10 Insane SEO Tactics that Work for Pros

In this article we’ll look at 10 SEO tactics that SEO pros utilize to dominate search. We’ll lightly touch on what they are, but deep dives will be covered in other articles. You won’t find any of these in any beginner SEO articles. Let’s get right into it.

10. Programmatic SEO

Programmatic SEO is the process of using automation to create web pages for search engines based on data, to improve visibility and rankings at scale.

Programmatic SEO Example

Look at the top 5 results as you type the following queries into Google:

1. “best burger in dallas”
2. “best omelettes in new york”
3. “best nachos in chicago”

You’ll start to notice that the same actors tend to always show up in top results: Tripadvisor, Uber Eats, and Yelp.

In fact, if you query “best [insert food] in [insert city]” you will most likely see the same actors. This is because these sites have programmatically created dedicated landing pages targeting every single [food] x [city] combination humanly imaginable. Most likely, they have also created with automation a way for them to create new landing pages if a new search query combination has never been conducted.

How can you apply Programmatic SEO?

Programmatic SEO is more about thinking about the questions your target customers are asking, doing keyword research to confirm volume, and coming up with a plan to create web pages dynamically through a database.

Here are some ideas to get you thinking:

1. Ultimate Guide to [insert activity] in [insert location] - Ideal for travel, local businesses, or activity-based sites.
2. [Insert number] Must-Visit [insert type of place] in [insert location] - Excellent for travel blogs, local guides, or cultural exploration sites.
3. Discover the Best [insert type of food/dish] in [insert location] - Perfect for food blogs, restaurant reviews, or culinary travel sites.

9. Parasite SEO

Parasite SEO is a SEO tactic where you find a high domain authority of a third-party website, publish content on that site in order to rank high in search engine results. Many affiliate marketers use this tactic by publishing content and with affiliate links. Examples have shown that the same article published on high domain authority sites often outrank niche sites.

Common websites used for this purpose include:

1. Social media sites - LinkedIn, Facebook, X
2. Video sites - YouTube
3. Question and answer sites - Quora, Stack Overflow, Reddit
4. News and general interest sites - Outlook India

8. Content Writing

A social media study shared by Neil Patel shows that the best performing content are “How to” and “listicle” articles.

A few tips on how to write a good “How to” article

1. Write for a specific topic and audience.
2. Topic: learning to ride a motorcycle
3. Audience: woman
4. Example title: How to learn to ride a motorcycle for woman
5. Break process down step by step.
6. Use headings, bullet points, and numbered lists to make your content scannable.
7. Use tables, charts, images, audio, and video to explain.

Ultimately, the best how to articles are comprehensive and helpful to people.

A few tips on how to write a good “listicle” article

I wrote a listicle articled titled “50+ Interesting Elon Musk Facts” ranking page 1 for the term “interesting facts about elon musk.” Here are some tips that contributed to it’s result.

1. Write a title that stands out. Many other sites on page 1 SERPs stick with “10 facts” while I used 50+.
2. I keep each fact to short concise sentences. Easily digestable for the reader.
3. I include external links for the reader to learn about each fact.
4. Keep to a consistent flow, logical and/or chronological progression.

7. Sneaky Backlink Building

Backlink building is the process of getting links from other websites to your own. While Gary Illyes, an analyst at Google has come out and said that backlinks is no longer a top 3 factor in determining search rank, practitioners have come out and disagreed based on what they’re seeing.

A higher domain authority will always have a higher probability of outranking a site with a lower authority. Securing quality backlinks continues to be the most effective method to increase a website’s domain authority.

With all that said, we’re not going to focus on any of the traditional ways of link building like making linkable assets, guest blogging, or paid backlinks. We’re going to talk about sneaky backlink building.

Connor Showler over on X, shares many examples on how anyone can get a backlink from high 90+ DR sites. His most recent post involving how to create GPT’s on OpenAI’s GPT store with an opportunity to create a backlink to your website through your builder profile.

6. Internal Linking

Internal linking is important for SEO because:

1. It spreads link equity around your site
2. Helps search engines crawl and index
3. Increases content helpfulness

The general thesis is that if you have a landing page with strong authority and other relevant pages that could benefit from improved search rankings, adding internal links from the authoritative page to those needing a boost can effectively enhance their rankings.

The problem is, most SEO marketers forget how to do this or simply don’t do it at all. There are a few tools to help you do this automatically like Link Whisper (not an affiliate link).

5. Content Planning

I’ve found that the hardest part of creating content is not the act of creating content itself but knowing what content to create. What if there was a template to provide a framework to focus your ideas and generate quasi infinite number of content ideas that is relevant for the purposes of building topic clusters supporting topical authority?

Check out this free Content Planning Spreadsheet Template created by Growth Machine.

When you open it, you’d want to make a copy for yourself so you can input your own data.

4. Studying SERPs

When you’re writing meta tags, ultimate guides, and reducing page load speeds it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. Once in a while you have to take a step back and look at the SERPs and ask yourself does my content align with user search intent?

The search results for “red shoes for sale in dallas” are primarily ecommerce product pages. So, if you’re writing an article attempting to rank for this term, it is not going to happen unless you have a product to sell.

Be aware of the 4 different types of keywords:

1. Informational - users want information on a topic
2. Navigational - users to go to a specifc destination
3. Commercial - users conducting research on products and services
4. Transactional - users want to purchase something

3. Request Indexing in Google Search Console

After you launch a new web page your job is done right? WRONG! I’ve gotten into the habit of going to Google Search Console and manually submiting the URL to request for indexing/re-indexing. If you don’t do this, there’s no telling when Google will index your newly created web page.

What if you publish hundreds/thousands of new pages? The problem with Google Search Console is there is a daily add limit for manually submitted URL’s. Ian Nuttall built URLMonitor to solve this exact problem. URL Monitor can automatically do bulk indexing submission requests. 400 pages a day on the starter plan at the time of this writing.

2. Delete Dead Pages

Here’s the thing with Google. It likes quality over quantity. It likes web pages that helps people answer their queries in Google search. Google much rather you have one great page than one hundred okay pages. If you have a great web page, Google will shovel as much traffic as it can to that web page.

Web masters have found a boost in traffic by deleting web pages that receive little to no traffic. Google likes websites that are easy to crawl and pages that are of high quality. It does not like to waste crawl resources on pages that provide little value.

So, pull up your web analytics, select the time period for the last 12 months and identify the web pages that have little to no traffic (set a threshold). Make a determination of whether you should keep, delete, or update.

1. YouTube

When a user conducts a search you want your digital properties to occupy as much search real estate as much as possible. YouTube videos are often displayed before site links if available. What if you could be visible in both the video placement and the site links?

This is precisely what Jasper.ai an AI marketing copilot software company deployed as their early SEO growth tactic. They utilized programmatic SEO to deploy web pages at scale, generative AI to write content, an editorial team to check for quality and accuracy, and a creative team to create videos. Those videos would then be published on YouTube and embedded on the web pages.

This strategy allowed their brand to occupy more of the SERP real estate. The video would ranked on the video result listings and the landing page would be ranked on regular site link listings.

To learn more about what Austin Distel’s team did at Jasper, sign up to watch the Webflow webinar.

Jasper’s YouTube video and the site link are both shown in Google SERPs, occupying more search real estate.

In Conclusion

It is not enough to create unique content anymore. You will have to be familiar with generative AI, dynamically created landing pages, and other content medium platforms (YouTube and Podcasts) to stay competitive. The biggest winner in the post ChatGPT era is the ability to create helpful entertaining content at great speed and scale.

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