How To Create An Effective SEO Strategy For 2021

As we approach the end of the year, individuals and businesses alike start to think about the new goals they can achieve the following year. While these goals can vary, there are some universal goals shared by companies everywhere. The main objectives being to gain more customers and improve their revenue. One effective way to do this is with SEO.

Appearing more often on the search engines provides a business with the opportunity to attract targeted audiences’ attention and turn them into loyal customers. However, this cannot happen without an effective SEO campaign strategy in place.

What is an SEO strategy?

An SEO strategy is the process of planning and implementing an SEO campaign designed to reach the goals the client wants to achieve, mainly to improve search engine ranking position. However, SEO can help boost brand awareness, increase the number of customers, improve a DA score, and more, and so the strategy will reflect the goal it is trying to achieve.

How to develop an SEO strategy

Our step by step guide will detail everything you need to know about the best SEO strategies to implement in 2021 to help grow your organic visitors.

Step 1: Create a list of keywords

A campaign without keywords will do little to help you. No matter what goal you are trying to achieve, you can be confident that keywords play an essential role in achieving it. After all, search engines revolve around users entering keywords into the search bar. Therefore, this is why the first step involves forming a list of keywords.

You could discover these manually by typing a relevant word using Google Suggest, but this is a very time-consuming process. If you want an effective SEO strategy, you must conduct keyword researchKeyword research helps websites unearth the best keywords to drive traffic and visibility. This research is supported by a number of powerful web-based tools, the best of which we’ve listed here. more efficiently. It is possible to find these keywords quickly and easily with the help of a keywordKeywords are the words and phrases that potential customers might search for to find your business. research tool.

Top Tip: Use both keyword research tools and Google Suggest

The tools allow you to find keywords quickly, which enables you to start, but as you are plucking keywords straight from Google, you know people are actually searching for these terms, and so it couldn’t get much better than that!

Carrying out keyword research

When carrying out this essential SEO keyword research step, you need to look at two key points:

1. Are the keywords highly competitive, or are they reasonably low in competition?
2. Then, look at the conversion rateA conversion rate is the percentage of visitors that take a desired action on your site.. Are the keywords high or low conversionA conversion is a desirable result on a website that leads to an action such as completing an order, filling out a form, or simply clicking on a link. rates?

Never assume that you should be using certain words over others until you have compared these details. For example, long-tail keywords are usually less competitive and could help you rank faster and better, so you could benefit from using these. However, remember your industry might prefer short tail search terms instead.

Use the right tools

Tools like Google Keyword plannerThe Google Keyword Planner Tool helps you find new keywords and synonyms based on the ones you already rank for. will enable you to view the search volume, while SEMrush will also let you carry out competitor keyword research. This competitor analysis proves extremely useful in gaining results yourself. If a competitor is already ranking well for a keyword, you don’t need to target it as well. You need to be using the right tools to be able to form a long list (a minimum of ten) of keywords that are most relevant to your business, bearing in mind the above points.

Why are these keywords important? You can place these keywords in your blog posts and meta descriptions when you create content.

Step 2: Build topics around the keywords

Type your keywords into Google and analyse the current content that exists on that first page. As you scroll down the top ten results, see if any patterns are emerging. This will give you a big helping hand as to what it is Google likes. How-to guides might frequently display for one search while lists might be popular for another, such as “5 Ways.” From this, you can build up a list of topic ideas that will stand a chance at ranking on that first page.

If you aren’t confident at coming up with topics yourself, you don’t have to struggle. As part of an SEO content strategy, you can let our experts develop engaging topics for your on-site and off-site pieces of content based on what is relevant for you.

Top Tip: Stand out from the crowd

For an effective SEO strategy to play out, you need to try and find ways to stand out, including how you write your content. You could focus on creating better content than what currently exists. Or you could focus on creating high-quality content in a different form – this could catch Google’s eye. If you put a fresh spin on a topic, going in-depth to the topic rather than churning out a better version of the same style of content, your content might stand a better chance at being shared. After all, not everyone has the time to write such an in-depth and unique piece, and so you might find yourself being referenced from time to time in other people’s content, which might make Google sit up and take notice.

Choosing your form of content

You want any topic that you write to hook people in, and finding a way to be different could be the key. That being said, you still should consider the search intent.

What is a keyword’s search intent?

The search intent is the reason for the query. Why did the user search for this term? Are they looking for a service? Are they looking to buy a product? Or are they interested in brushing up their knowledge? If your piece of content is 5000 words, but the user is trying to buy a pair of shoes, the chances are, they aren’t going to stop to appreciate all of your hard work. Instead, they are going to keep searching to find what they need.

Using search intent to help

If your content hasn’t found success in its current form, look at the search intent and what your potential customers are stopping to read. Rewriting the content in the new year could prove extremely useful.

Always let search intent drive you in the right direction for the best results.

