How to Improve SEO When the Basics Aren’t Enough (11 Methods)

SEO has changed, is changing, and will continue to change long into the future.

But it’s not dead, dying, or going to die any time soon.

So it’s still an important marketing channel for blogs, local businesses, and anyone else who wants to improve their visibility online.

But to improve your visibility, you need to improve your SEO.

We use the techniques I’m going to discuss below to boost our own site’s SEO.

The results?

More than 500K sessions from organic search every month:

And top-3 keyword rankings for more than 8K keywords:

If your traffic is stagnant or declining, or you’re not ranking for your important keywords, there are methods below to help you turn things around.

Here’s a quick summary of what we’ll discuss:

Before we go any further, this is an article about improving your SEO — it’s not a beginner’s guide for getting started.

So we’ve made a couple of assumptions:

• You’ve already nailed the fundamentals (if not, see our guide to the basics of SEO)
• You’ve tried to build some links and improve your technical SEO, but you’re not seeing meaningful growth
• You want to rank higher and get more traffic

Rankings and traffic are not the only metrics you should track. In fact, with all the changes happening in search these days, you might be tempted to shift your focus elsewhere.

Metrics like conversions, brand authority, engagement, and revenue are clearly important. But there’s still traffic out there. This article will focus on helping you get more of it.

1. Lean on Firsthand Experience

Effort: Very High
Area: Content Strategy
Summary: Hard to do, but major gains to make for user trust and experience (and E-E-A-T)

Building trust with your users is important for SEO and business in general. If your audience doesn’t trust you, they’ll stop:

• Reading your content
• Signing up to your email list
• Buying your products and services

But don’t just take our word for it.

In 2022, Google added an extra “E” to its E-A-T acronym. It was for “experience,” and Google summed up its inclusion with a question to ask yourself when creating content:

AI can generate generic content in seconds. But it can’t create genuine experiences.

So, adding firsthand experience to your content is one key way to differentiate yourself not just from your competitors, but also from AI content.

Here’s how to do it:

Show, Don’t Tell

Your readers (and Google) can tell the difference between:

“This SEO tool offers useful keyword research features.”

And:

“I use this tool to find keywords my competitors are targeting that I’m not. In fact, I’ve used it to identify keyword opportunities that now drive thousands of monthly visitors to my own website.”

We apply this technique a lot to show the effectiveness of the tips we share with our readers:

Let’s consider another example. Imagine you’re talking about a specific fitness supplement.

Think about which of these sentences you’re more likely to trust as a reader:

• XYZ protein powder helps you build more muscle
• When I started using XYZ protein powder and combined it with my usual workout routine, I gained 4 pounds of muscle in 8 weeks

The second statement adds credibility through personal testing. But ONLY if you’ve actually done the testing.

That’s why another great way to add firsthand experience is to…

Document Your Process

Take screenshots, photos, or videos as you use a product or implement a strategy.

For example, if you’re writing about email marketing tools, include actual screenshots of:

• Your campaign setup process
• The analytics dashboard showing your results
• A/B test comparisons you’ve run

This kind of visual proof demonstrates that you’ve actually used what you’re writing about.

We do this all the time in our own posts:

But what if you haven’t actually used the tool, been to the place, or gone through the process?

Honestly: You should strongly reconsider writing that content yourself.

If you don’t have the expertise, see if someone else on your team does. Don’t fake it.

2. Add Information Gain

Effort: Very High
Area: Content Strategy
Summary: Takes time to nail, but can set you apart from competitors and lead to better rankings

Information gain is about offering new perspectives, data, or insights not found in other pages targeting the same search query.

In other words: how can you go beyond what’s already out there?

This helps differentiate your content from your competitors. It also opens up opportunities to build backlinks as other content creators want to link to original data and content.

So how can you add info gain to your content?

Leverage Proprietary Data

One way to add extra value is to share unique data that only you have access to:

• Customer surveys
• Internal case studies
• Platform usage statistics
• Original research findings

If you run a marketing agency for example, you might analyze results across client accounts to identify trends — information your competitors don’t have.

Create Visual Demonstrations

Another way to add information gain is to create custom visuals that explain concepts in new ways.

These could be:

• Process flowcharts
• Comparison tables
• Before/after examples
• Step-by-step screenshots

A good example of visual content to add information gain is Delighted’s page on the customer journey:

Their visualization of the customer journey for a retail store, along with example statements from customers, helps solidify in readers’ minds what the journey looks like.

