Now that you’ve got the basics down, let me walk you through a handful of advanced SEO tips and techniques.
1. Optimize Your Site for Click-Through-Rate
There’s no doubt about it:
The more people click on your result, the higher you’ll rank.
CTR is a user experience signal that Google is paying more and more attention to.
2. Limit Website Downtime
If your site goes down, users get mad.
As it turns out, Google gets mad too.
In fact, they state that unplanned site outages “can negatively affect a site’s reputation.”
Fortunately, you can easily track site downtime with a tool like Pingdom.
Pingdom pings your site hundreds of times per day.
If it’s down, you’ll get a notification so you can fix the problem ASAP.
3. Delete “Dead Weight” Pages
Google recently said that a huge site with tons of pages can be bad for SEO.
To quote the Google rep (Gary Illyes):
“Narrow it down as much as you can. Don’t create low quality and no value add pages. It’s just not worth it because one thing is that we don’t necessarily want to index those pages. We think that it’s a waste of resources. The other thing is that you just won’t get quality traffic. If you don’t get quality traffic then why are you burning resources on it?”
This is why I make sure that every page on my site is AWESOME.
In fact, Backlinko generates over 205k unique visitors per month…
…despite having only 63 posts:
How is this possible?
It’s because I focus on 100% quality.
Despite the fact that this quality over quantity approach clearly works, I see A LOT of sites struggle with “Dead Weight” pages.
Dead Weight pages like:
- WordPress category and tag pages
- Outdated blog posts
- Duplicate content
- Low-quality blog posts
- Ecommerce product pages with zero sales
- Archive pages
- Thin content/boilerplate content
- Old services pages
And as you just saw, Google said that these Dead Weight pages can hurt your SEO efforts. So, I recommend deleting them.
4. Improve Your Site’s Dwell Time
Dwell Time is another key Google ranking factor.
Google wants to see that people stay on your site.
If people quickly bounce from your page and visit another search result, it tells Google:
“People hate this page!”.
But when people get what they want from your page, they’ll stick around. And Google will take notice:
So:
How can you keep people on your site longer?
5. Update and Relaunch Outdated Content
Do you have old articles on your blog collecting dust?
If so, check this out:
I recently updated and relaunched this post from my blog:
I improved the formatting, added more meaty content, included new screenshots and more.
(Basically, I made the page better)
Then, I relaunched it like it was a new post.
And that simple 1-2 punch increased search engine traffic to that page by 260%:
Nice!
