13 Advanced SEO techniques & strategies for 2026

Most websites hit a ceiling with basic SEO. You've done the keyword research, optimized your title tags, and built some links — but visibility eventually plateaus.

Breaking through that ceiling means adopting techniques that separate good SEO from great SEO. They’re the kind of techniques that compound over time and hold up even as search evolves.

Below, we'll cover 13 of the most effective advanced SEO techniques.

Our list of advanced techniques goes beyond the fundamentals and gives you ways to improve in 2026 — including how to handle the shift to AI-generated search results.

1. Improve your content's time to value

Improving your content’s time to value (the time it takes for a user to gain value from a piece of content) gives your users what they’re looking for and helps AI extract answers from your content.

Hero images, author bios, and long-winded intros can lead to a poor time to value. And poor time to value can negatively affect three key engagement metrics:

• Bounce rate: The percentage of website visits with little engagement before the user leaves
• Dwell time: The average time a user spends on a page before returning to the search results
• Average session duration: How long a typical session lasts

The above metrics aren’t verified ranking factors, but leaked internal Google documents show that user interactions and signals play a role in visibility in search engine visibility. Plus, there’s evidence that Perplexity uses engagement metrics to order citations. 

So, how do you improve your content’s time to value? By putting the most important information at the top of the page and directly under headings. 

For example, Investopedia's laissez-faire economics article does a great job with time to value. In the image below, you can see they hit on a definition of the term in the image and provide a summary of the article in the "Key Takeaways" section. These tactics give readers additional information and help them decide if they want to keep reading. 

Review your top pages (those with lots of traffic and/or conversions) and rework them if they don’t deliver value right away.

2. Build topic clusters

Building topic clusters (pieces of content that share a central topic) that provide comprehensive and reliable coverage can improve website authority that translates to better organic and AI visibility. 

Typically, topic clusters revolve around a pillar page, which is a page that targets a broad topic. The rest of the cluster is made of cluster pages on more specific subtopics. Each cluster page links to and from the pillar page like this:

AI systems and search engines prefer referencing content from trustworthy websites. And building relevant topic clusters helps you establish authority and trustworthiness in your industry. 

Think of it this way: If a website only had a single piece of content on a topic, you probably wouldn't consider them an expert on it. But if it had a whole cluster of related content, you'd probably think the site knew what it was talking about.

Use Keyword Strategy Builder to turn a seed topic into a full pillar-and-cluster architecture — with search volumes and other metrics mapped across the entire cluster.

Enter one to five seed keywords into Keyword Strategy Builder and click “Create.”

You’ll get a list of pillar pages and subpages. You’ll also see the keywords for every page.

Go through and find the most relevant topic clusters to build for your site.

3. Leverage strategic internal linking

Leveraging strategic internal linking helps search systems better understand your content and site structure, and it helps users navigate your site.

Most sites have internal linking that satisfies basic SEO, but for advanced SEO you’ll want to consider additional factors like linking to your most important pages from other semantically and topically relevant pages. And using descriptive anchor text (the link’s text) for every internal link.

One way to improve internal linking is to rely on pages with the most backlinks, since these pages tend to have high authority. 

To do this, analyze your site with the Backlinks tool. Enter your domain in the tool, head to the "Indexed Pages" tab, and sort by "Domains."

Look for opportunities to link from these pages to topically related pages that need a push in visibility. And think carefully about the anchor text you use.

You should also use this technique when you launch new content to improve its chance of being crawled and indexed. 

4. Maximize your SERP real estate

Maximizing your search engine results page (SERP) real estate helps your brand occupy more space in search results, making searchers more likely to notice and engage with your brand. 

You can increase your SERP real estate by adding structured data to your pages and creating multimedia.

Structured data (or schema markup) is a type of code that helps Google understand your content better. And when you use structured data, Google can show rich snippets (extra information like ratings or prices) in the search results for your site.

For example, Crate & Barrel is the only website with structured data shown in the below results. As a result, their site takes up more real estate than the other sites listed.

To implement structured data, follow these guidelines from Google and use the right format for your content type.

In addition to adding schema markup, you should create multimedia content (any type of content that's not text — like videos, images, or podcasts). Multimedia content can help you show up in multiple places for a single search. 

For example, for the term "how to vacuum seal without a vacuum sealer," Serious Eats shows up in the AI Overview and in Google's "Images" tab. 

