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My Top 8 Tactics Shared By 107 SEOs

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My Top 8 Tactics Shared By 107 SEOs

I asked the SEO community and a few experts to share advanced SEO tactics that are working for them.

I received 107 replies and had the opportunity to explore where people draw the line between basic and advanced skills in our industry.

Here’s everything people considered advanced, ranked based on the frequency of mentions.

If you’re wondering how to progress in your SEO career, these are the sorts of skills you’ll need to develop.

Here are my 8 personal favorites and how to get started with them.

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1. Integrate SEO with UX and CRO 

Learning non-SEO skills that integrate with SEO can help advance your career in a few ways:

  1. They improve your communication with non-SEO teams (who you often rely on to get things done).
  2. They elevate your SEO skills beyond the basics of “keywords, content, and links”.
  3. They accelerate results, so your boss or clients see faster returns on investment.

In particular, user experience and conversion optimization tie in with SEO quite nicely.

How SEO and user experience can work well to deliver conversions, and ultimately a return on investment.How SEO and user experience can work well to deliver conversions, and ultimately a return on investment.

While SEO is primarily a traffic acquisition channel, it’s useless to a business if the traffic you acquire doesn’t convert.

To understand the full journey searchers take, I recommend learning about SXO. It’s short for search experience optimization and focuses on a searcher’s journey from the moment they search until they convert.

You can also get more granular and look at specific user experience elements on your website that could be impacting your SEO performance. For example, Cyrus Shepard has seen big improvements in his client’s SEO campaigns by working on UX elements like:

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  1. Reducing ad density, particularly fixed-video ad
  2. Removing browser notifications
  3. Simplifying navigation
  4. Improving contact information visibility
  5. Clarifying site identity (logo + tagline)

Either way, combining SEO with UX and CRO can yield big gains, so it’s a worthwhile skill to learn.

2. Use paid ads to get more out of your SEO 

Whenever I think of integrating SEO with paid ads, I can’t help picturing the Old El Paso girl.

SEO or PPC? Why don't we have both? memeSEO or PPC? Why don't we have both? meme

Blending paid ads with SEO is an essential strategy for businesses to generate more leads and a faster return on investment. They’re complimentary channels, and you can use one to overcome the shortcomings of the other.

For example, local businesses can generate many leads directly from Google with:

  • Local service ads
  • Pay-per-click ads
  • Local and map pack SEO
  • Traditional SEO

With the help of paid ads, they can earn phone calls within the first few weeks of the campaign instead of waiting months for SEO to kick in.

A line graph depicting SEO taking a longer time than PPC to deliver leads.A line graph depicting SEO taking a longer time than PPC to deliver leads.

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3. Create topic clusters 

Topic clustering is a core aspect of SEO. However, most people don’t consider it an “advanced” tactic on its own, as it’s become a staple of creating strategic content for SEO nowadays.

If you’re new to topic clustering, it involves:

  • Gathering a list of keywords
  • Grouping the ones with similar intent together
  • Creating content to target each group
  • Interlinking between each post
Clustered keywords relate to the same topic and fulfil the same intent.Clustered keywords relate to the same topic and fulfil the same intent.

Here’s an example of what a cluster might look like:

Example keyword cluster for keywords relating to coffee makers. Example keyword cluster for keywords relating to coffee makers.

You can easily spot potential clusters for your topic using Ahrefs’ clustering reports in Keywords Explorer.

Enter your main keyword, and then in the Matching terms report, check out clusters by parent topic or terms.

Ahrefs' cluster by parent topic report in Keywords Explorer.Ahrefs' cluster by parent topic report in Keywords Explorer.

This technique allows your content to rank for a variety of keywords and to improve your website’s coverage of a topic. It can also help your brand be perceived as an authority on the topic.

Advanced keyword clustering

If you want to take things up a notch or two, you can also create your own intent identification and clustering model using a combination of SEO APIs and machine learning models.

This is not for the faint of heart, but it was widely acknowledged as an advanced SEO tactic that people use to get results.

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For instance, you can pull a keyword list using the Ahrefs API, use a large language model to identify each keyword’s intent, and then use a model like BERT or a custom-trained clustering model to create your keyword clusters automatically.

Many SEO experts, including Patrick Stox, Nik Ranger, Sally Mills, and others, are seeing success with similar methods. Here’s an example of how Sally has implemented this:

Advanced SEO keyword clustering shared by Sally Mills.Advanced SEO keyword clustering shared by Sally Mills.

