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Advanced SEO techniques, like building deep topic clusters and creating link magnets, can help you win more traffic from organic search.
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Basic SEO skills can take your online store far, but advanced techniques can dramatically boost your traffic and conversions. While fundamental SEO—like setting up Google Search Console and doing keyword research—improves search visibility, advanced strategies help you fine-tune performance for meaningful growth.
Here’s how to use advanced SEO techniques to optimize your site’s performance.
Advanced SEO refers to the tactics you use to improve your website’s search performance after implementing SEO fundamentals like setting up Google Search Console and Google Analytics, checking that your site is indexed, and doing your first tranche of keyword research. Advanced SEO focuses on fine-tuning your content strategy, keyword targeting, and site structure to maximize visibility in search results and drive more high-quality organic traffic.
Advanced SEO includes sophisticated keyword research, in-depth SEO content marketing strategy, targeted link-building, and technical site optimization. Here are 10 advanced SEO tactics to boost your ecommerce website’s performance:
Featured snippets are exactly what they sound like: short excerpts that succinctly answer a searcher’s question, which Google extracts from a top-ranking web page and displays at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs). Earning this prime real estate boosts your site’s visibility and drives more clicks.
Use competitor keyword research to identify your competitors’ featured snippets. First, look at the content—snippets that provide general, vague, or inaccurate information or inadequately answer a user’s search intent. Then, create better content that targets the same keywords using SERP-friendly formats like definitions, tables, and lists to answer questions in less than 60 words.
Also examine the titles—look for instances where a snippet isn’t placed under a targeted heading. Then, target that snippet with your own optimized heading and content combination.
Google also places AI-generated overviews at the top of the SERP. Rather than excerpting one article to give a brief answer, they synthesize multiple top articles into a summary. Citations to the articles that informed the AI summary appear on the right. Appearing in these citations is the next frontier of SEO. Luckily, many strategists believe that visibility in citations follows the same core principles of traditional SEO.
Google prioritizes websites that go deep on specific topics over those that cover many topics superficially. Going deep means building out entire clusters of content that explore different aspects or subtopics of one big idea or theme.
Robust topic clusters position you as an authority on particular subjects and create internal linking opportunities—both of which boost SEO performance. Add relevant internal links to your existing content, and generate a list of topics for future content that build upon existing clusters or form new ones.
Advanced SEO strategists continuously monitor which pages rank successfully and which don’t, then look for improvement. Perform a content audit to identify high- and low-performing pages.
Study high performers for patterns, and implement those patterns across other pages. Focus on pages ranking in positions 5 to 9 on the SERP—these are within striking distance of high performance. Improving these pages could generate meaningful traffic increases. Higher positions typically earn several times more clicks than lower positions.
Also, identify pages getting zero traffic. You may want to consider unpublishing some or all of these—just make sure to set up redirects.
Metadata is information about your website that search engines can read via HTML, including title tags, meta descriptions, and alt text. Add relevant keywords to your metadata and update your title tags to reflect current trends to boost your performance in search results—but don’t misrepresent your content. For example, you can update “Top 10 Toaster Ovens in 2024” to “Top 10 Toaster Ovens in 2025”—but changing dates on outdated content without updating the actual information can damage brand trust.
Merchant listings help ecommerce businesses claim more SERP real estate areas, like Google Shopping. Rich snippets display additional data (such as review score or product price) on SERPs, targeting users ready to buy.
Merchant listings and rich snippets rely on structured data. Follow Google’s step-by-step guide to ecommerce schema markup to target product snippets, merchant listings, or both. Although elements use slightly different data schemes, Google notes that listing-focused data markup typically qualifies pages for product snippets, too.
Google and other search engines constantly adjust their search engine algorithms, SERP formats, and ranking factors. Stay up to date by reading SEO-focused blog content and articles in trade publications and blogs, like Exploding Topics and Search Engine Journal.
