If you're reading this article, you probably already know and understand the value of SEO. According to published statistics, some 10.3 billion Google searches every month (in the U.S. alone!) help connect potential customers and visitors with websites to meet their needs. Being at the top of a Google search for your website's keywords can account for dramatically increased traffic… and for most people, consequently, increased revenue. In fact, being in the first spot on any search can get roughly 33% of all that query's clicks. If that query is loading up with tens or hundreds of thousands of searches a month… that's some serious traffic.
Where most websites struggle in achieving these traffic goals is going beyond the most basic SEO techniques, leaving them dead in the water with mediocre SEO. With that in mind, we've nailed down some of the best advanced SEO techniques which can help your website move up closer to that coveted #1 spot.
Improve the Framework of Your Website
You should audit your website regularly- just like an accountant might audit books. Often, thorough audits on a website framework can turn up simple problems which are preventing your existing SEO from being as effective. In general, it's easy to look over Moz's recommended SEO strategy to ensure that your content-generation process ticks each box. Ensure that all images have titles and alt tags, that you optimize your sidebars and related content suggestions, and that your page titles all contain the optimal number of characters with your keywords close to the beginning.
Do More Research On Your Users
Do you currently do any research on your users? Track their on-site behaviors, or their off-site activity? If you want to make your website more appealing to your possible visitors, it's important to use analytics to drill down deep into available data. One of the best ways to do this is to segment your visitors and study those visitors who are worth more. The ones who make purchases or become subscribers. Are they arriving with different keywords than other visitors? Do they have different, identifiable pain points you could build more pages for? Pinning down the untapped avenues in your most profitable audience can help you dramatically increase your website's visitation.
Optimise Your Blog Content
Every website should have a blog; and most these days dutifully churn out a post every week or month. What most website owners don't do is faithfully optimize their blog content. Firestarter SEO recommends building blog posts that are over 2,000 words long and enriched with plenty of SEO-optimized pictures and video. Each blog post should be keyword-optimized both in the title and in two or three different in-content headers. Usually following SEO best-practices for all blog posts can dramatically increase traffic.
Utilize Infographics
Infographics are a great way to get an SEO boost. Submitting links to your infographics to infographic directories can gain you some quality links, and infographics are also among the web's most shareable content. If you build a powerful, useful infographic and promote it cleverly, you can gain some substantial link power back to your website.
Don't Stretch Yourself
It's also important to know when you've done all you can, and you need to hand your work off to a professional. Especially if you're having to chose between handling customers or engaging in SEO, or doing SEO is biting into other critical tasks, consider picking a great, established SEO company to help you go the extra mile.
Conclusion
The first element of advanced SEO is actually holding yourself accountable for faithfully fulfilling basic SEO strategies, and running regular audits of your website. Follow Moz's published and proven techniques for the best strategy. From there, you should improve your strategies based on research… and begin researching specifically the visitor segment worth the most to your website. Begin writing deeper blogs, too, to beef up your keyword spread, and improve the richness of your content. And above all, know when you're in over your head: it's not worth it to get so frustrated that you quit when handing your SEO over to a reputable agency can help bridge the gap for you.