If you’re an in-house SEO or working on a large website, you need to find ways of automating tasks like topic clustering for a huge keyword list, especially if you’re working with a limited budget.

4. Analyzing data and forecasting results 

SEO is data-heavy. Without data analysis skills, creating comprehensive strategies that generate results for clients can be very challenging.

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My take is that data analysis is essential for any type of data-driven marketing these days. However, to develop more advanced skills, it’s not so much a matter of looking at more data as it is about developing your mindset to find more interesting insights.

Basic Insights Advanced Insights
53% of website visitors bounce People who download X are 73% more likely to convert
Organic traffic grew by 231% We’ve reduced time to conversion by doing Y
Our top-performing content is X Based on YoY performance, we forecast 150% growth by doing Z
We’re ranking #1 for these keywords
Our blog gets Y traffic from Google

The difference is that the basic insights on the left are readily available in your analytics software. You don’t have to look too hard to find these insights. Nor do you have to think too deeply about them.

They’re also not particularly helpful or actionable. Especially when you share these with clients or managers, they often don’t know what these numbers mean or what decisions to make from them.

However, the insights on the right connect specific actions to their results and can be used to make a case for increasing the budget of an SEO project. They help non-SEO stakeholders see the steps you took to achieve a result and why investing in doing more of what worked makes sense.

Further reading

Here are a couple of step-by-step guides to help you improve your analytical and forecasting skills for SEO.

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5. Use product and audience data in your SEO strategy 

The type of data you gather to create your SEO strategy can also be the difference between doing basic SEO vs advanced SEO. 

For example, here are some different data sources to consider:

Common Data Sources Advanced Data Sources
Google Analytics CRM for customer data
Google Search Console Sales pipeline software for sales data
An SEO platform like Ahrefs Accounting software for revenue data
Internal dashboards for product data

Don’t get me wrong; you can still make an advanced SEO strategy using the data sources on the left.

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For example, with Ahrefs, you can use metrics like Share of Traffic Value to see where your competitors are gaining market share.

Ahrefs' Share of Traffic Value graph comparing Healthline and WebMD.Ahrefs' Share of Traffic Value graph comparing Healthline and WebMD.

The analysis that would follow is not basic by any means.

But you can also go in the wrong direction if you don’t incorporate a brand’s internal data into your strategy.

For example, many SEO professionals don’t think much of a brand’s unique selling points. Maybe they include these in landing page copy, but that’s it.

However, advanced practitioners recognize product data and USPs as a goldmine for SEO. It’s how we’re able to:

  • Do strategic keyword and intent analysis
  • Target meaningful keywords with low competition
  • Validate keyword opportunities with product or brand managers
  • Ensure the SEO strategy aligns with the brand’s product-market fit

It’s critical to understand your product USP and do strategic keyword research. It’s how you’ll find low-competition, meaningful queries that are equally relevant from a business standpoint. This seems easy and rather “basic,” but it is not, and definitely not the type of task I would leave a junior SEO with. 

Aleyda Solís, Aleyda Solís,

For example, here’s how I implemented this for one of my aged care clients.

This particular brand had invested millions into a state-of-the-art facility that offered hotel-like quality of service and care. It was important to them that their residents maintained a sense of independence and dignity while also receiving the best care available in their city.

When you hear that, you probably don’t think that their services are affordable or low-cost, right?

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But here’s the thing. By gathering data from government sources, I was able to identify that this facility offered rooms that were 50% larger and 33% cheaper on average than other facilities in their city.

Uncovering this value proposition opened up a lot of potential for SEO, especially since price is a common concern for my client’s customers.

Example of a keyword list for price-related keywords relating to nursing homes and aged care facilities.Example of a keyword list for price-related keywords relating to nursing homes and aged care facilities.

The data gathered allowed the client to consider a price-related content strategy that we would have otherwise ignored.

They had the potential to:

  • Answer common pricing questions
  • Overcome price-based objections before people book a tour
  • Correct people’s assumptions that the service is likely out of their budget
  • Position themselves based on the unique value they offer
  • Increase the number of tours booked because price assumptions were no longer a blocker

6. Automating SEO with AI and machine learning 

Not gonna lie; when I first saw people’s responses that using ChatGPT = advanced SEO, I had a couple of “what on earth?!” moments.