And it has likely helped the page garner almost 400 backlinks:

3. Optimize for Featured Snippets

Effort: Medium
Area: SERP Optimization
Summary: Fairly low effort as you can optimize your existing content, but can majorly boost your SERP visibility

I know: this is nothing new. But I’d argue it’s even more important with how the SERPs look these days.

So many search results are packed with:

• AI answers
• Paid results
• Shopping ads
• People Also Ask boxes (which often feature AI Overviews themselves)

Featured snippets are still your best chance to get extra visibility in front of searchers for a lot of keywords.

Just look at this SERP:

Backlinko ranks in featured snippets for 958 keywords:

How do we do it?

Well, the truth is there is more to it than just answering a question and hoping for the best. Website authority plays a big part in it, and your content needs to be high quality too.

You also generally need to be ranking on page 1 to appear in the featured snippet spot.

But you can optimize your new and existing content fairly quickly to improve your chances of getting featured snippets.

Here’s how:

First, find a keyword that you already rank for. Do this using tools like Google Search Console, or by just manually searching Google.

Ideally, that keyword will already have a featured snippet:

Look at the snippet and identify what TYPE of featured snippet you’re looking at:

• Definition Snippet (“What Is Content Marketing?”)
• List Snippet (“Top 10 SEO Tools for Content Marketers”)
• Table Snippet (“Content Marketing Tool Prices”)

Finally, add a snippet of content to your page that’s designed to fit inside that featured snippet box.

For example, we wanted to get in the featured snippet for the keyword “SEO strategy.”

So we wrote a little section that would fit PERFECTLY inside of a featured snippet box:

And it worked:

You can apply this approach for keywords you don’t yet rank for too. Whether you have existing content or are planning to create it.

But either way, this is quite a manual and resource-intensive process.

Want an easier way to find featured snippet opportunities?

Use Semrush’s Organic Research tool to highlight all the keywords you rank on page 1 for which currently have a featured snippet in the search results.

Filtering for the top 10 positions and “Domain doesn’t rank” shows all the easy wins you could rank for.

Go through the pages that rank for these keywords and add sections targeting relevant featured snippets.

4. Create Linkable Assets

Effort: Very High
Area: Link Building
Summary: Effort-intensive but can pay dividends long into the future

Here’s the deal:

(Most) people don’t link to “great content.”

They link to sources.

For example, we published this guide to Google Search Console a few years ago.

And we’d confidently say it qualifies as high-quality content.

The post is full of actionable tips:

It even has a custom design:

Despite being a very solid piece of content, it only has 400 referring domains:

On the other hand, check out this voice search study we published many years ago:

This piece of content has 1.5K referring domains:

That’s 4x more backlinks than our GSC guide, despite the fact that voice search isn’t as trendy as many thought it would be.

Why is that?

Well, our Google Search Console guide isn’t that “easy” for someone to link to.

Unless you’re writing about GSC specifically or want to send someone to a resource to “learn more,” there’s no compelling reason to link to our guide.

On the other hand, our voice search study gave bloggers and journalists data that they can EASILY reference.

Which led to hundreds of high-quality backlinks.

This isn’t a one-off. We’ve published lots of studies over the years that have attracted thousands of backlinks:

You can think of these as “linkable assets” or “link bait” — content that is largely designed to get backlinks.

It’s high quality, and it provides real value for users. But it’s also highly shareable and linkable.

Studies and original data are, therefore, great ways to build backlinks that help you rank higher and drive more traffic.

(They also let you add information gain to your content, which we discussed earlier.)

Try Creating Free Tools

Free tools are another type of linkable asset we’ve employed at Backlinko.

Our /tools/ subfolder has attracted 106K backlinks from 908 domains:

If you already have paid tools, consider creating limited free versions. These serve a dual purpose:

• They can attract lots of great backlinks
• They let potential customers try out your tool, which can encourage them to convert

But what if you don’t have a tool already? What if you aren’t selling a product or service?

You can still create useful tools that net lots of backlinks.

Think calculators, converters, or even spreadsheet templates that offer some interactive functionality.

With AI tools, you can put basic prototypes together in a single prompt:

(I always recommend validating the code yourself or working with a developer to ensure anything you create with AI is sound and secure before publishing it on your site.)

