Advanced SEO isn’t complicated, it really is all about providing the best experience for the user. It is about being both analytical and creative, implementing industry best practices and finding the right techniques to improve the search visibility, click-through-rate and conversion rate of your website. By applying any of these more advanced strategies below, you will be sure to gain a further boost to the on-site SEO of your website.
Keyword Relevance Not Keyword Stuffing
It is important to understand that to rank well in Google, you need to do more than stuff a landing page full of keywords. In the past, if you didn’t repeat your keyword a certain number of times within the content, Google would struggle to understand what it was about. However, nowadays the search engine is much better at figuring out a page’s topic and can understand it on a deeper level.
Google specifically scans for relevant content on the topic that the landing page covers. This is known as Latent Semantic Indexing, where conceptually related terms are used by search engines to more deeply understand the content on a page. LSI keywords are not synonyms, they are words that frequently occur together, such as “coffee”, “cup”, “bean” and “latte”, although including synonyms within the content of a landing page is also a good idea.
Optimise Your Content for Featured Snippet Results
Featured Snippets are a short snippet of text that appears, usually in a box, at the top of Google’s search results. The content is automatically pulled from the cache of the web page in Google’s index. Featured snippets exist in order to quickly answer a searcher’s query quickly and are often referred to as position 0 in SEO as they appear above the top organic position and ranking here can give your organic click-through-rate a huge boost.
In order to optimise the content on your website for Featured Snippets, you need to include supplementary content such as tables or lists on your landing pages. They were designed to give the user the answer that they were searching for, without the need to click and fall into four categories.
- Unordered Lists – A bullet point list displaying information that doesn’t need to be in any particular order.
- Ordered Lists – For search queries that do need to be presented in a specific order, such as a set of cooking instructions.
- Definition boxes – Short snippets of text designed to give searchers a direct definition or description. Used by Google to answer “what is” queries.
- Tables – Google can display an entire table from your website directly within the search results.
SEO experts Moz analysed over 1.4 million featured snippets and concluded that the optimal length of a featured snippet paragraph is roughly 40 to 50 words or around 300 characters.
Include Schema Markup for Rich Snippet Results
Rich Snippet results are used to display information such as ratings, reviews and events within the search results and are much more eye-catching than standard organic results. Unlike Featured Snippets, Rich snippets are created by adding structured markup to your webpage called Schema.
There are many different types of rich snippet markup including product schema, review schema and FAQ schema. So you will need to identify which ones would be best for your website. Adding structured data to your website will not directly improve the search rankings, but it can help improve the organic click-through-rate.
Use Dynamic URL Parameters to Save Crawl Budget
We have covered the importance of crawl optimisation before and how each website is allocated what is known as a “crawl budget”, which is the number of pages that Googlebot will crawl each time it visits your website. If your crawl budget is used up by pages that don’t matter, it can become a problem for the pages that do, making it much more difficult for Google to find any new pages that you may publish or updates to content that you may have made.
If you have a large website that filters and paginates, by using dynamic URL parameters Google can figure out your URL patterns and will spend less time crawling unimportant pages and more time finding and indexing important content on your website.
If you want to learn more about advanced SEO techniques or if you’re looking for SEO in Essex, then contact Silkstream.