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However, when I asked a few SEO experts and speakers in Ahrefs Evolve’s lineup, I uncovered some pretty cool advanced use cases of AI and machine learning for SEO.

In addition to Sally’s clustering method above, here are some other examples.

Automate multi-lingual keyword translation

One of my favorite use cases of AI for SEO is for translating keywords to fast-track international SEO.

Using Ahrefs’ new AI keyword translator makes this process so quick, smooth, and easy by:

  • Automatically translating your entire list of keywords with one click
  • Preserving local lingo and the nuances of each dialect
  • Allowing you to see search metrics for each translated variation
  • Helping you discover multiple translation options for each keyword

For example, there are dozens of ways to say “popcorn” in Spanish dialects.

Instead of offering a single option, our translator shows you multiple variations to consider while also localizing these variations to your target region!

Ahrefs' AI translator preserving local nuances for the word popcorn in various Spanish-speaking dialects.Ahrefs' AI translator preserving local nuances for the word popcorn in various Spanish-speaking dialects.

Since international SEO was one of the top “advanced” SEO skills mentioned, any way you can make the process easier and faster is a bonus.

AI can also help you squeeze more juice out of a tight budget by streamlining your workflow and saving hours on tasks that would otherwise be very time-intensive.

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Automate redirect mapping with AI

I love Patrick’s approach to automating redirects for large sites. In a nutshell, the process looks like this:

Advanced SEO automation for redirect matching.Advanced SEO automation for redirect matching.

If this use case sounds interesting, feel free to check out the exact redirect-matching script he uses. Once configured, it automatically runs through the above process for you.

Internal link optimization, en masse

Internal linking is an area folks are automating with AI in different ways.

For instance, Kashif Riaz uses Gemini + ChatGPT to read his sitemap and develop contextually relevant anchor texts for each URL that he can use for internal links.

As a simple process, you could:

  • Give ChatGPT a URL
  • Ask it for relevant phrases that would be good as internal link anchors
  • Search Ahrefs’ Page Explorer for pages that include these phrases

Page Explorer is a report within Site Audit. You can search for any phrase in your website’s page text and get a list of pages that include it.

Example of using Ahrefs' Page Explorer to uncover pages that mention specific topics.Example of using Ahrefs' Page Explorer to uncover pages that mention specific topics.

It’s a great way to jumpstart internal linking for a new site that isn’t already ranking for keywords.

If you’re working on a site with URLs like example.com/363863852itwiy (ew, I feel for you), you can also try a more advanced approach.

Nik Ranger blew my mind when I first saw her present on how she and the team at Dejan SEO are using machine learning to automate internal linking at a large scale.

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For instance, their innovative process:

  • Creates a link graph of an existing website
  • Pairs the link graph with Search Console data
  • Uses vector embeddings to incorporate a page’s title, headings, and content into recommendations
  • Recommends internal links and anchor text

The model they’ve built can recommend internal links even if the URLs don’t contain any words or contextual clues. Normally, finding appropriate internal links on sites with these issues is incredibly challenging, but clever uses of AI make it a lot easier!

As large language models improve their contextual understanding of language, we’ll likely see more innovative use cases for SEO like this.

7. Doubling down on revenue-generating content 

Quality content was mentioned quite a lot overall.

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I struggled to see how creating quality content is an “advanced” strategy. To me, it’s an essential cornerstone of modern SEO, and you can’t get results without it.

However, I really liked the approaches some folks are taking to increase the revenue generation potential of their content strategies. This is what I think separates a basic content plan from an advanced one.

For example, the following content strategies were mentioned in the context of delivering results:

  • Product-led content (which we covered above)
  • Programmatic SEO (of the non-spammy variety)
  • Bottom-of-funnel content (to increase revenue)
  • Mid-funnel content (to get an edge over competitors)

I think [advanced SEO] is coming up with site-wide SEO strategies that move the needle – like creating new sections, doing programmatic content for BOFU keywords, doing product-led SEO on a site-wide level. 

Ben KazinikBen Kazinik

8. Optimizing multiple channels for maximum exposure to searchers 

Incorporating other channels, like social media and Reddit, was mentioned by a number of people.

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This one surprised me as something people consider “advanced” SEO. Mainly because, for a long time, Google has been the dominant platform SEO folks focus on. But I’m all for this shift. I think it’s been a long time coming.

Using Reddit for keyword research

I really liked Andy Chadwick’s process for using Reddit to find golden keyword opportunities. His process is based on the premise that people ask for the same thing in many different ways.

