As the year progresses, we should take stock of the major developments in the SEO sector that everyone should be aware of if they want to be successful in the field.
To stay afloat in the increasingly competitive affiliate or ecommerce sectors, you’ll need to utilise excellent SEO tactics, whether your firm is entirely online or has an online component.
No one will buy what you’re offering if they can’t find you among the sea of businesses on the internet, so developing a solid SEO plan is a proven method to increase website traffic, hits, and sales.
This article should serve as a one-stop shop for novices and seasoned marketers alike for some of the most essential SEO recommendations.
We’ve compiled a list of nine SEO principles that are broad enough that most SEO marketers should be able to benefit from them, whether they’re doing freelance SEO work for others, running an affiliate marketing site, or running their own ecommerce business.
If you’re new to SEO, we’ve even gone so far as to describe what an SEO plan is in the section below.
- Introduction
- What Is An SEO Strategy?
- How To Craft A Winning SEO Strategy For 2021
- 1. Choosing Your Keywords
- 2. Analyze Your Competitor’s SEO Strategies
- 3. Create Better or Different Content
- 4. Make Your Content Stand Out
What Is An SEO Strategy?
In fact, before we get into the specifics, let’s define what an SEO strategy is.
Hopefully, you already know that SEO is the process of increasing the number of visitors to a page, and the site as a whole, by planning ahead and modifying the backend of your site to ensure that it appears at the top of people’s search results.
As you can see, the definition of SEO is more focused on the optimization’s end-goals, but how do you get there?
That’ll be your SEO strategy, which is the specific actions you take in both planning and execution to make your SEO dreams a reality.
It’s best to cover as many of them as possible, even if they’re usually presented as a list of actions and things to consider.
Think of your SEO strategy as plugging holes in the hull of your boat, because what you do wrong can do more harm to your site than doing everything right.
Try to cover as many of these as you can, and if you don’t have the time or funds to do so right now, make some notes and come back here later to finish the rest.
How To Craft A Winning SEO Strategy For 2021
So, let’s dive into the strategic tips that every aspiring SEO should be aware of in order to develop a viable strategy for 2021 and beyond.
As the world progresses into the Information Age, where more people than ever find businesses online, SEO will become increasingly important to stand out.
1. Choosing Your Keywords
If you know anything about SEO, you know how important it is to choose the right keywords.
It’s not as simple as identifying the most popular keywords and concentrating your efforts there.
If only it was that simple! There are numerous other factors to consider, which we will go over in detail here.
To begin, understand that keywords are the foundation of everything you do in SEO.
We will continue to search the internet using words until we move beyond the use of keyboards and spoken voice searches.
Those are the keywords you’re looking for.
When you search for a term, Google and other search engines try to provide you with the most relevant results possible, all based on an increasingly complex algorithm.
You want that algorithm to be your friend, and the best way to do so is to engage in some friendly competition. Sure, you should go after keywords where you can, but you should also pick your battles.
You won’t be able to rank for every keyword, and you shouldn’t devote too much time and effort to one that you won’t be able to achieve.
Consider this: in the time it takes to crack a difficult keyword, you could target three easier ones and get the same amount of traffic.
When it comes to keyword competitiveness, you must consider specificity.
One-word searches are the most ambiguous; consider the word “shoe.”
When you feed that into the algorithm, you’ll get some basic definitions and a slew of large corporations eager to sell them.
Because “shoe” is extremely competitive, and the algorithm finds millions of search results in a matter of seconds, only these major players rank.
You can reduce the number of search results and thus find keywords that aren’t as competitive by adding more words to your search.
The term “shoe” is a bloodbath, but “best shoes for standing all day” is a lot easier to rank.
These are known as long-tail keywords, and they are the ones to target if you want to get the most bang for your buck with the least amount of effort.
Shoes are competitive in general, but by simply adding those words, we’ve increased the number of search results from billions to millions, with sites on the front page with Moz DA rankings as low as 30.
Because these are people who know exactly what you’re looking for, targeting these specific needs increases your chances of making sales.
Long-tail keywords are also great for voice search, which is only going to become more important in the future if you’re an SEO who likes to think about alternative search methods and future-proofing.
2. Analyze Your Competitor’s SEO Strategies
Since the beginning of business competition, astute entrepreneurs and marketers have scrutinised the competition to see what they were doing right and wrong.
It could have meant donning a trench coat and loitering outside the business, or sending an employee or a trusted friend to observe their sales process to see what was different.
You don’t have to do that any longer, thanks to the internet.
Analyzing competitors has never been easier.
So, if a competitor who, on paper, you should be able to compete with is trampled on a keyword, what are they doing? Take a look at what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong.
Finding out what they’re doing right can help you spot flaws in your own strategy, allowing you to improve.
If they’ve discovered a formula for success, there’s no shame in copying what they’re doing to get ahead.
Of course, there are limits to this. Avoid making one-to-one copies of any site content that you suspect is legally protected.
Find out what they’re doing wrong as well as what they’re doing right.
Your biggest competitors may have discovered great SEO techniques by observing you and noticing what you weren’t doing.