Another way to maximize your SERP real estate that’s specific to local businesses is to create a Google Business Profile. Business Profiles can influence how your business appears on Google Search, Google Maps, and Google Shopping:

By doing these things to grow your SERP real estate, you can improve your click-through rate, brand awareness, and visibility.

5. Find unlinked mentions 

Finding unlinked mentions opens the door to potential backlinks.

Unlinked mentions are still useful. However, linked mentions pass link equity to your site and send you direct traffic. 

You can typically find unlinked mentions in content like forums, news articles, and blog posts.

Tools like Brand Monitoring can help you keep track of when and where your brand is being discussed.

Once you know who has mentioned you without linking to your site, reach out and ask if they can provide a link. Here’s an email template to use:

Hi [Name],

Thanks for mentioning [Brand Name] in your article, "[Article Title]." We really appreciate the shout-out!

I noticed the brand name isn't linked. If it's helpful for your readers, would you mind linking it to [URL] so they can easily find more information?

Thanks again for the mention, and keep up the great work!

Best,[Your Name]

6. Remove or repurpose underperforming content

Removing or repurposing underperforming content ensures that every page on your site is helping your SEO efforts.

Every piece of quality content on your website should serve a purpose: to drive search visibility, convert leads, acquire web mentions, boost your authority, etc.

Content that isn't serving a purpose is taking up crawl budget and diluting your site's overall quality signals. 

To run an audit and find underperforming content, use the method outlined in our article on SEO content pruning. Following the guide, you'll build out a spreadsheet that helps you identify exactly which URLs aren't performing. 

Then, you can take the following actions based on your evaluation of a piece of content:

• Keep: The page is performing, so no actions are needed
• Improve: Make edits and improvements to see if the page performs better
• Repurpose: Consolidate two or more pages into a single page, with any removals being 301 (permanently) redirected
• Remove: The content serves no purpose and can't be repurposed elsewhere

This is a task that most sites should be running once or twice a year, depending on how much content they have.

7. Fix keyword cannibalization 

Fixing keyword cannibalization that occurs when multiple pages compete for the same keyword can improve visibility for the pages that were impacted. 

When multiple pages target the same keyword, they compete against one another in search results. And your preferred version might not be the one that performs best. Plus, having more than one page on the same topic splits link authority between them instead of consolidating it behind one strong page. 

Find specific keyword cannibalization issues in the “Cannibalization” tab in Position Tracking. Click “Keywords” to see a list of keywords with multiple ranking pages. Then click the keyword’s drop-down to see which pages are affected.

Once you've found the issues, you can do the following to fix them:

• Remove and 301 redirect cannibalized pages, typically after merging and consolidating pages
• Canonicalize cannibalized pages (which involves adding a snippet of HTML that identifies the primary page)
• Re-optimize pages for their respective keywords

8. Improve your crawl depth

Improving your crawl depth — how many clicks it takes to reach a page from your homepage — helps crawlers find and prioritize your important pages instead of wasting crawl budget on less important URLs.

Pages that are several clicks deep or poorly linked often get crawled less frequently, which can delay indexing or cause bots to miss them entirely. That means improving your crawl depth can help your pages get crawled and indexed more efficiently, which may lead to stronger visibility. 

Site Audit reports on crawl depth, internal link structure, and pages that can't be reached by crawlers, giving you a clear view of which pages are hard to find.

Start by configuring Site Audit. Then, head into your project, click “Issues,” and filter by “Crawlability” to see which issues impact your site’s crawlability.

Click any issue for the full list of affected pages. And click “How to fix” for tips to correct each issue.

Site Audit prioritizes which issues need fixing first. Start with errors, then move to warnings, and then notices. 

9. Anchor content to category entry points

Anchoring content to category entry points can increase visibility in AI answers because it targets the exact situations buyers describe in their prompts. 

A category entry point (CEP) is the specific moment that brings someone to your category. For example, the CEP for someone whose site is losing traffic might be "our traffic dropped and I can't tell why." That's different from the search engine keyword version of the same problem, which might be "how to increase traffic."

Building content around CEPs helps you capture the different prompts people use, so you can increase your visibility in LLMs.

To find your own CEPs:

• List 15-20 specific moments that bring buyers into your category (pull these from sales calls, support tickets, and the actual prompts people use)
• Check which moments your existing content already covers
• Write toward the uncovered ones first, framing each heading as the question a buyer would naturally ask

Find the prompts people are using in the Semrush Enterprise AIO Prompt Research tool. Just enter a topic to analyze.

