The Advanced Guide to SEO: How to Level up Your Skills and Results

As time changes, businesses and startups are finding new ways to rule SERPs and get maximum business out of their digital marketing investments.

Whether you’re an aced businessman or an ambitious startup trying to make it big in your industry, you’ve got to believe in the power of SEO.

Why?

Because SEO is not going anywhere! (For the next few decades)

And you must know how to get the maximum benefit from new SEO tactics for winning new customers and maintaining a big chunk of the market share of your industry.

If you’re done with basic SEO strategies and want to skyrocket your small business/startup’s online growth, you’ve got to pay attention at the advanced SEO modules. Because that’s the next level of your company’s growth that sets you as a prime source for the ideal customers seeking your services and searching for your business online.

Come, let’s explore what’s beyond basics and how advanced SEO can unlock the ways to grow and more profit for your business in this brief guide.

Understanding the Fundamentals of SEO

Before we continue discussing advanced SEO for businesses and startups, it is important to revisit the basics. Let me explain the ground rules for SEO’s success that serves as the base for your digital marketing’s sustainable growth.

Keyword Research and Analysis

Keyword research is one of the first steps that you need to take for building the bridge between your startup and your ideal customers. While conducting your keyword research and analysis, you must understand what your customers are typing while seeking a business like yours.

Take Airbnb as an example!

They’re not hotels still they manage to connect with the ideal customers by crafting content a traveler would be searching. For example, Airbnb’s potential customers won’t search for “5-star hotels in the Bahamas” instead, they’d search terms like “homestays” or “travel accommodations” which is more relevant and to the point.

While searching for the right keywords, try to understand what your potential customers would type to reach you (or a service like you).

On-Page Optimization Techniques

Next, in your basic SEO checklist for small businesses or startups is the on-page optimization!

You’d want to optimize selected pages against the keywords your customers would be searching to get maximum visibility in SERPs.

Again, we can use Airbnb as a use case for optimizing service/product pages for maximum SERP visibility. If you visit their website, they optimize the homepage, property listings, and other related elements in a way that they’re in line with the prime objective – maximum visibility in SERPs. From their page title to meta description and content, everything is optimized with the relevant key phrases which enhance their chances to be discovered by their target audience.

Technical SEO for Enhanced Performance

In order to initiate your advanced SEO strategies, there’s one important SEO ritual that you need to perform – the technical SEO of your small business/startup website.

It is important that your technical SEO is done correctly!

Why?

Because if your website doesn’t load in seconds or the web crawlers can’t access some parts of your website, there’s no use in investing in content or targeting relevant keywords.

Take any famous (or say, successful) brand online and you won’t find any delay in their website’s page load time which is only one of the various metrics to evaluate the technical SEO quality. So, get the technical SEO fixed for your website before embarking on a bigger journey – the advanced SEO for your small business or startup.

Mastering Off-Page SEO and Link Building

If you think doing On-Page SEO is enough for your business website, hold on for a minute!

The on-page SEO is one part of your SEO basics and you can’t move further towards the advanced SEO part without completing the off-site SEO.

Let me tell you what is included in your off-page SEO checklist before you can claim to have a strong SEO base for your startup’s website.

Advanced Link Building Strategies

Link building, guest posting, and earning quality links are some of the various lines you’d hear an SEO guy saying whenever this topic is teased.

But what are they and how do they benefit your off-page SEO?

It’s about building quality relationships with other service providers, promoters, or people who talk about the services/products your startup is offering. Off-page is based on the giving and taking rule where you impart your knowledge and get recognition from an authority website’s visitors.

Take HubSpot as an example!

They partner with various authority websites to contribute quality articles, do a collab video, or co-write a publication in hopes of promoting the right knowledge about inbound marketing. And while doing so, they never use any direct selling approach, and still, people deem HubSpot as a trustworthy source that they not only take their courses but also try their CRMs.

That’s the kind of off-page strategy you need to implement for your small business or startup’s website. And to do so, you may utilize various online tools that are created specifically for this particular objective.

Ahref’s Site Explorer and Moz’s Link Explorer are famous for helping you find websites having strong PA & DA that you may consider collaborating with for generating quality links back to your website.

Social Media and SEO Integration

Your SEO strategies would have results but slower if you don’t incorporate social media in your plan!

You must be wondering how social media is important for off-page SEO.

Because without sending the social signal to your main website, you’ll be losing a considerable chunk of online traffic that may’ve potential buyers in them.

You must know what’s being discussed in your target customer’s daily conversations for crafting content that is relevant and answers their current issues. And what better way to track these conversations than tapping into their social media communities?

