17 advanced SEO strategies for 2020

This is a list of 17 advanced SEO strategies, techniques and tactics.

In fact, these strategies have helped my site bring in 350,973 visitors per month from Google.

Backlinko monthly organic traffic
So if you’re sick of reading the same old beginners stuff (“create great content!”), you’ll really enjoy this list.

1. Rank for “Journalist Keywords”
2. Use Animated Images to Improve Time On Site
3. Create Content Hubs
4. Target Comparison Keywords
5. Use Dynamic Parameters for Pagination
6. Build Backlinks With Podcasts
7. Forge a Content Alliance
8. Maximize SERP Real Estate
9. Embed Original Images In Your Content
10. Optimize Your Content For Keyword Relevance
11. Create a Comments Section On Your Blog
12. Uncover People Also Ask Keywords
13. Add “Content Features” To Your Page
14. Publish Topic + Year Content
15. Get Backlinks From Unlinked Brand Mentions
16. Optimize for Google Discover
17. Find Low-Competition Keywords From Reddit
Bonus Strategy #1: Visualize Your Sitemap
Bonus Strategy #2: Find Hidden Terms With Google Keyword Planner

Searches are becoming more complicated, more specific, and longer.

When people turn to Google for help with something, their search is often written in the form of a question.

They might ask when a new album is being released, the name of an actor they saw in a movie or how to use a tool or product.

Whatever the search query, these are examples of the rise of question keywords.

People are always going to ask Google questions. And these keywords will only become more common as voice search becomes more popular.

Ready to help your clients find and target question keywords?

Let’s go.

Question Keywords & Semantic Search
So, what are question keywords?

Well it’s pretty obvious, but in case you need a definition:

Question keywords are used when a person types a complete and specific question into Google.

For example, instead of using a general keyword like “Diabetes”, a question keyword would be “how do I know if I have diabetes?”.

You might be wondering why question keywords are important?

Ever since their Hummingbird update, Google wants to show more relevant and helpful results to their users. This personalized approach uses what Google calls “semantic search”.

You convince yourself you just need an example or something to model your post after. That’s all! You click over to [insert name of any high DA, beautifully designed website that ranks for everything] for some inspiration and notice that in the past hour they’ve posted seven original blog posts. All in a different format. How do they make it seem so easy?

Blog writing is a skill that takes time and practice. Whether you’re a digital marketer working with an established brand or an entrepreneur trying to create an online presence, a well-crafted blog post can increase your visibility.

To help you save hours of aimless writing, we’ve created eight blog post templates to guide your content. While some of these are created with SEO optimization in mind, other templates are geared toward building your voice as a thought leader.

Regardless of your goal, these post structures have been proven to drive results. We’ve created how-to posts that gain 3,000+ monthly visitors, infographic posts that earn 65+ links, list posts that rank page one earning a $2.5k monthly value and the list goes on. Read through to find how to choose the right type of post for your topic and how to properly structure it so you can generate similar results.

graphic that explains how to choose the structure of a post

How to Choose the Right Post Type
Some topics have a clear post-type while others can be more of a gray area.

Once you’ve landed on a topic idea, you’ll want to look to Google to see what types of posts are ranking. Not only will this give you an idea of what’s needed to rank, but you’ll get a better understanding of user intent.

I’ve found myself in this position all too often. Going through the motions of business as usual without getting a good sense of the value of my work or being strategic about it.

In this article you’ll learn how to build a case to give yourself some strategy time by showing the long term value of it, and how to maximise the benefits of keyword mapping in your SEO strategy.

What is keyword mapping and why does it matter?
Keyword mapping is the process of pairing your target keywords to their goal landing pages.

The main benefits of keyword mapping are:

An informed internal linking strategy
Easily measuring the effectiveness of your SEO efforts
More persuasive reporting
Being able to notice and react quickly when things aren’t going well
So what are we looking to achieve? Ranking with the right pages for the right keywords at the bottom of the funnel.

A step-by-step guide to keyword mapping
Now that we know why we want to do this exercise and what we’re looking to achieve, let’s look at the “how”.

