Advanced SEO Techniques for 2024: What You Need to Know

Implementing the right advanced SEO techniques can significantly increase your website traffic, improve search rankings, and enhance your overall ROI. Staying ahead in SEO requires adaptability and awareness of ongoing changes. 

Google frequently updates its algorithms, sometimes hundreds of times a year, which means techniques that worked well a few months ago might not be as effective today. Despite this constant evolution, certain foundational SEO practices continue to prove successful and can help future-proof your website against unexpected shifts.

Whether you are aiming to increase sales, attract more store visits, or generate high-quality leads, these 10 strategies compiled by FOR® will surely deliver impactful and lasting results.

1. Improve and Update Your Content

More than half of all businesses engage in content marketing, and many of them have content that’s been around for a few years.

Think of old, underperforming content—it’s there, but it’s not doing you any good. If you notice that a page has dropped in rankings during a Google position check, it might be time to optimise it.

Reoptimising content that isn’t attracting much traffic, generating conversions, or meeting other key metrics allows you to maximise the value of your existing assets.

You can use several strategies to identify old content that could benefit from optimisation. Some of the most common methods include:

• Analysing organic traffic or conversion data in Google Analytics for specific pages
• Reviewing impressions and click data in Google Search Console to identify underperforming pages
• Assessing keyword rankings and traffic trends in tools like Ahrefs to pinpoint content that needs improvement

To narrow down which pages to focus on, consider these criteria:

• The content should be at least six months old.
• It should have previously driven significant traffic or conversions.
• It should be relevant to your company’s products or services.

Once you’ve selected the pages to optimise, conduct a thorough audit. Look for easy opportunities, such as updating title tags, inserting relevant keywords, or improving internal links. If the content is particularly outdated, you may need to make more substantial changes, such as rewriting sections or adding new information, to help it regain visibility in search results.

2. Use Strategic Internal Linking

While adding internal links is basic SEO, strategically enhancing your site’s relevance and authority requires a deeper understanding of advanced SEO tactics.

Effective internal links help search engines better understand your content and site structure and improve user navigation.

The strategy comes into play when you decide where and how to place these links. It’s important to link to your most important pages from other pages that are semantically and topically relevant.

You should use descriptive anchor text—the clickable text in a hyperlink—that aligns with the search intent behind the primary keyword of the page it’s linking to.

One powerful way to enhance your internal linking strategy is by using the pages on your site that already have the most inbound links.

3. Steal Featured Snippets

Securing featured snippets is an excellent way to increase your SERP visibility and attract more organic traffic to your content.

Featured snippets hold the coveted “position zero,” appearing above all other organic search results. They also occupy significantly more space on the SERP than standard listings.

4. Find Low-Competition Keywords on Reddit

Start by entering a subreddit into Semrush. Once you’ve done that, explore the keywords that pages from that subreddit rank for.

Indeed, Reddit often has a higher Domain Authority than your site, which is why those threads rank well. However, most Reddit threads tend to be poorly organised and cluttered with irrelevant comments.

Because of this, there’s a lot you can do to make your content more valuable and structured compared to a typical Reddit thread, such as:

• Organising information into clear, actionable steps
• Adding multimedia elements like images and videos
• Including external links to reliable and helpful resources
• Updating the content with the latest techniques, strategies, or data

Essentially, a well-crafted blog post will almost always outshine a Reddit thread in terms of quality and usefulness.

5. Focus on Content Design

Visual elements are important in catching users’ attention and keeping them engaged on your site. Engaged users stay longer and are less likely to bounce, which can positively impact your search rankings.

Instead of relying on static images, add a variety of visual elements like GIFs, animated images, and videos. For instance, GIFs and animated images, like animated SVGs, capture attention and enhance the user experience by automatically playing and looping, which keeps users engaged longer. Adding videos to your content can have a similar effect.

6. Fix Keyword Cannibalisation Issues

Keyword cannibalisation occurs when multiple pages on your site compete for the same search intent, which can diminish their individual SEO effectiveness. While it’s possible to optimise different pages for similar keywords as long as they address distinct intents, problems arise when two or more pages target the same intent. 

Use Semrush’s Position Tracking tool cannibalisation feature to identify and resolve keyword cannibalisation issues. This tool helps you detect problems by showing fluctuations in rankings and URLs. Once identified, you can address the issues by: 

• Removing and redirecting duplicate pages with 301 redirects
• Implementing canonical tags to indicate the primary page
• Re-optimizing content
• Consolidating pages
• Adjusting your internal linking strategy.

7. Optimise page speed

Page speed is essential for both SEO and user experience. Google uses it as a ranking factor because users expect websites to load quickly—ideally in two seconds or less. Failing to meet this expectation can harm your search rankings and drive users away, often to competing sites. Even a slight improvement can yield significant benefits; for instance, a one-second faster load time can boost conversions by up to 7%.

To enhance your page speed, you’ll need a blend of technical expertise and ongoing optimisation. Key strategies include compressing images, minimising redirects, and optimising HTML code.

8. Start A/B Testing

Use A/B testing to experiment with various versions of elements on your website to find out which variations drive the best results.

To start, focus on key pages that are critical to your business. Define the metrics you want to improve and consider potential changes that could positively affect these metrics. Small adjustments, like altering button colour, text size, or heading text, can significantly impact user behaviour.

Here are some elements you might test to optimise your website:

• Button text and colour
• Headline (H1) text
• Content length
• Table of contents
• Text size
• Hero images and other visuals
• Pop-ups and CTAs

You can fine-tune your website by systematically testing these elements for better performance and user engagement.

9. Add Schema Markup to Relevant Pages

Adding schema markup to your pages can enhance how your site appears in SERP, potentially increasing clicks and engagement. 

Schema markup provides search engines with information about your content, such as ratings, events, dates, recipes, and FAQs, making your search result snippets more informative and attractive.

By incorporating schema markup, you offer users clearer insights into what your page is about, which can encourage clicks. Additionally, it allows Google to present your content in a more engaging format, such as rich snippets or enhanced search results.

10. Uncover People Also Ask Keywords

The “People Also Ask” (PAA) sections in Google search results are valuable features that provide users with immediate answers to related questions. These sections often appear in search results for broad or fragmented queries and typically feature long-tail keywords with lower search volumes. Despite their modest individual search volume, these questions can collectively drive significant traffic to your site.

Conclusion

Mastering SEO in highly competitive industries requires more than just basic techniques. It’s a dynamic and ongoing process that involves continuous analysis, experimentation, and adjustment. By implementing advanced techniques like optimising page speed, using Schema Markup, and focusing on content design, you can enhance your SEO efforts and reach the top of Google’s search results. Contact Toni Hukkanen, the head of FOR® Branding and Marketing Agency, to schedule a free consultation and discover how advanced SEO techniques can boost your website’s performance and rankings.