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It is important to understand and use SEO effectively to increase search traffic and brand awareness. Millions of people right now are looking for content just like yours. You will be able to help them by being an SEO expert.

80% of a website’s traffic starts with a search query. This is why search engine optimization is so important. However, to stay on top of your SEO game will take a lot of research, trial, and errors. Google algorithms are constantly updated. Thus, you have to stay tuned to the latest updates.

Keeping this in mind, let’s get started with the 17 advanced SEO strategies that will help in increasing search traffic in 2020.

1. Ranking for ‘Journalist Keywords’

So what are Journalist Keywords? These are the terms that journalists use to search for something. These keywords are a great way to build backlinks. A journalist needs specific stats for their articles and they Google it.

Using terms like “average” or “median” with phrases like ‘daily-users’ or ‘page-speed’ increases the chances of the website getting ranked on Google. For instance, the complete phrase becomes, ‘average daily users’ or ‘average page speed’.

2. Use animated images to reduce bounce rate

It is important to make your audience stay on your website. The best way to do it is to use high-resolution animated images. Animated images stop people from skimming. They read more content and spend more time on your site.

3. Creating content hubs

28% of the organic traffic from backlinks comes from content hubs. Content hubs are kind of a mini Wikipedia on a topic. A content hub is a forum where website visitors will be able to find a lot of branded, curated, social media, user-generated, or any type of content regarding any topic. It is smaller than a website and bigger than a blog. Here is an example of a content hub from American Express. Their content hub is known as OPENforum.

4. Target comparison keywords

Comparison keywords are those that compare different things. These are like the following;

• Content marketing vs. SEO
• iPhone vs. Android
• Webflow vs. WordPress

Comparison keywords help people in deciding between two options and they don’t have much competition. So they rank well. If you can create content optimized with “You vs Competitor” with comparison keywords, it will be helpful.

5. Using dynamic parameters for pagination

This is a technical aspect of SEO. Sometimes it takes a lot of time to get a new page indexed. Google spiders take forever to crawl a new page. A simple trick is to change the new page address from this:

https://xyz.com/business-topics/page/2

To this

https://xyz.com/business-topics?page=2

This is a new format to get a new page indexed in Google to figure out the paginated page URL patterns. It makes Google find new pages instead of recrawling the old pages.

6. Backlinks with podcasts

At present, podcasts are the new guest posts and in some ways better than them. To create a guest post, you have to find a site, pitch them, write a draft, edit them, and then get published. But, for a podcast, all you need is to show up. That’s it. Going to podcasts is the best link building strategy used for backlinking. Make sure you pitch for the audience with a specific thing to offer. Audio quality should be good and start by creating small podcasts.

7. Create a content alliance

Creating a content alliance is when you team up with other businesses, their website, blogs, or YouTube channel on content. You can partner with someone that has got the data you need and promoting them on your website in exchange. You can also partner by sharing your content/data to them.

8. Maximizing the SERP real estate

The #1 search result in Google gets 32% organic clicks. There is another way to get more clicks from SERPs – using the SERP real-estate. The SERP real-estate is how many pixels you can control on Google’s first page.

The more pixels you can control, the more traffic you will be able to get from the keyword. For instance, getting ranked in a featured snippet will put you on the top of the page also; it will triple the SERP real estate for the keyword.

You can take up more SERP real estate by using medium articles, guest posts, YouTube videos, featured snippets, rich snippets, and top stories.

9. Embed original images into the content

High-quality content makes your image better. This helps in improving search engine rankings. But duplicate images (stock photos) can hurt your page rankings. This is why it is better to use original images as much as possible.

If you have original images, people might start to use your images in their blog posts and give your website link as the source. This increases traffic.

10. Optimize content for keyword relevance

On-page SEO is not only about keyword stuffing. Google wants to see relevant content on a certain topic. To give Google a signal that you have relevant content on a topic, you have to use Latent Semantic Indexing keywords. These are conceptually related terms that the search engines use for understanding content on a webpage.

Thus, when you use a lot of LSI keywords you confirm to Google that your page is relevant for a certain query. This will give you a better ranking for your target keyword. A simple way to do this is to create in-depth content where you will automatically use the LSI keywords.

11. Create a comments section on the blog

Comments can help SEO in three ways;

Firstly, the comments work as the direct ranking factor.

Secondly, they offer more stuff to users to read.

Finally, Google crawls the comments section. Thus, it works as an important segment to get ranked and indexed.

12. Uncover the “people also ask” keywords

41% of all the Google search results comprise a “people also ask” section. This is why it is important to optimize them as well. The only factor is, you have to find these questions. You can use a free tool called “people also ask”. This tool scrapes these questions once you put in the keywords.

13. Adding content features to the page is helpful

Content features include calculators, comparison charts, feature breakdowns, a bullet list of pros and cons, summaries, and quote boxes. These are the things that you add to your content to make it much more valuable and informative. Content features will directly or indirectly improve Google rankings.

14. Publish topic + year content

Topic + year content are the blog posts that cover the primary trends happening around a given topic. For instance when you optimize a post using keywords like “top SEO strategies 2020”, it gets a competitive edge. Because SEO is an extremely competitive keyword, but when you add 2020 to it, Google recognizes it as trending.

This is not the same as adding “2020” at the end of a title tag. If you add 2020 at the end of a title, the whole content has to be based on the SEO trends of 2020.

15. Backlinks from unlinked brands

Unlinked brand mentions are the mentions in blog posts and news articles that don’t link to your website. You can email the person that mentioned your brand and ask them to add a link to your website. It has a great conversion rate.

16. Optimize for Google Discover

This is just like the social media newsfeed of Google. The only difference is, instead of featuring posts from the people you follow, Google will show high-quality content that they think you like. Using high-quality images is an optimization technique for Google Discover. Apart from that, create fresh content on popular topics, engage on twitter, and use graphs.

17. Find out the low-competition keywords from Reddit

An easy way to do this is to pop a subreddit into the SEMrush or Ahrefs. Check out all the keywords in that subreddit and that’s it. You have a list of low-competition keywords. You will also find a lot of junk keywords. This is why you can use a quick CPC filter to get good keywords.

Here are the top 17 SEO strategies that work perfectly in digital marketing to increase the search traffic. So which ones are you going to try first? Share your thoughts with Skyram Technologies in the comments section.