Use this guide as an orientation. Depending on the maturity of your site and your SEO efforts on it so far, some steps might not make sense to you.

Earlier this week we asked our Twitter followers what they think happened to organic traffic when we added a 2-step email signup component to pages.

Almost 64% of those who answered thought this change would have no detectable impact on organic traffic while almost 32% thought this would result in a negative impact to SEO.

Well, majority of the guesses were incorrect. In fact, this particular test resulted in a negative impact to SEO (and conversion rates). Read on to learn more!

The Case Study
Email is a powerful marketing channel, but there can be trade-offs between different approaches toward capturing users’ email addresses and permissions. In our latest case study, we explore how one approach to email capturing impacted SEO.

We tested adding a signup component that involved two steps: it appeared at the bottom of the page, encouraging users to sign up for email updates. Once clicked, it expanded to a larger component and centered itself in the middle of the page so that users could input their email address. Our goal was to begin capturing email addresses on these pages without obscuring the whole page with an immediate overlay.

We tested this change full funnel and hoped that by only showing the larger email capture pop-up to those users that had already indicated they were happy to submit their email, we would avoid negative impacts on users who didn’t want to subscribe. Below are examples of how the 2-step component appeared on both desktop and mobile devices.

This week we asked our Twitter followers what they thought happened when we added a confidence banner to a travel client’s website (this test was run pre-COVID). The test was a full funnel experiment, so we measured the impact on user metrics (conversion rate and bounce rate) and on organic traffic.

We asked our Twitter followers what they thought the impact of this test was on organic traffic, 37% guessed positive impact, 17% guessed negative impact, 46% guessed no detectable impact.We asked our twitter followers what they thought the impact on conversions was for this test, 68% guessed a positive impact, 12% guessed a negative impact, 20% guessed it had no detectable impact.
The consensus from our followers was that this experiment had no detectable impact on organic traffic and was positive for conversion rate. This was partly correct – this test was positive for both organic traffic and conversion rate. Read below for the full case study:

The Case Study
Can trust signals impact SEO performance? That’s what our client set out to answer with this test. Our client tested adding confidence messaging below their search bar and measured the impact on user metrics (conversion rate and bounce rate) at the same time as measuring the impact on organic traffic. They tested this on three different domains, Spain, Russia and France.

Mockup of changes to the page where confidence message was added saying: ‘No hidden fees’, among other benefits.Mockup of changes to the page where confidence message was added saying: ‘No hidden fees’, among other benefits.
In our previous case study, testing page layout changes, we shared a test where moving the search widget on a travel client’s page had a negative impact on organic traffic. This case study of ours is one of many that we believe support the increasing importance of user signals for rankings.

In addition to user signals, many in the industry argue that the August 2018 core algorithm update placed further importance on E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness), especially for Your Money Your Life (YMYL) websites.

In this week’s #SPQuiz, we asked our Twitter followers what they thought the outcome in organic traffic was when we added a new keyword to the H1 of a customer’s product pages.

Here’s what people thought:

The majority of our followers believe adding additional keywords to the H1 would positively impact traffic. In contrast, almost 30% and 7% believe this change would either not have a noticeable impact or have a negative impact on organic traffic, respectively.

In this case, the majority were correct…sort of – read the full case study below!

The Case Study
The H1 is one of the oldest known ways to improve relevancy as H1s are used to highlight the page’s main topic, contributing to the overall user experience. While the H1 has been standard in SEO best practice for years, its significance as a ranking factor has often been questioned and debated.

In early 2020, Google’s John Mueller took time to explain Google uses headings to understand page content better, and that this can result in ranking improvements, or in ranking for new searches.

We decided to experiment with the H1 of a customer’s website to see if it would allow Google to improve our rankings for a broader set of keywords. We ran this experiment with an ecommerce company that offers customizable products by adding the keyword “Custom” to the front of the H1 of the product pages. Note: “custom” already appeared elsewhere on the page, in the title, and in other headings.