You should be able to do the same to them. Check out their website to see what’s new. Consider the following:
- View their site pages and layouts.
- As you do, check out the links and how they’re arranged.
- Read the content on their posts, especially informational ones.
- If financially viable, pass through their sales funnel and compare it with yours.
- Take screenshots along the way to make comparison easier.
So far, we’ve assumed that you’re aware of your competitors, which isn’t always the case.
Simply type in the keywords you’re looking for and look at the first page of results.
It’s a good idea to use a tool like MozBar or Ahrefs’ Website Authority Checker to see how high a site’s domain authority is. Your beatable competitors are usually sites with similar DA/DR to yours.
The importance of backlinks cannot be overstated. You can use Ahrefs’ backlink checker for free, and then find the site’s page that challenges the same keyword as you and run it through the tool.
Examine the referring domains and go through the list to see if there are any links there that you can get as well.
Contacting webmasters for link building is a separate skill that we’ll go over in more detail later.
It can be advantageous to obtain the same links as your competitors, thus levelling the playing field.
3. Create Better or Different Content
You may have a problem if you read your competitor’s content and find it to be of higher quality than yours.
While there are a plethora of metrics that go into the backend of your website, the most straightforward way to outperform your competitors is to simply be better. This implies that your website must have high-quality content.
This may necessitate doing what you’ve been doing all along, but better.
Good spelling and grammar are essential for this, but they can be difficult to come by if you’re outsourcing your content, so try setting higher content standards.
Perhaps the layout is an issue as well, which is where competitor analysis comes in handy because there are many SEO-friendly site templates available online.
You could also be targeting the wrong audiences, in which case you’ll need to re-target your content or change it entirely to meet the needs of your target audience.
Alternative content formats have risen in popularity over the last decade, so if no one is reading your written work, try audio or audio-visual content.
Making your content longer can also help your page perform better. Longer content text tends to attract more backlinks than shorter content text.
See if you can make your content longer than usual, ranging from 3,000 to 5,000 words.
If you can’t write as many words due to the time commitment, we recommend focusing on shorter-form content that targets user intent and provides more value for users with shorter attention spans, all while requiring less effort on your part.
However, there is a clever trick you can use to generate a large number of 2,000+ word content pages.
Make a list of all the pages on your site that have more than 1,000 words in the main text, and then go over each one to see if there’s anything you can improve.
Is it possible to include a FAQ section at the bottom? If that’s the case, you’ll gain a few hundred words.
Add to these pages until they have a total of 2,000 words or more, paying special attention to popular pages that already have a large audience and a high authority profile.
Update any content that needs to be updated. Because of the ever-changing nature of our industry, it’s not uncommon for pages to be updated on a regular basis if the content is in the SEO field.
4. Make Your Content Stand Out
In a similar vein, perhaps the issue isn’t with the content itself, but with how it’s presented. Your content should be well-organized, logical, and easy to locate. HubSpot suggests grouping content into topic clusters.
This is a method of reorganising your website so that your most important pages, known as pillar pages, are front and centre, which is ideal for ecommerce sites.
Cluster pages surround and link to these pillar pages, delving deeper into the topics covered on those pillar pages.
This makes it easier to satisfy reader intent and divides topics into multiple pages, potentially allowing cluster pages to rank on SERPs.
Once you’ve got the site structure in place, you’ll want to make sure the content looks great on the page as well.
We’ve all seen those ancient sites that were built in the 1990s and then abandoned, with nothing but boring text against a white or grey background.
You can’t get away with that anymore; those sites are frequently abandoned for a reason: anyone in their right mind who owns a website in 2021 makes it visually appealing.
A wall of text can be intimidating, so try to keep each page’s content to a minimum.
Break up the content into bullet points, which perform better when they’re numbered, to make the information more digestible.
Visitors can also scroll until a heading catches their attention so that they spend more time on the page if they are looking for specific information.
However, because a broken wall of text is still a wall of text, you should further break it up with images, bullet points, tables, graphs, and charts to make your pages more palatable.
If you’re explaining complex or niche-specific information, you’ll want to include screenshots or diagrams so that your audience, as well as yourself, can grasp the concept.
Pictures can be added for flavour if you aren’t in a specific niche.
You can also include images and attractive designs in the headers of your pages.
These banners on your blog posts aren’t as useful as diagrams, but if a reader leaves your site because it doesn’t look good, they won’t get to the good stuff in the first place.
Need help with getting your business found online? Stridec is a top SEO agency in Singapore that can help you achieve your objectives with a structured and effective SEO programme that will get your more customers and sales. Contact us for a discussion now.
This post will demonstrate and explain some excellent SEO strategies and how you may create a successful strategy for your website. So let’s get started.
Why Do I want an SEO Strategy?
If you’re asking yourself this question right now, I’d want to thank you for sticking with us this long! It’s a great example of the benefits of having a strong SEO strategy. Preemptive keyword research revealed that people are looking for “SEO STRATEGY,” so I prepared an article to fulfill that need.
A well-thought-out, prioritized, subtle, and ongoing approach is the simplest way to drive highly targeted visitors to your website, keep it there for a short time, and enjoy it.
