2021 Effective SEO Techniques to Improve Your Site

Struggling with effective SEO techniques? If you want to improve your site performance, focus on your brand.

Character vector created by vectorjuice – www.freepik.com

2020 has pushed more people online than ever before, whether that be for online school, remote work, buying food and supplies online, or finding ways to kill time during one of our many historical events.

Some of this new online activity may only be temporary, but it’s starting to look like some of these COVID changes might just be permanent. Big and small businesses alike are opting to keep employees home working remotely. Restaurants will welcome customers back in happily, but they won’t abandon online ordering and delivery. Things are different and that means effective SEO techniques too.

There are over 3.5 billion Google searches every day, and the number will only rise over time. While that many Google searches is fantastic for customers who can easily find whatever they are looking for, businesses might see that impressive number differently. 3.5 billion searches means there is more competition than anyone can count for the top spots in search results. Customers may find their answer, but it is only a win for the businesses that rank high on the results page and a loss for all the other businesses that were drowned out in the noise. Sadly, there is no other way to better your standings and ranking than playing Google’s game. Google controls the search algorithms, so you must play to those rules with all the tools on hand like SEO, Adwords, direct response marketing, and more to give your business the best fighting chance to reach the first page of search results. 

So, in 2021 what will the effective SEO techniques be to achieve this?

Make A Brand Focused Plan

Digital marketing can feel like it moves too quickly to make a proper plan, but planning is an essential part of successful marketing. In 2021 it would be in your best interest to focus on building a brand, not fiddling with meta titles and links.

Brands rank faster, rank easier and are more durable to updates , says Brian Dean of Backlinko in a features article on SEJ.

Narrowing down your keywords and your brand is just as much about what you add to your product and your site as it is about what you remove from your product and your site. Focusing your audience means that you intentionally exclude yourself from competing for off topic keywords and for other audiences.

Your brand’s reputation, location, company size, bandwidth, and more all factor into your marketing abilities. If you are trying to promote a new product in the middle of a PR event, you may face questions or comments about other issues or connections. It is a good idea to get everything in line, including a company safety management system, which team members are working on which project, and your marketing goals, among other factors, before you set out to start marketing in earnest. 

Marketing Specific Goals And Plans

Every business just wants to get going, start generating sales and revenue. While you might find some success with the unrefined shotgun approach, it will be very temporary and hard to replicate success.

Marketing is about both the short-term and the long-term plans, and if you want to succeed in the long term, you need a proper plan. SEO marketing does not yield the fastest results, and other marketing methods can take even longer to see measurable differences. 

Google considers information available from brands as much more reliable and prefers to operate within the reputed brands only. The knowledge panels contain rich information and searchers do not have to refer to organic listing for information. At present just a single brand appears in the knowledge panel and that is a leading one.

The number of people clicking on search listings is on the decline as only 60% of searches are likely to receive clicks. That leaves the remaining 40% going without any clicks.

Effective SEO techniques in 2012 are less about keywords and more about audience relationship. You need to know your customers and how to target them best. Keyword research is still a plus when it comes to ranking content; however content that ranks well is relatable to a specific customer base and purpose. Not all customers respond to the same ads the same way, so you must learn which customers like what content to get the best return on your investment. Once you have enough data to know and understand your customers, you must plan how to reach them, and your collected data must help inform your plan.  

Use The Tools Of The Trade

Tracking the efforts of digital marketing and SEO techniques isn’t the easiest and there are a lot of components. Thankfully, there are a slew of various tools you can use to make the process easier. There are data collection programs, SEO tools, advertising platforms like AdWords, keyword research programs, and other tools that help digital marketers do their job better and faster. 

The good news is; you don’t need to be an SEO guru to boost your business with this marketing strategy. All you need to do is have an idea of the most essential SEO tools and embrace their usage.

Click Here to check out the best SEO tools to help you skyrocket your small business growth.

Mobile Optimization Is No Longer Optional

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Google is about 100% mobile first indexing now.

There may be over 3.5 billion Google searches a day, and there are now over 3 billion mobile users in the world. Between the increase in Internet usage and mobile users, you’re already way behind if you’ve neglected this.

One of the main advantages of mobile first design is faster loading times across all devices. And in respects to SEO strategy, this is huge as it ensures Google won’t penalize your pages for being unresponsive.

Additionally, the increased responsiveness found with mobile first will improve the overall user experience, as well as navigation.

Furthermore, the foundation of website design is built from the mobile device up.

That is, a site’s functionality is built for viewing on a small screen, but making additions to enhance the experience on larger screens will require relatively minor additions to the site design.

Summary

Whether you have a website up and running, or are just in the beginning stages, mobile first is a web development strategy that’s here to stay. Equally important is making sure that you’re building a brand and not simply advertising a website. There is a difference!