8 Advanced SEO Strategies For 2024 and Beyond

SEO is ever-changing. As a marketer, the SEO tactics you used last year may be less effective this year and beyond.

I see so many SEO professionals falling behind because they’re not keeping up with the latest changes.

Things like quality keyword research and building backlinks are still important. But that’s not what we’re going to prioritize in this guide. This post assumes that you already have a basic understanding of SEO and common SEO practices.

Based on that knowledge, you can apply these advanced SEO tactics to rank higher and generate more traffic in 2024.

1. Focus on Author Authority

We know that Google’s algorithm is advanced. But it’s now so advanced that it wants to make sure that content is being written by real people and it’s produced for real audiences.

This is even more important with such a recent rise in auto-generated content being pushed out.

To appease both Google and your site visitors, make sure you put a stronger emphasis on author authority in your blog content. Here are a few quick action items that you can start applying right away on your posts:

• Add Author Bios: This can just be a short paragraph or two about the writer. Instead of focusing on their hometown or hobbies, the bio should include relevant information on why they’re an expert in a particular subject.
• Link to the Author’s Social Profiles: These links help show Google that the authors are actually real people who possess real industry knowledge.
• Create Full Author Pages: The short bios should link out to the author’s page on your site. The author page can include a longer bio, as well as all blogs that were published by that person.

Here’s a good example of an author bio on WordStream:

Even if all of your content is getting published by a single in-house or outsourced writer, you can still apply these concepts. For example, certain technical-angled posts can be written as your CTO. Those should have a completely different angle and distinguished voice from your VP of Sales.

In addition to new content, you should also go back and assign authorship to your previously published posts. This should be fairly straightforward for a developer to manage in your global changes, as opposed to manually adding one for each post.

2. Prioritize Audience Experience and Deliver Real Value

Google has been using the acronym “E-A-T” to help content creators understand how they evaluate content based on expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

But as of December 2022, Google officially announced it’s adding an additional E to this acronym, turning “E-A-T” into “E-E-A-T.” The new E stands for experience.

The idea here is to ensure that readers are getting the best possible experience when they’re reading content. For example, if you’re writing a blog post on travel tips for Kenya, Google wants to see some situations that you’ve actually experienced while you were in Kenya. This might even include some photos you took yourself or screenshots of your itinerary.

Google wants first-hand experiences, as this will ultimately provide more value and a better experience to readers than someone who just borrows ideas that can be found on the web.

For example, I have decades of experience working in content marketing and SEO. So I’m qualified to write the blog you’re currently reading. But if I were to publish a blog giving my opinion on weight loss and heart disease, it wouldn’t provide the same experience to readers as a qualified healthcare professional.

3. Highlight Depth of Knowledge

This strategy piggybacks off the last two, but it’s still worth mentioning on its own.  Google recently released a “helpful content” update. This update is going to be really important as you’re creating content in 2024 and beyond.

One of the most important aspects of this update is prioritizing your ability to write for humans and not just for search engines. To do this, you must go deep and showcase your depth of knowledge on a subject.

Quality is more important than quantity. Pumping out dozens of blogs every week is useless if it’s all fluff just stuffed with keywords that target search crawlers.

Google would rather see you put all of your efforts into just one article that really goes deeper on the subject. That’s because Google wants readers to feel satisfied after clicking a link in the SERPs.

If someone clicks a link and it doesn’t answer their question, it’s not really helpful.

For example, let’s say you’re a project portfolio manager for an international engineering company that oversees hundreds of projects per year with thousands of workers. You’re looking for a way to improve internal efficiencies, cut costs, meet deadlines, and improve your overall project planning approach. So you search Google for the best project portfolio management software, hoping to find reviews of alternatives to the tool you’re currently using.

If the first article you click just answers basic questions like “what is project management” or “what is project portfolio management software,” then it’s likely not going to help you out. Anyone in your position would already know the answers to these questions, and the content is likely written for search engines instead of people.

Instead, a detailed review on different tools that includes guidance from people in your position would be much more helpful. You’d be able to see which tools they used, how they applied them to specific projects, and what the results were. That’s how you illustrate depth of knowledge.

4. Product Page SEO

With ecommerce trending up, it’s no surprise to see product page SEO getting more and more competitive. Whether you’re selling single products like shirts and hats, or digital products like software subscriptions and professional services, you need to approach product page SEO differently than you do other types of content.

I’m referring to more than just keyword stuffing descriptions. Think about what audiences want to know when they’re buying something.

• Shipping costs
• Shipping time
• Return policies
• Customer reviews
• Upgrades or add-ons
• Payment options
• Videos of the product in use

These are just some examples to show how you can add more context to your product pages that will benefit buyers.

5. Know When and How to Use AI For SEO

AI is one of the hottest and most controversial topics in the world of content marketing and SEO right now. This is something that’s going to be changing and revolutionizing the way work gets done for years to come.

