SEO stands for search engine optimization and manifests the process of improvement and optimization of a website’s on-page and off-page elements with the goal of increasing the quantity of organic traffic that comes from search results, as well as its quality. Today, it’s the baseline of competitiveness and growth in the digital medium.
Since a large part of consumer interactions with brands happen online and users typically don’t look beyond the first top results in search engine result pages (SERPs), leveraging SEO is a must as it helps you appear higher in SERPs.
When approached wisely, SEO activities can bring your brand a wealth of benefits in the form of outreach, recognition, authority, conversions, and loyalty. To make it work to your benefit, you must learn the basics of optimization and put ongoing effort into it. But that’s not all.
Since it is a very dynamic field, SEO requirements change regularly, forcing site owners to adapt to change. That is, if you want to stay ahead of the curve and overshine the competition at all times, you need to tap into advanced SEO tactics and keep an eye on trends. In this guide, we are going to tell you everything you need to know to get on the right track!
Understanding the Latest SEO Trends
Keeping up with the latest SEO innovations is a good way to ensure that your strategy remains competitive and brings tangible results in the long run. In the guide below, we will tell you about the top 9 techniques that should help you stay ahead of the curve.
1. Advanced Keyword Research
Probably everyone knows the traditional method of detecting target keywords for driving traffic – you identify related topics, use research tools to assess their indicators, and select keywords with medium to high search volume and low competition to rank for them with ease.
Yet, if you want to advance your strategy, you should get more creative than that. Here are some lesser-known SEO tips for building a winning keyword strategy:
Keywords Audit
Before implementing new strategies, it’s always good to gain insights into which keywords you already use and how they work for your site.
You can easily do this with the help of advanced optimization tools like domain trust checker by NinjaReports. Apart from telling you the level of trust and credibility of your domain (which can also help with your strategy a lot), this tool can give you valuable insights into the number of keywords you rank for. Additionally, the tool will reveal the positions you take for each keyword and tell which ones bring you the most traffic.
Use this data to identify keywords that already work for you and detect gaps and areas for improvement.
Indirect Competitors Analysis
Analyzing your direct competitors (aka businesses that offer exactly the same products/services as you) is a well-known and time-tested way to gain insights into which keywords and other tactics work in your niche. But if you want to advance your tactic, you need to look at your partial competitors.
Partial competitors are brands that don’t offer the same products or services but address the same consumers’ pain points as you. For example, if you are a marketing agency, your partial competitors will probably include companies producing marketing software.
To explore them, you might need to go beyond the first page in organic SERPs. And, once you find them, you want to check which pages and content pieces bring them traffic, what topics they cover in their content, and what keywords they optimize their pages for. Such an analysis can help you detect a wealth of related but overlooked keywords.
Google’s Suggestions Analysis
While nearly everyone uses keyword research tools to detect promising queries, not many people use Google as it is to find what people are searching for. It’s a no-brainer but it actually works.
When you enter your primary keyword into Google’s search bar, there are several suggestions you can see:
- Autocomplete;
- People also ask;
- People also search for.
All these SERP suggestions can hint you at popular user queries related to your primary keyword. By analyzing them, you can detect hidden opportunities and complement your keyword strategy.
Low Search Volume Queries
While most brands hunt for keywords with high search volumes, there are plenty of queries with little to zero search volumes that remain out of the game. But what if we tell you that you can benefit from them, too?
Low-profile keywords might be more rarely used or just new (meaning that research tools still don’t possess much information on them). In both cases, a low search volume definitely doesn’t mean that no one searches for these keywords.
Here’s what you can do – detect low-profile queries and group them into clusters of 10-12 per piece of content. Since they are less competitive, you will likely rank for these queries faster and easier. Respectively, you might get higher in SERPs and earn more traffic.
2. Content Optimization Strategies
Once you have a detailed keyword strategy, you want to start optimizing your content. The basic SEO content strategies include:
- Creating valuable and quality content;
- Inserting links into headings and subheadings;
- Optimizing meta tags and descriptions;
- Optimizing URLs;
- Adding internal links, etc.
Using all these tactics is good. But what is even better is to complement them with the following profound SEO content strategies:
- Strive for diversity – Leverage a multitude of content types to drive more visitors and boost engagement. For example, you can use blog posts to include a larger number of relevant keywords and rank high, white papers or case studies to grow your credibility and capture potential clients’ infographics for making complex data easy to understand, etc.
- Ensure accessibility – Creating accessible content can help you boost trust, loyalty, and credibility, while also driving more SEO traffic. To do this, consider making your text larger and ensuring the right color contrast. Also, accompany your visuals with descriptive (and optimized) alt text and deliver audio or video versions of your content.
3. Technical SEO Innovations
The baseline technical optimization should include mobile optimization, site structure improvement, improving Core Web Vitals indicators, etc. Conduct a comprehensive technical SEO audit to identify areas for improvement and fix existing issues.
If you want to go the extra mile, consider using these cutting-edge SEO activities:
- Migrate to HTTPS (if you haven’t yet) to ensure solid security.
- Leverage noindex tags and robots.txt to control how Google crawls and indexes your site (for example, to make Google bots focus on important content and hide lower-value content).
- Add structured data markup to make Google understand your pages better.
