advanced seo tips to improve your website ranking
BY ALEXIS SCHROEDER
This is a follow-up to 'Actionable Tips for Boosting Squarespace Website’s SEO’ and ‘Common SEO Mistakes To Avoid’ and offers advanced steps you can take to get more organic traffic to your site.
In this guide, we’ll go over advanced SEO tips like deleting thin content, finding long-tail keywords, properly filling out your “About” page, reducing page load times, and backlinking.
Here’s a list of advanced SEO tips you can use today to improve your website ranking:
1. Delete thin content
Thin content in SEO refers to content that lacks valuable information for visitors. This kind of content sends a bad signal to search engines like Google because search engines prioritize sites that deliver high-quality relevant information to visitors.
There are a few ways you can find thin content including:
Looking for posts under 500 words and checking if you thoroughly covered the topic
Ask yourself if the content is relevant to your audience (for example: you have a recipe blog but share content on how to teach a dog fetch)
Checking to see which content has a high bounce rate (typically over 70%)
Knowing your blog post bounce rate is important for several reasons. Bounce rate is a metric used in Analytics to measure the percentage of visitors that leave your website after viewing only one page. You can find your website’s bounce rate by checking Squarespace Analytics or Google Analytics.
To find your bounce rate in Squarespace Analytics, open Analytics, click on Traffic, and then click on Behavior or Site Content. Here you’ll find the bounce rate metric. Focus on pages or blog posts getting a bounce rate of over 70%.
Now that you know which content to fix, here’s a list of ways you can improve your content:
Include images, videos, or infographics to enrich the content
Use subheadings, bullet points, and short paragraphs
Add internal links to other relevant posts on your site to keep readers engaged
Include thorough and detailed information, data, statistics, case studies, etc.
Include call-to-actions to your email list, courses, services, and related blog posts
2. Find long-tail keywords
A long-tail keyword is a specific phrase that people search which might have a lower search volume, but higher conversion rates. An example of this is “best eco-friendly baby shower gifts for new moms”.
Using long-tail keywords on your website is especially helpful if your target keyword is highly competitive. For example, targeting a keyword like “camera” is a lot easier when the keyword is something like “best budget camera for photography”.
There are many ways to find long-tail keywords, including:
Use keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, and related SEO tools, but keep in mind many of these charge a fee to use
Googling your target keyword and seeing what else comes up (example: I typed in “best camera” on Google and got many suggested autocompletes like best camera for photography, best camera for vlogging, best camera for beginners).
To get super technical, you can also analyze the keywords your competitors are ranking for, which you can learn how to do here
3. Properly fill out the “about me” page
Many people often skip out properly filling out their “About Me” page, assuming it’s not worth the hassle. As Google has changed over the years, we’re now learning how important experience and authority are for ranking on Google. Your “About Me” page is a quick and easy way to show authority in your niche.
An informative “About Me” page tells your readers why they should trust your products, services, and website. This page also gives you a chance to use your targeted keywords naturally.
What to include in your “About Me” Page:
Internal links to other important pages and posts on your site
Feature customer reviews, testimonials, and case studies to increase your credibility and trust
Clearly state who you are, what your website is about, and why you’re someone they should listen to (for example: you’re a fitness blog and have credentials like personal training certifications, exercise science degree, or a physical therapist, etc.)
Add a call-to-action to guide users to other parts of your site like the most popular blog posts, services, or products
Here are some great examples of well-done “About Me” Pages:
4. Reduce page load times
Have you ever been on a slow website with a ton of pop-ups, and is hard to navigate? If you have, you’ve likely clicked out of the website immediately and navigated to a different website. This is why it’s so important to reduce page load times and make the experience on your website as efficient as possible.
Here’s a list of things you can do to reduce page load times:
Minimize the use of custom code and snippets as this can slow down your website (also, Squarespace cannot support custom code if you run into a problem)
Compress images and minimize the use of GIFs, ads, pop-ups, and videos
Use no more than 2 fonts on your website and use web-safe fonts, which are fonts most browsers recognize (examples include Arial, Courier New, Georgia, Times New Roman, and Verdana)
Use Google PageSpeed Insights to get recommendations from Google on how to improve your site’s speed. Enter your website’s URL and once the analysis is done, you’ll get a score out of 100 for both desktop and mobile versions of your website. The most common suggestions from Google include things like leveraging browser caching, optimizing images, and reducing service response time.
Below the score, you’ll get recommendations and suggestions for improving your site’s speed. These recommendations can get very technical, which is why I recommend reaching out to Squarespace for specific support.
You can also try fixing things yourself with Google’s help. For example, I typed in a popular website, and “minimize main-thread work” came up as a recommendation. I have no idea what that means, but right below this recommendation, Google has a “Learn how to minimize main-thread work” guide with a link.
5. Backlinking
Backlinking is the process of getting links from other sites to your own. You can think of this as “votes” from other websites. High-quality backlinks can lead to ranking better in search results. This is because every backlink is telling Google, “This content is valuable and recommended”.
For example, when I shared links to “About Me” pages that I recommend, that qualifies as a backlink. You can also get backlinks by:
Guest posting on a website
Creating the best content out there, which will likely get you backlinked from other sites
Make guides or infographics and reach out to websites and let them know about your resource and ask to collab
Look for broken links on websites and let the owner of the site know about the broken link and provide your link that would fit in the article.
Sign up for HARO (known as Help A Reporter Out), a service that connects reports with authority figures to be a source in articles
The best kind of backlinks you can get come from high-authoritative websites. This includes sites like Forbes, Business Insider, Yahoo, The Huffington Post, etc. Those sites can be difficult to get backlinks from, so also try getting backlinks from highly authoritative sites in your niche. For example, if you’re a recipe blogger, you could try getting a backlink from well-known recipe bloggers.
Implementing these advanced SEO techniques will not only help improve your site’s ranking but also boost your site’s visibility and performance. Checking your past content and making sure it’s relevant and up-to-date is a task you should do regularly. This will ensure your site is staying relevant and authoritative.
thin content: thin content in seo refers to content that lacks valuable information for visitors. thin content sends a bad signal to search engines because search engines prioritize sites that deliver high quality, relevant information to visitors.
long tail keyword: a long-tail keyword is a specific phrase that people search which might have a lower search volume, but higher conversion rates. An example of this is “best eco-friendly baby shower gifts for new moms.”
backlinking: backlinkin is the process of getting links from other sites to your own. you can of this as “votes” from other websites. high quality backlinks can lead to ranking better in search results
About the Author
Alexis Schroeder is a freelance writer in the blogging and SEO industry. In college, she started a personal finance blog while paying off debt, and worked several different side hustles to make money. Now she teaches others how to build their blog from scratch and rank on Google.
