrumbs”>
<a href=”/”>Home</a>
<a href=”/category/”>Category</a>
<span>Page</span>
</div>
By doing so, you can make it easier for both users and search engines to navigate your website.
Advanced SEO Concept 7. Mobile SEO
Mobile SEO represents the apogee of contemporary SEO, and its primacy is underlined by the fact that a staggering 50% of all searches are now conducted on mobile devices. Consequently, optimizing your website for mobile users has become an ineluctable imperative that cannot be ignored if you wish to remain competitive and relevant in the digital ecosystem.
There are a few things you need to do to ensure your website is mobile-friendly:
- Employing a responsive design that can dynamically adapt and adjust to the varying screen sizes and resolutions of different devices, thus ensuring that your content is always legible and visually appealing.
- Utilizing font sizes that are sufficiently large to be easily discernible on a smaller mobile screen, thereby enhancing the readability and comprehension of your content.
- Crafting short, concise, and captivating titles that can be readily absorbed and processed by mobile users on the go, thus captivating their attention and stimulating their curiosity.
- Optimizing your images with relevant alt text and compressing them to reduce their file size, thereby enhancing the speed and responsiveness of your website and catering to the preference of mobile users for expeditious and hassle-free access to information.
By adhering to these principles, you can optimize your website for mobile devices and improve your chances of ranking well in mobile search results. Furthermore, if your website is fully optimized for mobile devices, you can earn the coveted “mobile-friendly” label that can serve as a powerful endorsement and enhance your visibility and credibility in the search results.
Conversely, if your website is not optimized for mobile devices, you may wish to consider making some changes to your website to avoid losing out on a vast and rapidly expanding demographic of mobile users.
Advanced SEO Concept 8. International SEO
International SEO is an intricate and demanding practice that revolves around optimizing your website to cater to users residing in different countries. The process can be achieved by targeting country-specific keywords, leveraging local hosting, and creating website versions tailored to individual countries.
To attain a successful international SEO strategy, one must take into account the following crucial factors:
- Keywords – Precisely target unique and specific keywords, considering the distinct linguistic and semantic variations of each country.
- Localization – Enhance your website’s localization through adopting the correct country code top-level domain, using local hosting providers, and generating country-specific website versions to provide users with content that resonates with their culture and preferences.
- Language – It is vital to use the language of each targeted country to ensure your content resonates and connects with your intended audience effectively.
Establishing a robust international SEO strategy is an intricate and multifaceted process that demands time, effort, and precision. However, it is a quintessential element for any business looking to expand its digital footprint globally and maximize its reach across multiple countries. By meticulously considering the factors mentioned above, you can enhance your website’s visibility and performance across borders, boost your business growth, and successfully spread your global wings.
Advanced SEO Concept 9. Semantic Search
In the domain of search, a novel approach has emerged, one that surpasses the limitations of traditional keyword-based methods. It goes by the name of “semantic search,” and it factors in the contextual nuance of a user’s query.
Unlike its antiquated counterpart, semantic search scrutinizes not only the individual keywords of a query but also their interdependent relationships and the deeper intent behind them.
For instance, supposing a user were to look up “restaurants near me,” a semantic search engine would discern their intention and yield results that align with their geographic proximity.
As a fundamental component of SEO, semantic search has the capacity to furnish more pertinent, customized outcomes to users. This, in turn, can augment click-through rates and conversions for your business.
To that end, it requires you to optimize your website for semantic search, thereby securing the most apt outcomes for your users.
Advanced SEO Concept 10. E-A-T
The bedrock of Google’s search algorithm lies in its E-A-T guidelines, which serve as the cornerstone of website ranking. E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, and these three tenets comprise the vital ingredients for site evaluation.
If your goal is to ascend to the top echelons of Google’s search results, you must prioritize content that exudes unwavering expertise, unimpeachable authoritativeness, and unequivocal trustworthiness. This entails intensive research and dexterous writing, coupled with a concerted effort to cultivate your website’s authority through backlinks and citations.
The relevance of E-A-T is all the more critical for websites that dispense advice or dispense information germane to one’s health, wealth, or safety. Should your site fit this bill, it requires you to exercise meticulous care and diligence in crafting content of the highest quality.
Advanced SEO Bonus Tip – AMP
AMP, an acronym for Accelerated Mobile Pages, is a Google-endorsed undertaking that endeavors to ameliorate the functionality of mobile web pages. The rationale behind AMP is to furnish pages that load expeditiously on mobile devices, hence enhancing the overall user experience.
If your aim is to cultivate a website that is snappy and attuned to the exigencies of mobile devices, it is incumbent upon you to contemplate implementing AMP. This can be accomplished by formulating AMP renditions of your web pages, or by availing yourself of a WordPress plugin such as the AMP for WP plugin.
Conclusion
SEO represents a pivotal facet of any online marketing endeavor, and for it to yield favorable outcomes, one must have a firm grasp of fundamental SEO principles and the more intricate Advanced SEO concepts. To this end, the 10 advanced SEO concepts proposed above serve as an auspicious point of departure, pushing you on a trajectory that ensures your website is held in high esteem by Google’s search algorithm. With these potent guidelines in your arsenal, you can aspire to create a website that boasts a lofty Google ranking.
But, if you’re not sure where to start with your search engine optimization needs then this task must fall to someone who knows what they are doing – like us!
Advanced SEO can be challenging and time-consuming so we’ll take care of all those pesky problems for you while still making sure everything goes smoothly from beginning to end by providing creative solutions tailored just right according to each client situation at hand. Contact 12 Channels today for a free SEO or Advanced SEO consultation.