FAQ schema is a form of structured markup that can get rich snippets in search results. It was released in 2019 and allows web pages to mark up FAQ content on their web pages so that it appears for users in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). When implemented, it can transform your web page’s search result to look like this:

Example of FAQ rich snippet

Not only can these rich snippets readily provide informative content to users, they also created quite a buzz in the industry when SEOs discovered they could be used to take up more real estate on the SERP, pushing competitors further down the page.

In August last year we shared our first case studies from testing FAQ schema, where we reported that we had seen uplifts in organic traffic ranging from 3% to 8% despite the concerns of ourselves and others that this new search feature was going to negatively impact organic click-through-rates.

They were exciting results, but a lot has changed since then. First, since we published that case study Google made some changes to FAQ schema implementation. Gone are the days where you can go wild on the SERP with price, and review, and FAQ schema and get rich snippets for all of them. Today, aside from some rare edge cases, Google only allows you to have either price and review snippets or FAQ snippets:

FAQ Only

This week, we asked our Twitter followers what they thought happened to the organic traffic of pages when we replaced microdata markup with the equivalent JSON-LD structured data.

This was what they thought:

Twitter poll showing 61% of voters believing that the test had no detectable impact on organic traffic, 33% thought this change had a positive impact, 5% thought negative impact
It turns out those 61% of people were correct! This change had no measurable impact on organic traffic, despite JSON-LD being Google’s preferred way of adding structured data to a page.

The Case Study
We have run hundreds of tests implementing different schema to win various rich snippets over the years. While there’s never a universal answer for every website on whether a specific type of schema will improve organic traffic or not, implementing schema to win rich snippets generally generates good results for organic traffic.

From review schema to win review star snippets, to FAQ schema to soak up real estate on the SERP, we can generally accept that the rich results produced from schema implementation benefit users and improve organic click-through-rates.

Yet, there’s not one universal way to mark up data on your website. On schema.org, a collection of shared vocabularies for data markup understood by the major search engines. There are two widely used formats for structured data: microdata and JSON-LD.

With JSON-LD, a JavaScript object is inserted into the HTML of your page to define data, whereas microdata uses HTML tags and attributes to define data. In its structured data guidelines, Google states that it recommends JSON-LD over microdata for web content.

So we know that Google prefers JSON-LD, but does that preference translate to improved organic traffic if we change our structured data markup from microdata to JSON-LD? That was the question we sought to answer for this test.

The test was run on a client’s website in the travel sector (in January 2020, before any traffic drops related to the COVID-19 pandemic). The client in question had various schema on its website implemented with microdata. This included breadcrumb, review, and offer schema.

We didn’t change any of the schema other than removing all the microdata tags and attributes, and instead inserting script elements containing JSON-LD objects after the opening body tag.

Unique challenges for B2B SaaS companies
1) Let’s be honest, most SaaS look the same.
2) Bro, that’s SUPER niche
3) Where’s the blog?
4) Booooring.
Write great content
Link building strategies that work for SaaS

Our SaaS link building playbook – the only strategy you need

Step #0 – Identify what you have to work with

Step #1 – How to build links to your home page
Step #2 – How to build links to your linkable assets

Step #3 – How to build links to your “quick win” pages

Step #4 – How to build links to your main landing pages
Whether you are a new or established SaaS company, you are probably already creating a ton of amazing, jaw-dropping content.

I’m guessing your blog is filled with articles like:

The ultimate guide to X and Y, the top X tools, how to do X, the top X statistics for 2021, etc.

Everyone talks about creating great content and how this will land you amazing backlinks naturally with time, right?

After working with SaaS companies for the past 2 years though, I’ve noticed a pattern…

Backlinks for SaaS companies very rarely come naturally. Especially cause everybody and their mom are starting a SaaS company in 2021.

No matter the niche, you are most likely going to have to manually build backlinks to your SaaS company to get your amazing content seen and consumed to eventually acquire new customers.

In this article, I won’t talk about specific techniques or tactics (plenty of that already online).

What I will do is give you the general frameworks that we at Growth Gorilla use to find link opportunities and ideas for SaaS companies based on what your target pages are.