Link building improves your site’s authority, but earning quality backlinks requires strategic content creation. Create content that appeals to writers, journalists, and industry sites to earn citations in media coverage or on high-quality websites. Include original or proprietary quantitative data—this is what reputable websites link to when citing your content.
Here’s an example: Say your brand creates bedding using only natural fibers. You might publish a report featuring proprietary survey data that quantifies your customers’ preference for natural versus synthetic fibers. If your report says, “Our customers prefer natural fibers over synthetic options. Switching from poly blend to cotton-modal improved customer satisfaction and reduced return rates,” a journalist might write, “Some businesses report increased customer satisfaction after switching from synthetic materials to natural ones.”
But if your report says, “Our customers prefer natural fibers over synthetic options. Switching from poly-blend to cotton-modal reduced t-shirt return rates by 65% and increased customer satisfaction by 40% among t-shirt shoppers and 15% overall,” a journalist would write, “Many businesses find that customers prefer natural fibers. Ecommerce apparel brand Swagiography saw a 65% reduction in t-shirt return rates and a 40% increase in buyer satisfaction after switching to cotton-modal from poly blend.”
The first option doesn’t require citation—writers determined to substantiate a claim will look elsewhere for specific information. The second option meets this need, and most authoritative sites will include a backlink to your content to validate the source.
You can also monitor current events relevant to your industry to anticipate writer queries, or subscribe to industry mailing lists and offer expertise as a subject-matter expert. Both strategies can increase your odds of earning article citations.
You can use paid search engine advertising as an advanced link-building strategy. Here’s how it works:
1. Identify informational search terms relevant to your business or expertise, prioritizing keywords that require quantitative, historical, or expert-validated answers, such as “percentage of dogs with basic obedience training,” “dog training statistics,” and “dog not eating veterinarian advice.”
2. Run paid search ads targeting these keywords. Search ads appear above organic search results, helping writers, marketers, and journalists find your site.
Getting your site indexed by Google is basic SEO; it helps Google crawl your site and identify key pages. To level up, use a site crawler to spot problems like broken internal links, redirects, or slow page speed.
You can review crawl behavior in Google Search Console’s crawl data report or download your log files (which are auto-generated catalogs of your site’s usage history) and inspect them with a free tool like Screaming Frog Log File Analyser.
Internal link building encourages users to explore your site by sending them to other relevant content. It also improves search engine crawl efficiency by helping crawl bots navigate your site. Here are some best practices:
Link to important pages. Drive readers from blog posts, landing pages, or company news to the most important pages relevant to the referring page content. A blog post titled “How to fix water-damaged loafers” might link to your footwear category page, protective shoe wax, and leather care resource hub, for example.
Link from successful pages. You can also link from high-performing pages to key pages with lower authority scores or poorer search visibility. This strategy helps site users locate these pages and can improve their performance in search engine results.
Optimize anchor text. Anchor text is the word or string of words attached to a hyperlink. Choose concise, descriptive phrases relevant to both the host page and the search intent that the linked page targets. Consider the sentence, “Waterproof leather sealant helps your feet stay dry when the sidewalks aren’t.” “Waterproof leather sealant” is the best anchor text for a company that sells waterproof leather sealant, and “helps your feet stay dry” is the right choice for a brand that sells rain boots.
Advanced SEO focuses on fine-tuning content strategy, keyword targeting, and site structure to maximize search visibility and drive more high-quality organic traffic. It requires more technical and content marketing expertise than basic SEO and can increase the precision and flexibility of your SEO strategy.
Yes. Search generates 68% of all web traffic, and first-page Google results earn 27.6% of clicks for relevant searches. This makes a basic SEO strategy essential for promoting your brand online.
Many ecommerce business owners manage basic SEO for their own sites, and you can self-teach or take online SEO courses to learn more advanced techniques. Choose a website builder with built-in SEO tools and consider consulting an SEO and content strategy expert for guidance.
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