If your brand doesn’t need an enterprise-level solution, use Prompt Research within the AI Visibility Toolkit.

Pair these prompts with research from other sources to identify which ones are most relevant to include in each CEP-focsued piece.

10. Keep your brand narrative consistent across the web

Keeping your brand narrative consistent across the web ensures search systems have accurate information and also signals that your brand is trustworthy.

If your company description or positioning vary across your website, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, review sites, and directories, search systems have conflicting information to reconcile. That can lead to misinformation about your brand in AI answers and hurt your credibility. 

To keep your narrative consistent:

• Use the same company description and value proposition across your site, social profiles, and any directories or listings you control
• Correct outdated or inaccurate third-party descriptions where you can (press mentions, review platforms, Wikipedia, etc.)
• Add structured data (schema markup) to your site to ensure Google is able to easily understand information about your organization, offerings, and key facts

Then, monitor how AI platforms describe your brand. Do this in the AI Visibility Toolkit with the Perception report. Within Enterprise AIO, use Concepts Analysis to see what concepts AI systems associate with your brand.

From there, prioritize strengthening concepts that are accurate but weakly associated with your brand. And correct any that are outdated or wrong. 

11. Optimize for AI extraction

Optimizing for AI extraction means structuring your content so AI systems can easily crawl, parse, and use it within responses.

Here are three areas of focus to make your content easier to extract:

• Crawlability: AI platforms use their own crawlers. Review your robots.txt file and server configuration to confirm major AI crawlers aren't blocked.
• Entity clarity: AI systems synthesize across many sources at once, so using consistent terminology about your brand and offerings makes your content easier to extract accurately.
• Citable structure: AI responses favor content that answers a question in a self-contained passage. Sections where the first sentence directly answers the heading (pictured below) outperform dense prose that buries the answer.

Semrush Enterprise AIO’s Content Optimization provides recommendations to improve your content’s performance in both organic and AI search. 

Alternatively, use the Content Toolkit’s Content Optimizer to make SEO and AI Visibility improvements. 

12. Prepare for agent-friendly interactions

Preparing for agent-friendly interactions ensures your site is capable of AI agents acting on it directly.

Most sites are built for people, and some common design choices may prevent agents from completing tasks. Review and potentially fix:

• Vague buttons: Labels like "Learn more" or "Get started" don't tell an agent what the action leads to. Use specific labels instead, like "Book a demo" or "Start free trial."
• Pop-ups and modals: These can block the page for an agent, which may not be able to dismiss them the way a person would. Avoid them on pages where you want agents to complete a task.
• Information that only appears in images: Agents may not be able to read text that's part of an image. Keep pricing, specs, and availability as actual text on the page.

For the full picture — including the SEO and off-site work that has to come before any of this — see our guide to optimizing for the agentic web. 

13. Audit and improve Core Web Vitals

Auditing and improving your pages’ Core Web Vitals (CWV) — Google's standardized page experience metrics — can boost your search engine rankings. 

The three CWV metrics are:

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): How quickly the main content of a page loads. Aim for under 2.5 seconds.
• INP (Interaction to Next Paint): How quickly the page responds to user input. Aim for under 200 milliseconds.
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): How much page elements move unexpectedly during load. Aim for under 0.1.

Check your site’s CWV scores using Google Search Console. Click “Core Web Vitals” under “Experience.” You’ll see a mobile and a desktop report. Click “Open Report” for either mobile or desktop to see a list of errors.

You’ll see errors categorized by their severity. Click into one of the errors to see some examples of affected URLs. 

Go through the report and fix any priority pages. Common fixes by metric include:

• LCP: Compress and properly size images, use a content delivery network (CDN), and preload key resources
• INP: Defer or remove non-essential JavaScript, break up long tasks, and use event delegation
• CLS: Set explicit dimensions on images and embeds, minimize dynamically injected content, and use appropriate fallback fonts

Contact a developer for assistance if you aren’t sure how to implement a fix.

Advance beyond the competition

Advanced SEO isn't about finding one tactic your competitors haven't discovered. It's about building a site that's consistently easier for search engines, AI systems, and users to understand and trust.

Rather than trying to implement all the above techniques at once, start by identifying your biggest opportunity:

• If your content isn't ranking, build topic clusters or fix keyword cannibalization
• If you're getting impressions but few clicks, test your title tags or expand your SERP real estate
• If you've hit a growth plateau, audit underperforming content and improve your internal linking

As you make changes, track your results with Semrush’s Position Tracking tool and keep iterating.