You have just started your very own online business—what’s next?

If your company relies heavily on the internet to get customers, the first thing that you will need is to get more traffic into your website.

Every business or even the individual wants to rank above Google’s fold. It is a given that ranking at the top of a search engine enables you to be more reachable to your target audience. The way to do this is done, for sure, by optimizing your website and content. Google has more than 200 factors to determine which website to rank one, two and three, etc.

11 Advanced SEO Techniques to Improve Your Search Rankings in 2020

1. Improve User Experience

Different search engines such as Google would like to show the best results to the queries of their users. If the user is satisfied with the websites that came out from their questions, then that user will surely use that search engine again. Search engines determine the overall experience of a user when they click on a webpage that showed up in the results.

If your webpage takes too long to load, users may abandon your site and move on to the next website on the results list. It is, therefore, essential to check your webpage’s loading speed for it to rank high in search engine results.

2. Focus on Schema Instead of Keywords

Search engines are changing their algorithm so that they would give more useful results to user queries. The objective of search engines today is to analyze the intention of users and anticipate what search results would best suit the users’ needs.

Because of this, search engines look for web pages that effectively use Schema SEO instead of just putting a lot of different keywords that do not make sense. Schema markup is a system that will make it easier for search engines to determine what the content of the website is all about.

3. Use Keywords That Matter

Keyword placement in your content is still vital. You must incorporate long-tail keywords in your page title, your URL, meta descriptions, and sub-headers for search engines to determine its rank. However, the frequency of your keyword use is no longer critical. There is no longer a need for you to repeat a keyword more than four times in the body of your content. Keyword placement will always trump keyword density.

4. Update Your Website’s Content

Your website should have new content uploaded regularly. Even if you are selling products and services, your website must also contain useful information that may help your customers concerning the products and services that you are offering. When your site always has new content, your website’s visitors will frequent your page in search of information.

Some webmasters will tell you that one of the best network marketing secrets is to use a lot of keywords that are most commonly used by people on their searches. Using a program such as WordTracker will let people know a keyword’s frequency of use.

Several SEO marketers will tell you that using a keyword frequently within a website through the website’s articles is the right way of increasing your website’s rank concerning that specified keyword. For example, if your web-based business is into selling hardware items, then uploading articles that contain a lot of keywords relating to hardware items will increase your website’s rank.

On the other hand, some SEO marketers will suggest that it is not in the number of keywords in the articles that count but rather on the quality of the material itself concerning its content. They say that too much use of a keyword within an article will make the article sound dumb and poorly-constructed. They believe that people will want to read articles that are read-worthy and full of useful information about a specific niche that they are interested in. Your company website should develop customers that will want to go back to your site from time to time to see if there are new updates on your page.

5. Establish YouTube SEO

When you enter queries into search engines, you may find different YouTube videos among the top ten results of your question. Take advantage of how YouTube videos always appear among the top results by creating your own YouTube video containing information about your business, your products and services, and your branding. However, it is not enough to record a video and upload the video to YouTube.

Remember that YouTube is also a search engine, and according to Forbes, YouTube is the 2nd most popular search engine behind Google. Your YouTube Video should also undergo a search engine optimization process for it to rank high in YouTube results pages. Some techniques to rank your videos high is to make your video title SEO-friendly. You should also provide a transcript of your YouTube video so that both YouTube and Google can understand every word of your video.

Embedding your video content into your text-based websites will also give your site a lot of opportunities to be noticed by both YouTube and Google users. You should follow the same SEO techniques to your YouTube videos as you would implement on your webpage or blog posts.

6. Establish Voice Search Optimization

More and more people are taking advantage of the voice search features of their smart devices to search for websites. It would be best if you made your website searchable by voice so that your site will not be left out once voice searching reaches its peak. One way for your website to rank high through voice search results is to include questions and answers in your content.

Voice searchers do not use the same algorithms as text searchers. People who use voice searches usually as complete questions rather than phrases such as “What do ferrets eat?” as compared to “ferret food.” Your website contents need to have a lot of question phrases or long-tail keywords so that it will rank high in voice searchers’ results. Use schema SEO structured data on your webpage and build your content around that structured data. Search engines such as Google will most likely pick a webpage that already contains the question and the answer.

7. Optimize the Technical Aspects of Your Website

Setting the SEO for content management aside, it is also essential to make sure that the technical aspects related to running your website are optimized. Search engines do not want to give their users web pages that have a lot of glitches. It would help if you got your technical search engine optimization for your webpage to rank higher in Google search results. You can avoid glitches on your webpage by switching to a more secure connection by using HTTPS rather than the old HTTP web protocol. Another way of optimizing your webpage is by allowing it to be accessed by mobile phones by enabling Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP. A mobile-friendly website will make it easier for users to access your website on whatever screens they are using.

8. Target Local SEO

If you have a brick-and-mortar store, you should also use SEO to target your local market. Most searches on Google are from people looking for local information, while 97 percent of searchers use Google to find local businesses. Optimize your search engine results by adding geo-centric keywords to your web content. For example, if you are looking for an SEO agency in Sydney, you will have to use a geocentric keyword, also you will have to add local business schema and make sure that you are optimizing your page according to the location.

9. Develop a Strong Social Media Presence

Do not just rely on SEO to make your website gain a lot of traffic. It would help if you also considered developing a strong social media presence. Create a social media page for your business and actively engage your followers by answering their questions or regularly giving them feedback.

10. Take care of analytics

You should also monitor the performance of your website to see if all the things that you have done on your site are working effectively. You may use the different performance indicators to determine what else can be done to make your website generate high traffic so that your online business will become successful. A successful SEO audit of your website will help you understand where your site is currently at and what you need to do.

