What Effective SEO Looks Like In 2021

Whether it’s making your brand visible, increasing organic traffic on the website, or revenue generation, you need to have a clearly defined SEO strategy to achieve your business goals.

A good SEO strategy helps you define clear business goals.

What exactly is SEO?

We have all heard that SEO (search engine optimisation) is a prominent digital marketing tool, so it becomes essential to know about this in detail as the world of social media is influencing our lives hugely. In digital marketing, SEO plays a vital role in reaching out to the target audience. Because of the growing popularity of search engines, it becomes a prime place to advertise your brand and its products and services. Including SEO as a part of the digital marketing campaign makes your website visible to the target segment and directs more traffic to the website leading to more possible conversions. 

It proves to be a valuable tool to improve the brand presence, build new relationships, and position you as a trustworthy brand in a competitive world. Let us understand what SEO is made up of and why its role is vital in today’s times.

Importance of SEO for business:

SEO’s role is to increase brand awareness and reach out to potential clients through search portals. Different SEO strategies are implemented to improve the ranking in search engines. Whenever a client is searching for a particular product or service that is relevant to you, you would want to make sure that your company tops the search results so that the client can reach out to you. For example, a client wants to buy health insurance and searches for a health plan quotation on Google, and if your insurance company does not reflect on the initial one or two pages, then probably the client will not reach out to you. In a nutshell, the main benefits offered by a good SEO strategy are:

• Brand awareness
• Quality of Content
• Increase in sales
• Increase in visibility and ranking
• Increase in Web Traffic
• Achieve the growth targets

The pandemic has taught us that the online visibility of your business is crucial.  Our movements have been very restricted, so the companies need to cater to the audience online.  If your business has implemented an effective SEO marketing strategy, then people are much more likely to connect to you. The following points will help build an effective SEO strategy for your business:

1. Rate your current SEO performance: It is the first step for a well-planned SEO strategy. If you are not aware of your site’s recent performance, you will not be able to apply methods for its betterment. So your strategy must begin with benchmarking your current performanceacross factors like visibility, keywords used, traffic on the website, etc with the help of tools such as Google Analytics. It will help you know about the opportunities at hand.
   
2. Know about the competitors’ SEO plan: Apart from analysing your performance, another critical factor involves analysing your competitors’ performance and applying strategies for an effective SEO. Once you have a handy list of your competitors’ strategies, you can compare yours and make adequate changes.
   
3. Set clear goals and performance targets: Setting goals and targets is a critical part of creating an SEO strategy. You need to know your goals to draft a clear plan and track the performance regularly. It is imperative to see the end outcome that the organisation desires.
   
4. Define the keywords (Short and Long Tail): Keywords are crucial for searching on digital platforms. Keywords are the words that the target audience will use to find relevant content, and the brands use them to connect with the audience that looks out for these products and services. Keywords need to be well researched. You may choose short tail keywords (for example, dog), long-tail keywords (such as German shepherd for sale), or local keywords (such as cute puppies for sale in Florida). They help to optimise your titles, URLs, and other SEO items.
   
5. Audit the content: Content is the face of what reaches the audience. For example, if you own a preschool for kids, you might publish a series of blogs about kids’ activities, parenting tips, games, kid’s nutrition, and more. So whenever a person searches for a pre-school, yours would be the first to strike. The content needs to be informative, along with being relevant.  
   
6. On-page SEO: An On-Page SEO refers to the practice of optimising the web pages to make use of the keywords wisely such as setting the title tag, meta-descriptions, alt text for images, effective use of h1, h2, h3, schema markup as well as optimising the user experience of the web page.
   
7. Off-page and local SEO: An Off-Page SEO needs external optimization practices, including guest blogging or mention by influencers about your content. Local SEO is in trend because searches are performed through a smartphone or tablet. Use local keywords, go in for a regional directory listing, create location-specific tags, and have a page on Google+ or Google Maps.
   
8. Search engine marketing: It refers to the paid marketing done to promote your business through digital platforms. These include Google Ad words, and social media paid ads, display ads, and more. The SEO strategy helps to reach out to a new target audience faster.

Google Page Experience Update 2021

Gone are the days of keyword stuffing to get on page one for Google or other search engines. User experience on a website now plays a more important factor when it comes to page ranking. The new algorithm will measure the percentage of URLS on a website that offer a good user experience based on signals such as:

• Core Web Vitals – Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and First Input Delay (FID).
• Mobile Friendliness – Whether your page is responsive to mobile screen size.
• Safe Browsing – Whether your site has any deceptive content, malware issues, and etc. flagged by Google Search Console.
• HTTPS Usage – Whether your website has a valid SSL certificate and is using HTTPS.
• No Intrusive Interstitials – This refers to the intrusive page popups that covers a large portion of the web page for users.

The Google Page Experience Update will now gradually rollout in mid-Jun and won’t be fully live until the end of August 2021.

“We’ll begin using page experience as part of our ranking systems beginning in mid-June 2021. However, page experience won’t play its full role as part of those systems until the end of August. You can think of it as if you’re adding a flavoring to a food you’re preparing. Rather than add the flavor all at once into the mix, we’ll be slowly adding it all over this time period.”

Google

Conclusion

The steps mentioned above will help create an effective SEO strategy to achieve your digital marketing goals. It will help enhance the trust of your brand and help you achieve the growth goals.