Step one – Third-Party examine web site
The first step in developing your own SEO strategy is to do an honest assessment of the current state of your website. This is often without a doubt the most important stage because you’ll all right generate it through your whitehat SEO outreach plan and realize that nothing has changed because your website has terrible user expertise. People may find their way to your website through referrals, but when they arrive, they are turned off by the lack of quality.
Before you begin the SEO process, consider the following questions:
Is traffic the most pressing concern?
Would more traffic boost the conversion rate?
What are other people’s thoughts on my website?
Would I provide them my website as an example of a good-faith effort if they asked?
Being genuine from the start is critical to the success of search engine optimization.
Step two – determine Your improvement Goals
Setting goals for your SEO strategy is essential for determining whether it is worthwhile to invest in it (and if done well, it continuously is). Before you begin the implementation process, make a list of the items you want to see improved throughout your SEO campaign. Among these are possible candidates:
- Natural traffic (overall, regionally, demographically, etc.)
- Impressions
- Transformations (sales, emails, subscribers, etc.)
- Links
- Social media usage
- Rate of recurrence
- Rate of click-through
Keeping this information ready throughout the SEO process can help you achieve real-world success.
Step three – Competition and keywords should be analyzed?
This one has the potential to be a humdinger. Keywords are critical to how your pages get indexed in Google’s fabled filing cabinet, thus they are a key component of a good SEO plan. This phase is all about determining which keywords you want a specific page to rank for.
Investigating Your Competitors: One of the most effective strategies to find out which keywords have received the most traffic is to look for your competitors. You might get some great ideas and unique phrases that you’ve never thought of before.
Brainstorming Keywords: Spending some valuable time with business partners or friends and brainstorming a variety of keyword phrases is also time well spent. While optimizing a page for a keyword phrase like “cars for sale” may appear to be a good idea, it is a bad idea due to the high level of competition in the market. Utilizing services such as Google’s Keyword Planner or SEMrush can provide you with an idea of the amount of competition for specific keywords, as well as the number of users who search for such terms. Instead of something like “cars available,” you could see that a phrase like “low mileage automobile Cherokee” has a lot better chance of ranking high.
A short note about keyword tools: while some of these resources are free, they do not perform as well as paid-for tools.
Step four – Audit Your website
This stage, while difficult to execute on your own, is critical to the process. It is a complete, thorough, and honest description of how your website now appears in the perspective of SEO.
- Performance
- Mobility
- Links
- SEO for local businesses
- Content
- The Internet of Things
- Technical
Following a thorough examination of these classes, we provide a comprehensive list of the issues on your website (and off it). It is critical to be honest with yourself about your website and your business, just as it is with every other aspect of a successful SEO strategy and digital online marketing. The crucial question is, “Am I willing to make the changes required to run a successful SEO campaign?” or “Handle I even have the time to try to do all of this on my own?”
Step five – Enforce fast Fixes
Some of the red flags that appear during the initial website audit are simple to fix. The majority of the time, it is due to technical problems such as a simple encryption error, a missing ALT tag, and so on. Although they may be quick solutions, there may be a large number of them, resulting in lengthy maintenance and repair times. This stage is critical to the success of your SEO campaign. Ladies and gentlemen, this could be the reason you came!
Step six – Content forever
After conducting your own SEO research, you will find that the term “content” appears frequently and appears to be important. Yes, it is. Material (along with link development) is the lifeblood of how search engines work, so it’s critical to create valuable, unique content that your users will want to return to again and again.
Given that content writing is an essential component of any SEO strategy, you must be prepared to write frequently. Backlinko’s Brian Dean announced a wonderful piece about writing content for SEO that I’m sure you’ll find quite useful!
Step 7, Step 8, Step 9 – planning and Dedication
Improving a website so that it is search engine optimized is not a quick or easy undertaking. The response necessitates perseverance. Most of the time, the solution necessitates constant and detailed work.
Scheduling content: It all comes down to having a decent Search Engine Optimization strategy. It is critical to have a steady flow of valuable content on your website. The importance of consistency and longevity cannot be overstated. Creating a reasonable schedule for generating well-researched material is one of the smartest things a webmaster can do.
Scheduling Link-Building: Although we didn’t go over it extensively, there are a lot of great resources online to assist with strategic link-building (here’s one in all them, from purpose Blank SEO). Along with content, link-building is critical to how search engines rank your website. Spending conscious effort networking or looking for opportunities to create connections will greatly boost your ROI.
The verdict:
As you can see, this is merely a discovery of the fact of the SEO strategy. In reality, your SEO plan is customized to you, your company’s needs, your target market, and your available resources. The point I’d want to emphasize here is that you must have a notion. SEO doesn’t happen overnight, and it doesn’t happen by accident. Your commitment to a tactic can validate the level of success you’ve had with an SEO strategy.
Having a good SEO plan can help you climb the Google ranks and, eventually, help you reach your objective of having a successful website. If you want to be successful, the advice above should be sufficient and simple to follow.
Need help with getting your business found online? Stridec is a top SEO agency in Singapore that can help you achieve your objectives with a structured and effective SEO programme that will get your more customers and sales. Contact us for a discussion now.