5. Update Existing Content with GSC Query Data

Effort: Medium
Area: Content Optimization
Summary: Takes time to do at scale, but can help your existing content rank higher and drive more traffic

Updating your existing content is a great way to improve your SEO with less effort than creating completely new content.

But it’s not just a case of changing your title tags and making minor content edits.

Instead, you need to make strategic updates if you want to see a measurable impact on your traffic and rankings.

What’s an easy way to do that?

Optimizing for keywords Google is already ranking you for but that you’re not yet targeting.

Here’s how:

First, jump into GSC, head to the “Performance” report, and then make sure you’re on the “Queries” tab.

Then apply the following filters to identify the best opportunities:

• Make sure you select the “Average position” box above the graph
• Sort by impressions from highest to lowest
• Filter by position, starting with “Smaller than 20”

You’re looking for relevant queries for which you have a lot of impressions but few (or zero) clicks.

Filtering by average position means you see keywords you’re already ranking for. This just makes it more likely that, when you optimize for them, you’ll rank higher, faster.

The theory is that if Google is already placing your page on the first page or two for that term, it likely thinks your content is already at least somewhat relevant and of decent quality.

Click on these to see which page is getting impressions for that query:

Sometimes multiple pages will appear. But it’ll usually be pretty clear which page is most relevant for each one.

Once you have these keywords and the corresponding pages, it’s time to optimize your content for them:

• If the keyword is very close to your target keyword for the entire piece of content, you might want to update your title tag to include that keyword
• If it’s just a related keyword, consider adding it to your headings or throughout your content where it’s natural
• You could add question queries as new headings, or within a dedicated FAQ section

6. Target New and Trending Keywords

Effort: High
Area: Keyword Strategy
Summary: Not always easy to scale, but can lead to great traffic and backlink opportunities

Most keywords are competitive for the simple reason that there are LOTS of sites trying to rank for them.

But when you target “new” terms, you’re naturally competing with fewer people.

This means you can often rocket your way to the top of the search results.

For example, take the voice search guide I mentioned earlier. Brian added this to the site back in 2018, when people were just starting to talk about voice search as a channel.

Because the term “voice search” was relatively new (especially compared to old school keywords in the SEO niche like “link building”), Brian’s guide cracked the bottom of the first page within a week.

But how can you do the same?

Staying on top of trends is the simple answer, although this does require some effort.

There’s a lot to say for just keeping an eye on social media, monitoring Google trends, and generally “staying on top of” what’s going on in your niche.

We did this ourselves recently when DeepSeek R1 was announced. This shook up the AI world, and we wanted to get on top of it.

So, within about two weeks, we had an article live that explained all the key facts and stats around DeepSeek:

We hold the number one spot for the target keyword:

A keyword that didn’t exist until the week before our post went live:

And this page already has 259 backlinks from 63 referring domains:

There’s a distinction here between new keywords and trending keywords. By their nature, many new keywords will trend for a little while. You might see a spike in traffic for a short period when people are first mass searching for that term.

But the goal is to target new keywords that are likely to continue to bring traffic, links, and conversions over time.

For example, DeepSeek was clearly a trending topic at the time. But even months later, we still see fairly stable traffic to the page:

And as people will continue to talk about and write about DeepSeek over time, we’ll likely continue to attract some backlinks too.

How can you find “new” keywords to target in your niche?

As I mentioned above, just keeping an ear to the ground in your industry for relevant new terms, tools, products, and concepts is a good starting point.

But you can actively find new keywords with tools like Exploding Topics.

This shows you trending keywords across timeframes and categories. It prioritizes topics that are seeing huge growth (hence the name), so you can get in on them before the rest of the industry catches up.

7. Optimize for Key UX Signals

Effort: Medium
Area: Technical SEO/UX
Summary: Not an “official” ranking factor, but still worth optimizing for, and can improve other important business metrics

Website owners have long thought Google uses user experience signals in its ranking algorithms.

We don’t know the specifics and likely won’t any time soon. But we do know that Google uses clicks. It’s not hard to imagine they use some form of dwell time and bounce rate too.

Thankfully, optimizing for these signals generally improves the user experience. This makes it a method of improving your SEO that can also improve your bottom line.

How?

Because a better UX leads to happier users, which makes them more likely to convert.