4. Leveraging AI and Machine Learning
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are among the biggest SEO innovations of the past decade. Their rise changed the way we deal with large volumes of data, content creation, and optimization. But while there are still certain ethical considerations in terms of leveraging AI for creating web copy (it simply can’t craft dynamic and high-value content that meets high standards of search engines), there are a few other ways to use AI and ML to your benefit:
- Google Analytics – Currently, there is already an opportunity to integrate GA4 with AI and ML tools. You can use this chance to collect, analyze, and interpret large sets of data, facilitate predictive analytics, use AI-powered audience segmentation, analyze user journeys, etc. The core purpose is to make data analysis simpler and more accurate.
- Ideas generation and drafting – Though it can’t craft full-fledged copy for you, artificial intelligence can be used to come up with fresh ideas for your content that users may like and create drafts in less time to make the content creation process more guided.
- AI Overviews – Lastly, it’s impossible not to mention Google’s new generative experience in search. In a nutshell, it means that soon, users will be able to receive comprehensive AI answers to their queries that appear on top of SERPs. These answers are generated by AI based on the top search results. To rank for them, you will need to follow these tips:
- Follow optimization best practices to earn a high organic ranking;
- Provide content that matches your target query extremely closely;
- Ensure readability and simplicity;
- Get to the main point as quickly as possible on your page.
5. Link-Building
Link-building is by far one of the most pivotal elements of off page optimization. The conventional best practices include creating high-quality content that others will want to share and networking with site owners for guest blogging purposes.
For maximum results, there are a few extra link-building off page SEO techniques that you should try:
- Broken links – Look for trusted websites that have broken links and reach out to site owners to offer them your own content to replace them.
- Resources link-building – Research reputable sites that have dedicated resources or tools pages where they recommend relevant resources in your industry and reach out to them to offer them to feature you on these pages.
- Unlinked mentions – Research mentions of your brand on the web that don’t feature a backlink and offer site owners to make it a linked mention.
- Reclamation – Find sites that used to link to you but removed or changed them and reclaim your lost links back.
- Competitor analysis – Lastly, to excel in link-building, don’t hesitate to monitor the backlink profiles of your competitors. This can help you detect effective strategies and opportunities to use in your off page optimization tactic.
6. User Experience (UX) and SEO
Google never stops repeating that the primary key to success is to focus on a user and put their needs above all. So unsurprisingly, user experience matters for Google when it ranks websites.
It may not be a direct ranking factor, but UX affects your site’s traffic, click-through rate, engagement, and other factors that affect your reputation and rankings. Here are a few pieces of advice on how to increase SEO traffic through fine-tuning UX:
- Refine your site architecture to make it easy to navigate.
- Follow a consistent, hierarchical layout and design to help both users and search engines understand your site better.
- Ensure that your loading speed doesn’t exceed 2.5 seconds, and adjust your site to all Core Web Vitals requirements.
- Ensure absolute responsiveness for mobile users.
7. Local SEO and Hyperlocal Marketing
Local optimization is a pivotal part of SEO meant to help you ensure that you drive both online traffic to your site and foot traffic to your store/office. It is there to help you ensure that you target prospects in your specific area of operation.
To rank even higher and maximize your success, be sure to include the following tactics in your SEO efforts:
- Local optimization – The process of optimizing your site and content to appear in local search results (both in SERPs and on the map) in your region or city. The primary steps include:
- Research and select relevant geo-targeted keywords.
- Claim your Google Business Profile and optimize it with relevant keywords and up-to-date contact details, addresses, and other business info.
- Create dedicated geo-targeted content and landing pages, and optimize your old content with local keywords.
- Create listings on all major and relevant directories, including Facebook, Yelp, Apple Maps, TripAdvisor, etc.
- Gain local mentions, for example, in local news and blogs.
- Manage your customer reviews for greater authority.
- Hyperlocal optimization – This process is very similar to local optimization. The difference is that hyperlocal SEO targets smaller areas like streets, neighborhoods, etc. To nail it, follow all local optimization best practices and additionally, create hyperlocal content using keywords that target narrow areas.
8. Video SEO Strategies
Video optimization takes a deserved place among the latest SEO trends. It’s linked to a number of tangible benefits, such as improved engagement and visibility, broader backlink opportunities, more traffic, and more.
To gain all the benefits, you need to craft high-quality video content that engages and brings value to your target audience. Additionally, you need to use the following optimization best practices:
- Conduct research and choose relevant keywords that have a good reach potential.
- Write a clear but intriguing title using your target query.
- Write smart video descriptions and optimize them with your keywords.
- Add tags that will help index your video correctly and recommend it as related content to other videos.
- Name your video file appropriately, describing its contents and targeting your primary keyword.
- Add captions, transcriptions, and timestamps to help platforms understand and index your videos correctly and to boost user experience.
- Create appealing, descriptive, and engaging thumbnails to encourage more people to click on your video.
9. Monitoring and Analytics
After all your on page and off page SEO efforts, implement an ongoing monitoring and improvement strategy. Careful results tracking is pivotal for success because even if you adhere to all SEO requirements and follow best practices and trends, you should remember that search engine optimization is an ever-changing field. That is, it requires ongoing effort to remain competitive.
To monitor your results, first set up an analytical tool of your choice, for example, Google Analytics, and determine specific metrics that hold the most value to your business (e.g., SEO traffic, conversions, keyword rankings, etc.). Regularly monitor your metrics and make strategic improvements to achieve greater outcomes.
Conclusion
Search engine optimization is something businesses can’t do without in today’s world. With the right SEO activities, you can ensure that your business is easy to notice in SERPs and drive plenty of targeted traffic. In the long run, it can also help you grow brand recognition, loyalty, and sales.
With this guide at hand, you have a complete roadmap to high positions in SERPs. Follow the tips, steps, and SEO innovations we shared with you here to attain your optimization goals!