With that said, there’s still a right and wrong way to use AI when it comes to SEO.

Last year, Google said that AI content falls into the auto-generated content category, which is against their guidelines. However, they’re not automatically penalizing AI-generated content and recently said its ok if it offers real value and aligns with E-E-A-T. So content can be written by a robot if the robot has real world experience? Kind of confusing.

I’ve used just about every AI content generation tool on the market. They’ve really come a long way, especially in the last three to six months. But the vast majority of what they produce still doesn’t deliver complete and accurate infomation. So if you’re relying solely on AI to replace writers in 2024, you’re going to be in trouble from an SEO perspective.

Instead, you can use AI tools for idea generation or outlines. They’re also useful if you’re stuck and just need some guidance getting a few words on the page. But beyond that, I’d tread cautiously or your content will not rank well.

6. Core Web Vitals and Page Loading Speed

Google’s Core Web Vitals are not new. They were originally announced in 2020, and have gone through other updates in recent years.

But just because these are “old news,” it doesn’t mean they should be ignored in 2024.

I’m assuming most of you have a firm understanding of the basics of Core Web Vitals, so I won’t go too deep here over-explaining what you already know. But here’s a quick reminder of which search signals we’re talking about.

Even years after these rolled out, I’m still working with new clients who haven’t taken any steps to improve LCP, FID, and CLS.

Running a technical audit on your site, with a specific focus on Core Web Vitals, can make a huge difference in your SERP performance in the proceeding months. Here are a few things you can try right now:

• Upgrade your hosting for faster page loading times
• Minify CSS
• Eliminate non-critical scripts
• Designate common size attributions for all media files
• Defer or minimize JavaScript
• Enable lazy loading

These strategies do require some technical experience. So you’ll likely need to consult with your developer if this isn’t something you can handle on your own.

7. Optimizing Published Content

All too often, I see SEOs and marketers apply the latest strategies and tips toward new content strategies. While this is important, it won’t deliver results as fast as a content update.

Depending on the age of your site, you might have hundreds or thousands of quality posts that are already published. Many of which might already be ranking well.

Breathing new life into old content is one of my favorite ways to get results. Start by identifying your top 50 blogs. See which ones are over one year old, and start there. Now, see which ones have room for improvement in the SERPs. For example, if a post is already ranking first for all of your target keywords, you can skip it for now.

So your original list of 50 posts might be 30 or 35. Spend the next month doing everything you can to improve those posts—including the application of strategies discussed in this guide.

Update outdated stats. Link out to new research. Find opportunities for relevant internal links. Add new sections or rewrite sections for clarity.

Content that’s ranked 9th might jump to 5th or 6th after an update. If you do this across 20 or 30+ pages, it can result in thousands of more clicks per month.

8. Focus on “Related Keywords” That Align With Search Intent

I think it’s easy for people to think of SEO as just “pick a keyword you want to rank for and include that keyword in the Title Tag, the Meta Description, the Headings, and the Alt Tags on the page”.

But as we know, Google is way more sophisticated than that, so if that’s all you are doing to optimize your website, you’ll only get so far. And while it’s true that there are many other factors that go into ranking a page in Google for a keyword, such as attracting high-quality external links to your awesome content, on-page SEO is still a piece of the puzzle, and using related topics and semantically connected keywords in your content needs to be a part of that.

Here’s what I mean.

We’re not talking about just other related keywords that contains our targeted keyword.

For example, if I’m targeting “wedding venues”, I might already know that people search for “best wedding venues”, “cheap wedding venues”, “Boston wedding venues”, and similar keywords. But what we’re talking about here is something different.

What we mean by “related keywords” is other words and phrases that Google often sees on pages that are targeting or contain that keyword.

So in the case of “wedding venues”, that might be things like “reception”, “ceremony”, “packages”, “rustic”, “outdoor”, “indoor”, “planner”, “unique”, “estate”, “bride”, “photo”, etc. You want to try to find those keywords that are used often on other pages that contain your keywords and, most especially, those keywords that appear on many of the pages that are ranking well in Google for that keyword.

This can be a bit tedious, but it’s free. Or you can use a tool like LSIGraph to help you out.

Once you’ve found related keywords, it’s just a matter of using them naturally throughout your content. And yes, I mean naturally (as opposed to artificially inserting the keywords where they don’t really make sense, or where they produce hard-to-read, un-natural sounding sentences).

Final Thoughts

You can start using the seven advanced SEO strategies in this guide to improve your website today.

Doing just one of these things won’t necessarily move the needle overnight. Many of these strategies require more than just a simple technical change on your pages. They must be incorporated into your holistic approach to content generation.

If you leave here with just one key takeaway, make it this—prioritize value, user experience, and authority with all of your content in 2024.