Here’s how to improve your user experience and important UX signals:

Answer User Questions Fast

Answer important questions quickly, and don’t bury the most important parts of your content under lots of fluff.

It just makes sense to give users what they came to your content for, fast.

We do this on our posts to minimize the time to value for the user:

Structure Your Content for Scanning

Making your content more scannable makes it more readable. And the easier it is for users to read your content, the longer they’re likely to spend on it.

Make your content scanner-friendly by:

• Using clear H2 and H3 headings that preview your content
• Keeping paragraphs short (2-3 sentences maximum)
• Adding bulleted or numbered lists for steps and key points
• Including ample white space between sections

We put a lot of focus on all of these at Backlinko. Our posts are all visual-heavy, use short sentences and paragraphs, and we design them to be highly scannable:

Simplify Your Language

Using simple language makes your content easier for your users to understand. And if your users can understand it better, they’re more likely to engage with it.

Plus, if it’s easier for Google’s algorithms to understand your content, they may find it easier to understand which keywords are relevant to your content. And therefore might make it more likely that you rank for those terms.

Here are some practical ways to simplify your writing:

• Use shorter words when possible (e.g., “use” instead of “utilize”)
• Aim for an 6th-8th grade reading level for most content (technical content may go beyond this)
• Avoid jargon and industry terminology where you can, but if you must use it, be sure to explain it
• Vary your sentence length but try to keep it below 20-25 words

A good (free) tool to help with this is the Hemingway Editor:

Add Compelling Visuals to Your Content

Using visuals in your content makes it more engaging and splits up long sections of text. You can also use them to help explain or solidify complex concepts in your readers’ minds.

Visuals might include:

• Custom graphics
• Charts and graphs
• Screenshots
• Formatted tables
• Videos

But it can also be a simple quote or note that you format differently from the rest of your content.

Here’s an example of how we use visuals in our content:

This short snippet of a post has a bullet list (which helps for scanning and to break up text), a custom graphic, and a formatted quote.

8. Shift From ToFu to BoFu Keywords

Effort: High
Area: Keyword Strategy
Summary: Opportunity to drive more traffic and more sales

You can think of a marketing funnel as having three parts:

• Top of the Funnel (ToFu), or the awareness stage
• Middle of the Funnel (MoFu), or the interest/consideration stage
• Bottom of the Funnel (BoFu), or the conversion/action stage

Targeting top-of-the-funnel keywords has long been a huge part of many SEO strategies. It involves writing content on informational queries with the goal to drive huge amounts of traffic — focusing on volume, and hopefully converting later.

But things have changed.

AI tools, AI Overviews, and other SERP features have reduced the available clicks (and therefore traffic) you can drive to your site.

Which keywords have been hit hardest?

You guessed it: informational ToFu queries.

If you already run your own website, you probably don’t need me to tell you that. There’s a good chance you’ve seen a drop in traffic from these kinds of keywords.

And we feel your pain.

Our clicks for queries containing “what is” (a highly informational keyword modifier) have been cut in half from their peak in May 2024 — the month Google released their AI Overviews.

But here’s what’s interesting:

Our Top 3 rankings have remained stable during this period.

This shows the issue isn’t our SEO performance. Instead, fewer people are clicking through to websites for informational queries.

What kinds of queries have been driving more traffic to our site?

Keywords closer to the bottom of the funnel. Some have seen clicks grow more than 400% in the past few months:

Users searching for keywords like “website traffic checker” are looking to solve a problem immediately.

And that’s exactly what our free website traffic checker lets them do:

These kinds of keywords may tend to bring less traffic overall. But the traffic they do bring is far more likely to convert into actual customers.

Here are some of the most common types of BoFu keywords you can target:

• Buy [product]
• [Product] pricing
• Best [product] for [specific need]
• [Product] reviews
• [Product] vs. [Product]

Don’t Abandon TOFU Completely

While you should shift resources toward BoFu keywords, some top-of-funnel content still has value.

The main benefits of strategic ToFu content include:

• Building topical authority in your niche
• Supporting your site structure through internal linking
• Creating brand awareness when your brand appears in AI Overviews

9. Use Broken Link Building

Effort: High
Area: Link Building
Summary: Simple but often effective link building technique

Broken link building involves finding sites that are linking to broken pages. Then, you suggest your relevant page as a better alternative.