You must have heard about The North Face, the clothing brand!

They have a strong social media presence and actively engage with their buyers and fans. This strategy, that The North Face uses, allows the brand to send social signals to major search engines for establishing the brand as a service provider people are talking about.

You also need to come up with a social media and SEO integration strategy that benefits your SEO plans in the long run.

Tools like Hootsuite are a good option for not only managing your social media but also tracking comments and user behavior, too.

Leveraging Content Marketing for Advanced SEO Success

Once your basic SEO checklist is completed and you’re all set to start focusing on advanced SEO, it is important that your small business or startup has a content marketing plan ready.

Content marketing plan?

Yes, because content marketing is an integral part of advanced SEO!

Sure, your SEO would need content down the road for your website, blog section, and social media pages. But having a content marketing plan is something bigger than that. A content marketing plan, for advanced SEO, can serve as a strategic approach that companies use for skyrocketing their digital presence and establish themselves as a credible source in the market.

Take Moz as an example!

This SEO software provider is known for having credible content sources such as the Whiteboard Friday videos. They do a piece of blog, video, or podcast on SEO trends each week and they’ve garnered a strong audience on their website by having a strategic content marketing plan. Other than that, their content marketing strategy also includes a community of SEO evangelists, rookies, and pundits having their opinion on different SEO-related queries.

That’s the kind of content marketing plan that you need to develop for your small business or startup in order to benefit from advanced SEO in the long run.

Content Marketing Strategy Creation Tips

If you’re not sure how to incorporate an effective content marketing plan into your advanced SEO, here are some key tips that you may consider:

• Start with advanced keyword research using tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Moz’s Keyword Explorer for identifying long-tail phrases and semantic search opportunities for developing engaging content.
• Don’t just restrict your content to basic answers and go beyond that point by offering in-depth explanations to your visitor for creating a wow experience. Doing so will establish your brand as a credible source of information that they can revisit if they need that piece of information in the future.
• Don’t rely on basic promotion methods but go beyond to explore some unconventional promotional tactics like teaming up with social influencers who talk about the same topics you’re promoting on your website.
• Lastly, you need to analyze how your content is performing and where’s the area of improvement for crafting an excellent experience for your visitors so that they become your promoters.

Local SEO for Small Businesses

Moving forward to the next step in advanced SEO for small businesses and startups, you must pay attention to local SEO.

Why?

Because local SEO can prove a game-changer if your customers live next door, in the same area, or in the suburb from where your business operates. The local SEO best practices can help you increase brand visibility and double the foot traffic to your physical business location.

Suppose, you’re a restaurant that wants to gain more customers and double its profits.

As a restaurant, you must have your Google My Business (GMB) profile completed with accurate information about your time, menu, and photos to show the ambiance. By doing so, whenever someone types restaurants near me, your business would pop up in the searches representing the accurate picture that convinces the customers to try your dishes.

You can also craft localized content to preach about your food offerings, their history, and any trivia that your foodie customers would love to know. These are some of the many possibilities that you can consider while performing local SEO for your small business or startup.

And if you’ve no clue what to do first, or maybe in the middle of your local SEO, here’s a handy list that you may follow:

• Firstly, you need to have a Google My Business profile of your small business/startup where you must give accurate information in order to have more search visibility.
• You may consider creating localized content that people in your surroundings would find relevant and interesting.
• There are various online business listings that you may try to have an account on behalf of your business and increase the possibility to be found by your potential client.
• And while you work on your website’s local SEO, don’t forget to earn local links back to your business website in order to establish your brand as a credible source in local SERPs.

And if you’re not sure how to perform local SEO for your small business or startup, there are various small business SEO service providers who’d gladly do it for you.

Advanced SEO Trends for SMBs & Startups:

There are some more aspects of advanced SEO that you must know in order to benefit from online traffic and get more revenue for your small business or startup. Here are the key ones:

• You must not forget that a large chunk of online users is on mobile so your advanced SEO must include mobile search optimization into the checklist.
• Google considers small details like page load time, interactivity, and visual stability as part of its core web vitals checklist. Do consider working on these aspects of your advanced SEO plan.
• As you move forward with your advanced SEO, voice search optimization should be on your SEO checklist as the majority of users are shifting to voice commands than typing a query by hand.
• While working on your content marketing strategy, you must not forget that user intent optimization that is another important aspect of advanced SEO as it can impact your visitor’s stay time if they find the content highly relatable and valuable.

So, these were some important aspects of advanced SEO that you must try in order to skyrocket the success of your small business or a new startup.