He uses this redundancy to his advantage by:

  • Identifying information gaps he can easily close
  • Finding low-competition keywords that are overlooked by competitors

For instance, he shares a great example of the keyword “does oat milk cause acne”…

Keyword metrics relating to the keyword "does oat milk cause acne" indicating a difficulty score of 0 and 50 searches per month.Keyword metrics relating to the keyword "does oat milk cause acne" indicating a difficulty score of 0 and 50 searches per month.

At first glance, it has a seemingly low search volume.

However, this is deceptive because people search for answers to this question in a bunch of different ways and the sum total of all their searches will yield a much higher monthly search volume.

A list of keywords related to the topic of whether oat milk causes acne with a total monthly search volume of 140.A list of keywords related to the topic of whether oat milk causes acne with a total monthly search volume of 140.

Not to mention that Reddit ranks in the top three positions, with many people asking the same question in different ways:

Example of Google Search results showing Reddit and how multiple people ask the same question in different ways.Example of Google Search results showing Reddit and how multiple people ask the same question in different ways.

What’s more fascinating, though, is that there’s no competition for it.

With a difficulty score of 0, it shouldn’t be too difficult for a new skincare brand to rank for this topic above more established competitors. It can also join the conversations on Reddit and provide a clear and trustworthy answer to plug this information gap.

This strategy, rolled out across dozens of similar low-competition topics, can become an easy way for new or establishing brands to enter a competitive market.

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Using social media for SEO

You can also use other social channels to help your SEO efforts. At Ahrefs, we use multiple channels to reach our audience like YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook and X.

I reached out to Sam, the VP of Marketing here at Ahrefs. He also runs our YouTube channel, and he shared some tips you can try out if you want to expand your SEO skills by integrating social media.

As a simple process, you can start by:

  • Finding video keywords that relate to your existing blog content
  • Repurposing your blog content into videos

For instance, check out your website’s organic keywords in Ahrefs Site Explorer and filter for keywords in the top 10 positions only.

Process for using Ahrefs' Site Explorer to find keywords in the top 10 positions.Process for using Ahrefs' Site Explorer to find keywords in the top 10 positions.

Remove any branded keywords and then copy the top 10,000 keywords:

Ahrefs' feature allowing a selection of up to 10,000 keywords.Ahrefs' feature allowing a selection of up to 10,000 keywords.

Pop these into Keywords Explorer and check out the Traffic share by domain report for an idea of how well YouTube ranks for keywords in this list:

Ahrefs' Traffic Share by Domain report showing Youtube's metrics.Ahrefs' Traffic Share by Domain report showing Youtube's metrics.

You can also use the SERP feature filter and include only keywords that contain a video on the SERP:

SERP feature filter in Ahrefs with "Videos" selected.SERP feature filter in Ahrefs with "Videos" selected.

Doing this gives you a feel for how video-friendly a particular topic is. You can also create a list of exact keywords to target with a video strategy.

This method has helped Ahrefs get loads of high-retention views from search. We also pair this with native YouTube optimization to increase our organic visibility within the YouTube ecosystem.

But, when it comes to creating social media content from blogs, it’s important that you don’t just re-word the blog post. You’ve got to match the content to the platform to retain your audience’s attention.

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For example, we’ve published a handful of long-form blog posts on link building strategies and tactics. Each covers different angles, like:

However, Sam has also created a video but has selected an angle that’s a better fit for audiences on YouTube:

And, we’ve also published many social posts about it, adapting the content to fit the native audience of each platform, like this short and sweet LinkedIn post:

1727099770 777 My Top 8 Tactics Shared By 107 SEOs1727099770 777 My Top 8 Tactics Shared By 107 SEOs

When integrating social media into your strategy, the end goal will often be about more than just rankings.

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Conversion or leading someone closer to a conversion is more important in most cases.

Further reading

Here are some additional posts you can check out to learn more about how to incorporate social media into your SEO strategy.

Key takeaways

Advanced SEO means different things to different people. However, one thing’s clear.

Those who go beyond the basics are the ones who not only deliver better results to clients but also unlock more opportunities to grow in their careers.

If you’d like to learn more advanced SEO tips from experts, come to Ahrefs Evolve 😉

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Most of the experts mentioned in this post will be there sharing their latest and greatest advice.

Having said that, it’s also important to remember the basics. Never cut corners because you’re chasing some new “advanced” tactic. Rather, add advanced skills on top of the foundation of the tried-and-true fundamentals.