11. Build Links

Backlinks have been essential to the SEO world before, and they will still be relevant today. Google and other search engines always give priority in determining search ranking by looking at web pages that have a lot of links. However, it would help if you remembered that you should be careful in putting links to your webpage. Low-quality links on your webpage may harm your site, making it rank lower. On the other hand, having links to trusted websites with high-quality content and high domain authority will establish your website as effective and safe, therefore making you rank higher. Search engines equate quality backlinks to reliability.

The number one factor that affects ranking is backlinks.

Let’s delve deeper into this ranking factor…

What Are Backlinks and Why They’re So Important for SEO?

Backlinks—aka “external links” or “inbound links” are incoming links to your own webpage. They’re links from websites to another one. These links point back to you, so search engines consider each of these links votes for your content and website. Websites that link to yours basically tell search engines that you have good stuff.

What Is Backlink?

The benefits of using backlinks can be summarized in the following points:

• Improving Organic Ranking: Backlinks increase your chance of getting better search engine rankings as your content will naturally rank higher.
• Steady Referral Traffic: When you add your webpage link on a comment or even place it on some other domain, there are high possibilities of you getting the referral traffic/visitors to your website from there. So, backlinks can help you grab the referral traffic.
• Getting Faster Indexing: Backlinks help search engine bots to discover links to your website and crawl it effectively. This is crucial especially for a new website, as they help in the faster discovery and indexing of your site.
• Jump in Metrics: The quality backlinks will not only enhance the referral traffic but also the ranking metrics too (e.g. DA, PA, TF, CF, etc). and this will definitely be going to work for you.
• Boosting Branding and Authority: The use of quality backlinks helps you to raise the authority degree, as well as gives branding your website. This, in turn, leads to providing you with some sponsored posts from some big brand names in your niche. So, this increases the opportunity to earn more by just writing sponsored posts on your site.

How to Get High-Quality Backlinks?

Getting high-quality backlinks can be challenging, especially if you are in a boring niche or starting a new business and no one knows who you are. But actually, you don’t need to be famous to build backlinks. There are some smart techniques, ethical strategies and SEO tools you can use to build high-quality backlinks without getting spammed by other sites. Here is how according to Neil Patel:

1. Content:

Always put in your mind that, in SEO, if “Content is the King” then “Backlink is the Queen”. No one will link to you if you don’t have content worth linking to. That’s why you must start your backlinking strategy by crafting great content. But how to do this?

Start with analyzing your competitors. (Type key keywords of the topic you’re looking to target into Google Search. Ignore the paid results and check some of the top organic results. Look at some different factors such as title, images, word count, title tag and meta description. Follow up with these techniques in your own article and do everything better. Then, publish that piece of content on your website and other good sites, too such as Medium, Quora, LinkedIn, etc.

2. Infographic

Half of the human brain is involved in visual processing. That’s why people love infographics and content marketing, in turn. Infographics are visual and easy to scan. In 2018, nearly 7 out in 10 of B2C marketers have increased their use of visual content. A study also revealed that colors increase readers’ attention spans and recall by 82%, gain readership by 80% and make an impression that is 39% more memorable. This reflects how people love infographics.

So, you need to create an infographic for your website and this method helps you achieve success at multiple levels.

3. Comments

Commenting on other pieces of content is also a great way to start building backlinks. But remember that the comment should be written for the primary purpose of building a relationship with the author.

4. Testimonials/Reviews

Posting reviews or testimonials for other products or services within your industry is also a simple way to generate backlinks and improve your website’s ranking.

5. Social Signals

Aligning social signals is a must because they tell search engines how active and updated your website is. If you’re not able to be active on every single social media platform, then choose one or two that you can keep up with. A 2016 study showed that there’s a significant correlation between social network presence and rankings.

The Correlation Between Social Network Presence and Better Rankings

6. Original Data

While conducting an original study seems like a massive amount of work, it still a great way to generate backlinks. Marketers and business owners are thirsts for insights. If you have data that no one else has, that makes you a valuable resource. As a result, other writers and content creators will share your unique data or link their content with its original source (which is yours).

How Do You Identify If a Backlink Is High-Quality or Low-Quality?

All SEOs understand that quality backlinks are essential for their sites but some aren’t aware of the danger of bad or low-quality backlinks. Bad backlinks are links from spammy domains, low-quality online directories, private blog networks, etc. Such backlinks can destroy your SEO metrics, kill your rankings and even turns Google’s table on you.

Without any further ado, Backlinko identified the key 5 traits to differentiate between high-quality or low-quality backlinks.

1. High-quality backlinks come from trusted, authoritative websites.
2. High-quality backlinks should include your target keyword in the link’s anchor text (anchor text is the visible text part of a link).
3. The site (and page) linking to you is topically related to your site.
4. The link you use should be a “do-follow” link.
5. The link should be from a domain that hasn’t linked to you before.

What Is the Anchor Text?

What’s Nofollow Tag/Link?

The more links that your website has, the higher you’re gonna rank. But it’s important to keep in mind that “quality trumps quantity”. Always check the content whether it is quality and genuine content or not. Remember, building relationships is the cornerstone of building backlinks.

Wrapping Up

Having a website to give your business an online presence is not enough. SEO has been in existence for a long time and has helped a lot of businesses to get a lot of traffic to their websites. However, the digital industry is dynamic. What was effective before in terms of SEO techniques may not be as effective today.

To maintain your business’s strong digital presence, make sure to apply the above-mentioned SEO techniques to keep your web page ranking high.