The Ultimate Guide to an Effective SEO Strategy in 2021

SEO strategies have been changing rapidly in the past few years. The newest trends and changes are just around the corner with 2022 on the horizon. To help you stay ahead of the game, we’ve created a guide to what an effective SEO strategy should like and all the variables you should take into consideration when creating and implementing a solid SEO strategy for your business’ website.

What is an SEO Strategy?

An SEO strategy is a plan for how your business will use SEO to reach its marketing goals.

A complete SEO strategy tackles several aspects that need to be fully optimized in order to rank your content on search engines like Google.

How to create an SEO strategy that works

In order to devise the right strategy for your business you need to do the following:

1. Market research

Before thinking of your SEO strategy, the first step you should take is conducting detailed market research. In order to do effective market research, you should first identify your target market, and then create personas of the people in this segment to better understand their needs, lifestyle, frustrations, etc.

After you have identified your audience’s needs and pain points by using the information gathered through your market research, it is time for you to come start taking a look at the way your main competitors are addressing your target audience and the elements that are working well for them

2. Competitor research

In order to outrank your main organic competitors, you need to understand who they are and what they’re doing. Good competitor research can help you to understand the content they are producing, what keywords they rank for organically, and how your site is fairing against theirs

What’s more, competitor research will give you a better understanding of where there might be opportunities in your industry that have not yet been tapped. Once you start analyzing who your main organic competitors are and what they are doing, you’ll be able to start getting a feel for what content your audience might be interested in and how you can improve the quality of your site.

As we mentioned before, this research is not only important from an SEO perspective but also gives invaluable insight into who your target audience is as well.

3. SERPs and type of content analysis

A step that most marketers out there are missing is the SERPs analysis and the type of content understanding. For an SEO strategy to be solid, you need to analyze the type of content that’s already ranking on Google for keywords relevant to your website.

When analyzing the type of content that’s currently ranking, you can identify what is working and what isn’t for those types of pages. For example, if a page ranks well on Google’s search engine results even though it doesn’t have any external links or shares/likes then this means that the content on it is to some degree more valuable and authoritative.

4. SEO strategy creation

After collecting all the data from the previous point, it’ll be time to start planning your SEO strategy around that. For your SEO strategy to be effective, it needs to be crafted in such a way that it fits the SEO trends of 2021 and is effective for your website.

The first thing you’ll need to do when creating an SEO strategy is to think about what keyword targets you want to focus on as well as which keywords are most important for ranking well on Google’s SERPs.

You also need to use these keywords in the right type of content. By this point, you should already have a solid idea of what the relevant content should look like in order to be considered relevant by Google.

How to Implement an SEO strategy

After you have designed the best SEO strategy for your business, you should focus on the following aspects for the strategy to be implemented correctly. Not doing these might lead to a failed SEO campaign no matter how solid your strategy is.

1. On-page SEO

For your SEO strategy to be implemented correctly, you need to do On-page SEO. On-page SEO is all about making your website’s content optimized. This way, users can find the information they are looking for and search engines can understand your content in a better way. On-page SEO includes:

• Title tags
• Meta descriptions
• Headings and subheadings
• Alt text and image names (alt tag)
• Internal linking
• Focusing on content relevance and quality
• Keyword research.

2. Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is all about getting links to your website from other websites or well-known blogs in the same niche as yours, so people can find you by looking at third-party sources that are relevant to what your site offers.

Off-page SEO includes:

• Social media marketing (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube)
• Guest blogging on other websites in the same niche as yours
• Inbound link building with authoritative sites that are relevant to what you offer
• Commenting on other blogs in your niche
• Press releases
• Email marketing and newsletters.

3. Conversion optimization

Having thousands of visitors a month but not being able to sell your product is a common problem when you don’t optimize for better conversion rates. In order to maximize the possibilities of converting, you need to make it as easy and simple as possible for the customer to buy, so that they do not hesitate or get lost in a sea of options.

Including CTAs or call to action is important for conversion optimization to work. CTAs are typically buttons that encourage the user to take action, whether it be signing up for a newsletter or purchasing your product without needing more information.

Craft your CTAs in a way that is clear and concise, so that it grabs the customer’s attention.

4. Lead generation

Not always will you be able to sell your product right away. Sometimes, it’s necessary to convince the potential buyer using different tactics and strategies such as email marketing.

Lead generation is a key part of an effective marketing strategy because it allows you to continue the pursuit of people who might be interested in your product.

Lead generators can take many forms, from contests and webinars to email campaigns that are sent out on a semi-regular basis. You should make sure that the leads generated by these efforts are qualified in some way and that they have an interest in your specific product.

5. Optimized web design

If you want your SEO strategy to be as effective as possible, you need to work on your web design. Optimizing your site for mobile devices is also a crucial part of the modern web design process.

Did you know that 94% of first impressions relate to your site’s web design? A web design that looks untrustworthy or difficult to understand will have a negative impact on your bounce rate, conversion rate, and ultimately your position on SERPs.

It is for this reason that you need to work on your web design.

How to know if your SEO strategy is working

In order to measure the results of your SEOctrategy, you need to use tools such as Google Search Console and Google Analytics to know what you are doing right and wrong. You can find a plethora of other tools to measure the effectiveness of your strategy, but these two will provide the most information on how you’re performing in relation to competitors.

An SEO strategy is like a living being, you need to constantly monitor it in order to make changes and little tweaks that allow you to reach your marketing goals.

You should always experiment with your SEO and do a lot of a/b testing to see what works better.

As I said before, you can follow up on your SEO strategy by using these tools:

Google Search Console

This free tool allows you to track your organic search performance and monitor the pages where your site is ranking. You can get a lot of information about what’s driving traffic from the SERPs including keyword positions, click-through rate, impressions, and more. It also helps with disavowing spammy links

Google analytics

This tool gives you all the information about your site’s traffic and how people are interacting with it. You can get information on where people enter, what they click on, or which pages they leave from.

Is SEO the right option for you?

If you have a business website and you want to increase your search engine rank or website traffic, then SEO is the right option for you. If your website does not have any visitors, it’s unlikely that search engines will find it and if they do find it, there might be no one looking at what you offer because of a lack of content to drive them in the right direction.

Therefore, SEO is always the right option if you want to increase your online presence, traffic, and ultimately, your ROI.