I’m not a fan of tactics, but I am all about consistently doing the basics – doing keyword research, creating solid content, making sure they are SEO friendly, and working hard to acquire links.

Doing this alone has lasted us decades in SEO, avoiding all the Google penalties along the way! 

Marcus HoMarcus Ho

If you’ve got thoughts to share or advanced techniques working well for you right now, reach out on LinkedIn.

 

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How to Revive an Old Blog Article for SEO

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Step-by-Step: How to Optimize Old Blog Posts for SEO

Quick question: What do you typically do with your old blog posts? Most likely, the answer is: Not much.

If that’s the case, you’re not alone. Many of us in SEO and content marketing tend to focus on continuously creating new content, rather than leveraging our existing blog posts.

However, here’s the reality—Google is becoming increasingly sophisticated in evaluating content quality, and we need to adapt accordingly. Just as it’s easier to encourage existing customers to make repeat purchases, updating old content on your website is a more efficient and sustainable strategy in the long run.

Ways to Optimize Older Content 

Some of your old content might not be optimized for SEO very well, rank for irrelevant keywords, or drive no traffic at all. If the quality is still decent, however, you should be able to optimize it properly with little effort. 

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Refresh Content 

If your blog post contains a specific year or mentions current events, it may become outdated over time. If the rest of the content is still relevant (like if it’s targeting an evergreen topic), simply updating the date might be all you need to do.

Rewrite Old Blog Posts 

When the content quality is low (you might have greatly improved your writing skills since you’ve written the post) but the potential is still there, there’s not much you can do apart from rewriting an old blog post completely. 

This is not a waste—you’re saving time on brainstorming since the basic structure is already in place. Now, focus on improving the quality.

Delete Old Blog Posts 

You might find a blog post that just seems unusable. Should you delete your old content? It depends. If it’s completely outdated, of low quality, and irrelevant to any valuable keywords for your website, it’s better to remove it. 

Once you decide to delete the post, don’t forget to set up a 301 redirect to a related post or page, or to your homepage.

Promote Old Blog Posts 

Sometimes all your content needs is a bit of promotion to start ranking and getting traffic again. Share it on your social media, link to it from a new post – do something to get it discoverable again to your audience. This can give it the boost it needs to attract organic links too.

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Which Blog Posts Should You Update?

Deciding when to update or rewrite blog posts is a decision that relies on one important thing: a content audit. 

Use your Google Analytics to find out which blog posts used to drive tons of traffic, but no longer have the same reach. You can also use Google Search Console to find out which of your blog posts have lost visibility in comparison to previous months. I have a guide on website analysis using Google Analytics and Google Search Console you can follow.

If you use keyword tracking tools like SE Ranking, you can also use the data it provides to come up with a list of blog posts that have dropped in the rankings. 

Make data-driven decisions to identify which blog posts would benefit from these updates – i.e., which ones still have the chance to recover their keyword rankings and organic traffic. 

With Google’s helpful content update, which emphasizes better user experiences, it’s crucial to ensure your content remains relevant, valuable, and up-to-date.

How To Update Old Blog Posts for SEO

Updating articles can be an involved process. Here are some tips and tactics to help you get it right.

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Author’s Note: I have a Comprehensive On-Page SEO Checklist you might also be interested in following while you’re doing your content audit.

Conduct New Keyword Research

Updating your post without any guide won’t get you far. Always do your keyword research to understand how users are searching for your given topic. 

Proper research can also show you relevant questions and sections that can be added to the blog post you’re updating or rewriting. Make sure to take a look at the People Also Ask (PAA) section that shows up when you search for your target keyword. Check out other websites like Answer The Public, Reddit, and Quora to see what users are looking for too. 

Look for New Ranking Opportunities

When trying to revive an old blog post for SEO, keep an eye out for new SEO opportunities (e.g., AI Overview, featured snippets, and related search terms) that didn’t exist when you first wrote your blog post. Some of these features can be targeted by the new content you will add to your post, if you write with the aim to be eligible for it. 

Rewrite Headlines and Meta Tags

If you want to attract new readers, consider updating your headlines and meta tags. 

Your headlines and meta tags should fulfill these three things:

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  1. Reflect the rewritten and new content you’ve added to the blog post.
  2. Be optimized for the new keywords it’s targeting (if any).
  3. Appeal to your target audience – who may have changed tastes from when the blog post was originally made. 