This approach works because:

1. You’re helping website owners improve their site (fewer broken links means a better user experience)
2. You’re offering a ready-made solution (your content) that makes fixing the problem easy
3. It creates a win-win situation rather than a one-sided request

Here’s how to do it:

Jump into Semrush’s Backlink Analytics tool and enter one of your competitors.

Head straight to the “Indexed Pages” tab and tick the “Broken Pages” box:

The idea is to look in the Backlinks and Domains columns for broken pages with links pointing to them. You’re looking for pages with links for which you have (or could create) a relevant alternative.

You’ll typically find some irrelevant pages in here, or pages that you won’t be able to replicate. And some simply won’t have great backlinks pointing to them.

You might also find pages that aren’t actually broken or have redirects pointing to them. So just be sure to try and open the page to confirm it’s actually broken.

In the HubSpot example above, it looks like their page on co-marketing stats would be a good candidate. It has 254 links pointing to it, so let’s click that number to see where these links are coming from.

On the next page, click the “Best” option to filter out nofollow links (which won’t pass SEO value if we get them).

It looks like the GrowthFolks.io link is from a fairly recent post (“Ultimate Guide for 2025”).

You’re more likely to land a link if the site owner is actively updating the content. Rather than targeting pages that added the original link 5+ years ago.

If we check out that page, we can see they’re linking to the broken HubSpot page over a statistic:

If you were a HubSpot competitor, and you had your own page of co-marketing statistics, you could reach out to this site for a link.

In your outreach email, you’d want to highlight:

• That you found their page useful
• The fact the stat link is broken
• That you have a good replacement (with a link to your resource)

Here’s an example of how Brian Dean did exactly this:

10. Speed Up Your Website

Effort: Medium
Area: Technical SEO
Summary: Not as big a factor as it used to be, but still important and often easy to optimize

How quickly (or slowly) your site loads has a direct impact on your Google rankings. It has had an impact for a long time.

Nowadays, a fast-loading website is pretty much a prerequisite for ranking and providing a good user experience (which can affect metrics like conversions).

Making small changes here is unlikely to massively improve your SEO. But if your site isn’t already loading that fast, you may be able to make a decent impact.

You can get a quick benchmark of how fast your site loads with Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

Here are a few quick tips to help improve your site speed:

• Compress and optimize images on your site
• Move to a better web host
• Reduce webpage file size
• Delete unnecessary 3rd party scripts

For more on this, check out our full guide to improving your page speed.

11. Build Your Visibility Beyond Traditional Search Results

Effort: Very High
Area: Brand Authority
Summary: Long-term strategy that has the potential to massively boost your online visibility

Our final tip for improving your SEO is more about improving your online visibility as a whole.

Why is that important?

Because search has changed a lot in the past few years. Ranking on page 1 no longer has the impact it used to.

While ranking at the very top is still what we all want, there is a lot to gain from shifting some focus to platforms beyond your website.

I showed an example of a SERP earlier on that was packed with ads, an AI Overview, and a People Also Ask section. But there are other SERP features you should consider as your SEO strategy evolves.

For example, look at this SERP:

We rank pretty well (the third regular organic link). But there’s a video carousel at the top of the page where we don’t appear.

And here’s an example of a SERP where we’re sitting lower than a “Discussions and forums” block:

These are missed opportunities that we have some control over.

Okay, we can’t choose the discussions people have on Reddit. But we can think about developing a Reddit marketing strategy. And we can put more resources into creating videos.

Beyond potentially appearing in more of these important SERP features, there are other benefits to broadening your visibility horizons.

By appearing in wider discussions, you’ll also:

• Signal authority to both traditional search engines and AI systems (like AI Overviews)
• Create new ways for your audience to find you (like on YouTube)
• Diversify your traffic sources, reducing your dependence on traditional Google rankings

Not only can it lead to your brand appearing in the discussions that are ranking in search results. But it can also give AI tools more context about your business.

For example, Google’s AI Overviews often feature forums like Reddit in the links section:

And tools like ChatGPT Search often use forum results to display information about brands:

Need More Guidance to Improve Your SEO?

Improving your SEO is all about picking the tasks that are likely to have the highest impact on your website.

There are simply too many things you “could” be doing that will quickly use up your resources without getting meaningful results.

The tips in this guide are some of the best ways to improve your SEO. But if you’re looking for a more comprehensive list of tips, check out our complete SEO checklist.