Step 3: Optimise Your Website

Coming up with topic ideas and creating a fantastic piece of content is only half of the work. You now need to optimise your content, but did you know there is a right way and wrong way to do this? The best way to determine whether your website is currently using any of the improper optimisation techniques is to let Technical SEO specialists carry out a technical SEO audit.

This will highlight everything you are doing right, but also everything you are currently doing wrong. It is the latter aspect that will negatively affect where you rank.

There are then multiple ways you can optimise your website. You will want to ensure that you are implementing the following on your website:

• Internal linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages.
• Meta descriptions tags
• Header tags
• Title tags
• Alt tags
• High-quality content
• The use of keywords (on-site and in your URLs)

With the right on-page SEO strategy formed, you will be helping any off-site strategy, such as social media and link buildingLink building is a process of acquiring links pointing to your website. These links are obtained by creating content, participating in social media or commenting on other blogs., that you start too.

Step 4: Develop that awesome content

Coming up with the topics and developing ideas from your keywords is only the start. Now you need to let those keywords do their magic by creating your content and publishing it.

A solid SEO content marketing strategy as part of your overall SEO campaign is crucial. Not only because it helps your on-page SEO and ranking position, but it can help establish you as an expert.

When forming your SEO content strategy, you should be researching what your competitors are doing. Upon finishing your research, the right course of action might be to start creating pillar content and clusters.

No matter what form of content you write, you need to ensure that it is engaging, well-written, and appropriate for the audience. Check for spelling mistakes, incorrect punctuation, and grammatical issues before posting to ensure you aren’t giving your audience a reason to head elsewhere.

It is not just about how your content reads. Think about how it looks on the screen. Breaking up large chunks of text with aesthetically pleasing and easy to view infographics, for example, or with helpful screenshots and images can take your content to the extra level.

Also, think about whether your content will display correctly when viewed on mobile. If it doesn’t, then optimising your website for mobile is a must. This opens the opportunity to gain more organic trafficOrganic search traffic (sometimes called natural or unpaid search) is the traffic that's driven to a website because of unpaid placement on a search engine results page., especially as voice search becomes more prominent.

Top Tip: Refresh your content

If you have published content more than a year ago, and it isn’t helping improve your ranking position, then why not improve it? Nothing is stopping you from rewriting your own content to match the search intent of your audience. You can add more relevant information, data, images, and more to the content, and do it all in a way that is going to appeal to both Google and its users.

Step 5: Build high-quality links

With content nailed on your own site, you now need to ensure that people see it. Waiting around for people to come from the search results can take time, though. Sometimes you need a little help from backlinks, referral traffic, and a link building strategy.

What are backlinks

Backlinks are all the links that are directed back at your site. The chances are if you have been running your business for a long time that you already have a big link profile.

What is referral traffic?

This is traffic that hasn’t come directly from the SERPs to your site. Instead, they will have clicked on links pointing back to your site from another website or social media platform.

What is a link building strategy?

A link building is a plan you form to build up the backlinks to your website yourself based on your specific goal. For example, you might want to increase your DA, so a resource link building campaign could prove useful. You might be interested in pushing yourself up the ranks or finding new audiences. Your goal will affect your strategy.

For the most part, backlinks are great. However, not all of them are. So when you start to put together your SEO link building strategy, the first thing you will want to do is perform a backlink checker. This will analyse all the links that are currently pointing to your site. You can discover the DA score and see whether these links are helping or hindering your ranking efforts. If you have previously tried to do link building yourself with no success, the problem might lie in the backlinks you have but didn’t know you had.

With the SEO backlinks checker completed, you will want to start working with an expert who regularly creates link building strategies. We offer link building services that ensure you have high-quality content, target specific audiences, and post on relevant sites with a good DA.

For the most effective outcome, working with experts is the solution, as the blogger outreach team are experts in building relationships with bloggers, and this is a skill that takes a while to possess.

Top Tip: Use those keywords (again)

Remember, at the beginning of this guide, when we said about keywords being important? Well, it is time to make the most of them again with your link building strategy. When you create your backlink, you will include it as an anchor textAnchor text is the text highlighted by a hyperlink. The words highlighted are crucial for SEO, informing Google’s crawling bots about the content of the site linked to. in the content. This anchor text tells Google and other search engines what the linked-to website is about. By using your keywords in your anchor text, you are increasing your chances of ranking well! Remember, backlinks are still a major ranking factor.

Step 6: Measure, track, evaluate

As part of any SEO campaign strategy, the key is not just carrying out the above techniques but also monitoring what happens afterwards. When you see these measurements in front of you, you can see exactly how you can improve certain aspects. For example, if your on-page SEO is up to scratch, but your report tells you your traffic is still low, then maybe it is time for off-page SEO to begin.

A good report will show you everything from your rankings to your conversions.

Top Tip: Be patient

It takes time and effort for results to come about in SEO, but by monitoring the progress the entire time, you can see the slow but steady impact it is making, so learn to be patient with the process, and you will be rewarded eventually.

For most advice on starting up your SEO campaign for the new year, get in touch with our team today.