Remember that your meta tags in particular act like a brief advertisement for your blog post, since this is what the user first sees when your blog post is shown in the search results page. 

Take a look at your blog post’s click-through rate on Google Search Console – if it falls below 2%, it’s definitely time for new meta tags. 

Replace Outdated Information and Statistics

Updating blog content with current studies and statistics enhances the relevance and credibility of your post. By providing up-to-date information, you help your audience make better, well-informed decisions, while also showing that your content is trustworthy.

Tighten or Expand Ideas

Your old content might be too short to provide real value to users – or you might have rambled on and on in your post. It’s important to evaluate whether you need to make your content more concise, or if you need to elaborate more. 

Keep the following tips in mind as you refine your blog post’s ideas:

  • Evaluate Helpfulness: Measure how well your content addresses your readers’ pain points. Aim to follow the E-E-A-T model (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).
  • Identify Missing Context: Consider whether your content needs more detail or clarification. View it from your audience’s perspective and ask if the information is complete, or if more information is needed.
  • Interview Experts: Speak with industry experts or thought leaders to get fresh insights. This will help support your writing, and provide unique points that enhance the value of your content.
  • Use Better Examples: Examples help simplify complex concepts. Add new examples or improve existing ones to strengthen your points.
  • Add New Sections if Needed: If your content lacks depth or misses a key point, add new sections to cover these areas more thoroughly.
  • Remove Fluff: Every sentence should contribute to the overall narrative. Eliminate unnecessary content to make your post more concise.
  • Revise Listicles: Update listicle items based on SEO recommendations and content quality. Add or remove headings to stay competitive with higher-ranking posts.

Improve Visuals and Other Media

No doubt that there are tons of old graphics and photos in your blog posts that can be improved with the tools we have today. Make sure all of the visuals used in your content are appealing and high quality. 

Update Internal and External Links

Are your internal and external links up to date? They need to be for your SEO and user experience. Outdated links can lead to broken pages or irrelevant content, frustrating readers and hurting your site’s performance.

You need to check for any broken links on your old blog posts, and update them ASAP. Updating your old blog posts can also lead to new opportunities to link internally to other blog posts and pages, which may not have been available when the post was originally published.

Optimize for Conversions

When updating content, the ultimate goal is often to increase conversions. However, your conversion goals may have changed over the years. 

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So here’s what you need to check in your updated blog post. First, does the call-to-action (CTA) still link to the products or services you want to promote? If not, update it to direct readers to the current solution or offer.

Second, consider where you can use different conversion strategies. Don’t just add a CTA at the end of the post. 

Last, make sure that the blog post leverages product-led content. It’s going to help you mention your products and services in a way that feels natural, without being too pushy. Being subtle can be a high ROI tactic for updated posts.

Key Takeaway

Reviving old blog articles for SEO is a powerful strategy that can breathe new life into your content and boost your website’s visibility. Instead of solely focusing on creating new posts, taking the time to refresh existing content can yield impressive results, both in terms of traffic and conversions. 

By implementing these strategies, you can transform old blog posts into valuable resources that attract new readers and retain existing ones. So, roll up your sleeves, dive into your archives, and start updating your content today—your audience and search rankings will thank you!

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How Compression Can Be Used To Detect Low Quality Pages

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Compression can be used by search engines to detect low-quality pages. Although not widely known, it's useful foundational knowledge for SEO.

The concept of Compressibility as a quality signal is not widely known, but SEOs should be aware of it. Search engines can use web page compressibility to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords, making it useful knowledge for SEO.

Although the following research paper demonstrates a successful use of on-page features for detecting spam, the deliberate lack of transparency by search engines makes it difficult to say with certainty if search engines are applying this or similar techniques.

What Is Compressibility?

In computing, compressibility refers to how much a file (data) can be reduced in size while retaining essential information, typically to maximize storage space or to allow more data to be transmitted over the Internet.

TL/DR Of Compression

Compression replaces repeated words and phrases with shorter references, reducing the file size by significant margins. Search engines typically compress indexed web pages to maximize storage space, reduce bandwidth, and improve retrieval speed, among other reasons.

This is a simplified explanation of how compression works:

  • Identify Patterns:
    A compression algorithm scans the text to find repeated words, patterns and phrases
  • Shorter Codes Take Up Less Space:
    The codes and symbols use less storage space then the original words and phrases, which results in a smaller file size.
  • Shorter References Use Less Bits:
    The “code” that essentially symbolizes the replaced words and phrases uses less data than the originals.

A bonus effect of using compression is that it can also be used to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords.

Research Paper About Detecting Spam

This research paper is significant because it was authored by distinguished computer scientists known for breakthroughs in AI, distributed computing, information retrieval, and other fields.

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Marc Najork

One of the co-authors of the research paper is Marc Najork, a prominent research scientist who currently holds the title of Distinguished Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He’s a co-author of the papers for TW-BERT, has contributed research for increasing the accuracy of using implicit user feedback like clicks, and worked on creating improved AI-based information retrieval (DSI++: Updating Transformer Memory with New Documents), among many other major breakthroughs in information retrieval.

Dennis Fetterly

Another of the co-authors is Dennis Fetterly, currently a software engineer at Google. He is listed as a co-inventor in a patent for a ranking algorithm that uses links, and is known for his research in distributed computing and information retrieval.

Those are just two of the distinguished researchers listed as co-authors of the 2006 Microsoft research paper about identifying spam through on-page content features. Among the several on-page content features the research paper analyzes is compressibility, which they discovered can be used as a classifier for indicating that a web page is spammy.

Detecting Spam Web Pages Through Content Analysis

Although the research paper was authored in 2006, its findings remain relevant to today.

Then, as now, people attempted to rank hundreds or thousands of location-based web pages that were essentially duplicate content aside from city, region, or state names. Then, as now, SEOs often created web pages for search engines by excessively repeating keywords within titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal anchor text, and within the content to improve rankings.

Section 4.6 of the research paper explains:

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“Some search engines give higher weight to pages containing the query keywords several times. For example, for a given query term, a page that contains it ten times may be higher ranked than a page that contains it only once. To take advantage of such engines, some spam pages replicate their content several times in an attempt to rank higher.”

The research paper explains that search engines compress web pages and use the compressed version to reference the original web page. They note that excessive amounts of redundant words results in a higher level of compressibility. So they set about testing if there’s a correlation between a high level of compressibility and spam.

They write:

“Our approach in this section to locating redundant content within a page is to compress the page; to save space and disk time, search engines often compress web pages after indexing them, but before adding them to a page cache.

…We measure the redundancy of web pages by the compression ratio, the size of the uncompressed page divided by the size of the compressed page. We used GZIP …to compress pages, a fast and effective compression algorithm.”

High Compressibility Correlates To Spam

The results of the research showed that web pages with at least a compression ratio of 4.0 tended to be low quality web pages, spam. However, the highest rates of compressibility became less consistent because there were fewer data points, making it harder to interpret.

Figure 9: Prevalence of spam relative to compressibility of page.

The researchers concluded:

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“70% of all sampled pages with a compression ratio of at least 4.0 were judged to be spam.”

But they also discovered that using the compression ratio by itself still resulted in false positives, where non-spam pages were incorrectly identified as spam:

“The compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6 fared best, correctly identifying 660 (27.9%) of the spam pages in our collection, while misidentifying 2, 068 (12.0%) of all judged pages.

Using all of the aforementioned features, the classification accuracy after the ten-fold cross validation process is encouraging:

95.4% of our judged pages were classified correctly, while 4.6% were classified incorrectly.

More specifically, for the spam class 1, 940 out of the 2, 364 pages, were classified correctly. For the non-spam class, 14, 440 out of the 14,804 pages were classified correctly. Consequently, 788 pages were classified incorrectly.”

The next section describes an interesting discovery about how to increase the accuracy of using on-page signals for identifying spam.

Insight Into Quality Rankings

The research paper examined multiple on-page signals, including compressibility. They discovered that each individual signal (classifier) was able to find some spam but that relying on any one signal on its own resulted in flagging non-spam pages for spam, which are commonly referred to as false positive.

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The researchers made an important discovery that everyone interested in SEO should know, which is that using multiple classifiers increased the accuracy of detecting spam and decreased the likelihood of false positives. Just as important, the compressibility signal only identifies one kind of spam but not the full range of spam.

The takeaway is that compressibility is a good way to identify one kind of spam but there are other kinds of spam that aren’t caught with this one signal. Other kinds of spam were not caught with the compressibility signal.

This is the part that every SEO and publisher should be aware of:

“In the previous section, we presented a number of heuristics for assaying spam web pages. That is, we measured several characteristics of web pages, and found ranges of those characteristics which correlated with a page being spam. Nevertheless, when used individually, no technique uncovers most of the spam in our data set without flagging many non-spam pages as spam.

For example, considering the compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6, one of our most promising methods, the average probability of spam for ratios of 4.2 and higher is 72%. But only about 1.5% of all pages fall in this range. This number is far below the 13.8% of spam pages that we identified in our data set.”

So, even though compressibility was one of the better signals for identifying spam, it still was unable to uncover the full range of spam within the dataset the researchers used to test the signals.

Combining Multiple Signals

The above results indicated that individual signals of low quality are less accurate. So they tested using multiple signals. What they discovered was that combining multiple on-page signals for detecting spam resulted in a better accuracy rate with less pages misclassified as spam.

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The researchers explained that they tested the use of multiple signals:

“One way of combining our heuristic methods is to view the spam detection problem as a classification problem. In this case, we want to create a classification model (or classifier) which, given a web page, will use the page’s features jointly in order to (correctly, we hope) classify it in one of two classes: spam and non-spam.”

These are their conclusions about using multiple signals:

“We have studied various aspects of content-based spam on the web using a real-world data set from the MSNSearch crawler. We have presented a number of heuristic methods for detecting content based spam. Some of our spam detection methods are more effective than others, however when used in isolation our methods may not identify all of the spam pages. For this reason, we combined our spam-detection methods to create a highly accurate C4.5 classifier. Our classifier can correctly identify 86.2% of all spam pages, while flagging very few legitimate pages as spam.”

Key Insight:

Misidentifying “very few legitimate pages as spam” was a significant breakthrough. The important insight that everyone involved with SEO should take away from this is that one signal by itself can result in false positives. Using multiple signals increases the accuracy.

What this means is that SEO tests of isolated ranking or quality signals will not yield reliable results that can be trusted for making strategy or business decisions.

Takeaways

We don’t know for certain if compressibility is used at the search engines but it’s an easy to use signal that combined with others could be used to catch simple kinds of spam like thousands of city name doorway pages with similar content. Yet even if the search engines don’t use this signal, it does show how easy it is to catch that kind of search engine manipulation and that it’s something search engines are well able to handle today.

Here are the key points of this article to keep in mind:

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  • Doorway pages with duplicate content is easy to catch because they compress at a higher ratio than normal web pages.
  • Groups of web pages with a compression ratio above 4.0 were predominantly spam.
  • Negative quality signals used by themselves to catch spam can lead to false positives.
  • In this particular test, they discovered that on-page negative quality signals only catch specific types of spam.
  • When used alone, the compressibility signal only catches redundancy-type spam, fails to detect other forms of spam, and leads to false positives.
  • Combing quality signals improves spam detection accuracy and reduces false positives.
  • Search engines today have a higher accuracy of spam detection with the use of AI like Spam Brain.

Read the research paper, which is linked from the Google Scholar page of Marc Najork:

Detecting spam web pages through content analysis

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New Google Trends SEO Documentation

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Google publishes new documentation for how to use Google Trends for search marketing

Google Search Central published new documentation on Google Trends, explaining how to use it for search marketing. This guide serves as an easy to understand introduction for newcomers and a helpful refresher for experienced search marketers and publishers.

The new guide has six sections:

  1. About Google Trends
  2. Tutorial on monitoring trends
  3. How to do keyword research with the tool
  4. How to prioritize content with Trends data
  5. How to use Google Trends for competitor research
  6. How to use Google Trends for analyzing brand awareness and sentiment

The section about monitoring trends advises there are two kinds of rising trends, general and specific trends, which can be useful for developing content to publish on a site.

Using the Explore tool, you can leave the search box empty and view the current rising trends worldwide or use a drop down menu to focus on trends in a specific country. Users can further filter rising trends by time periods, categories and the type of search. The results show rising trends by topic and by keywords.

To search for specific trends users just need to enter the specific queries and then filter them by country, time, categories and type of search.

The section called Content Calendar describes how to use Google Trends to understand which content topics to prioritize.

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Google explains:

“Google Trends can be helpful not only to get ideas on what to write, but also to prioritize when to publish it. To help you better prioritize which topics to focus on, try to find seasonal trends in the data. With that information, you can plan ahead to have high quality content available on your site a little before people are searching for it, so that when they do, your content is ready for them.”

Read the new Google Trends documentation:

Get started with Google Trends

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