Top 20 Actionable SEO Techniques for 2021
Search engine optimization or SEO is the ultimate practice of improving the quantity and quality of your web traffic and exposure to your brand through organic search results.
SEO or Search Engine Optimizers are the people who optimize the website to show at the top of the different search engines and gain more web traffic.
1.
20 Benefits of SEO for your Business
1. SEO builds trust and credibility
People trust Google. They use it every day to find what they are looking for. By ranking high on search engines, your business will build trust and credibility with your audience.
2. SEO helps to attract local customers
The local search focuses on geo-specific searches and local business listings. Small and medium-sized businesses need to have their site optimized for the location they operate in.
Having a properly optimized My Google Business profile and knowledge graph panel, tailor-making your site content to answer local search queries, having more favorable local user reviews on Google, etc can help you attract local customers.
3. SEO helps you outrank your toughest competitors
With 80 percent of users relying on the internet for searching for a product purchase, expect your competitors to invest in SEO, as well as other digital marketing strategies.
It gives you a detailed explanation and ideas on meta description, target keyword, broken links, internal inks, broken links, keyword search, and title tags, etc.
That’s why if you skip on SEO, you can expect your sales and overall market share to decrease.
4. SEO decreases your advertising costs
SEO also benefits your business by lowering your advertising costs and even your marketing expenses. With a well-planned SEO strategy, your company can rank on the first page of search results for high-value keywords.
That offers your business the option to decrease your advertising spend, as well as reinvest it elsewhere. For example, instead of running five PPC campaigns, you may opt to run two and then use your savings to expand your content, marketing strategy.
SEO can decrease not only your digital advertising spend but also your traditional advertising costs.
5. SEO provides you great insights
SEO comes with great insights into your customers, including the times of the year, month, or day they are most active, the regions from which the most traffic originates.
While you can use the Google Keyword Planner to let you do keyword research, to know the keywords that are most relevant to your business or niche. Google Analytics will tell you a lot about user browsing behavior, their interests, etc.
6. SEO Helps in High ROI and Conversion
SEO accounts for a large chunk of a site’s traffic. Which means that there can be more conversions. Whether you want to get your site visitors to make a purchase. subscribe to your newsletter or share your content on their social media handle.
SEO paves the way for it all. SEO is highly quantifiable – Google Analytics can give you unparalleled insight into every small action that you take and tell you what is working and what is not.
As SEO is cheaper than other digital marketing methods and attracts the most site footfall, its return on investment is considerable too.
7. SEO can increase your website referrals
One of the benefits of SEO is that it will increase your website referrals. You will gain more website referrals from search engines.
Besides, your website visitors are likely to refer your website to their friends. A strong SEO presence will make you grow referrals, literally and figuratively!
8. SEO is the best PR strategy
SEO is the new “PR” strategy. It makes PR make sense. To rank high in search engines, you must have quality backlinks. Building links is an important part of SEO as it boosts your website’s ranking
Backlinks are links from external websites that link to your website. The more you have, the more relevant your website is.
The more relevant your website is, the higher you rank. Acquiring quality backlinks may require publicity. The more publicity you have, the more backlink opportunities you may have, The two works hand-in-hand.
9. SEO can double, triple, or quadruple your business
SEO can literally double, triple, or quadruple your business. SEO exposes you to the entire market of individuals searching for you.
You can expand into more cities, states, nations, or other parts of the world with an effective SEO strategy. The world becomes your marketplace with an effective SEO strategy.
10. SEO rankings last forever
Okay, not really. But honestly, it is extremely hard to screw up SEO rankings. You will likely remain in top positions unless you use black-hat SEO practices.
Black – hat SEO practices consist of frowned – upon tactics to trick search engines to rank your website. However, you are not going to have to worry about this. Why? Because you are going to use a trusted SEO company. Once you attain top placement, it is time to celebrate! Or, begin expanding to other keywords.
11. It is The Ultimate Long – Term Strategy
Long-term here means a long term. You will not get the results immediately as you expect. It will take up to 12 months to just see an optimal improvement in the ranking itself.
The ranking for your website will not change either. Once you reach the top. you stay there! Rising competition may make the task difficult, but with consistent efforts, you can hold on to your ranks.
SEO is a strategy that is developed keeping in mind a long period of time. with the introduction of little to no changes required. So, convinced yet? With SEO.
You can assist your website reach the pinnacle of success, start working on improving your website. SEO is essential in today’s world, especially to move forward online and be successful!
12. SEO targets every stage of the buying funnel
The rise of content marketing makes SEO even more valuable to businesses. With content marketing includes a range of content types from infographics to guides to blog posts, you connect with consumers in every stage of your marketing funnel.
While users reading the top of the funnel (TOFU) or middle of the funnel (MOFU) content, such as a blog post about the costs of an AC unit, won’t convert right away, they will eventually.
That’s why content marketing which depends on SEO – earns 54 percent more leads than traditional marketing. The best part is that consumers love this approach.
More than 60 percent of consumers prefer companies that create original content for them, which can also help build their brand awareness and loyalty for your business.
13. SEO measures your success with real numbers
It’s critical to understand the impact of your investment, whether it’s in advertising or marketing. That’s why it’s a massive perk of not only digital marketing but also SEO that you can monitor the success of your strategies.
The best part is that you can access your digital marketing analytics in real-time. With Google Analytics, as well as other web analytics tools, it’s easy to assess the performance of your SEO strategies. A few metrics to monitor include your website traffic, bounce rate, conversions, and time on site.
14. Top SEO rankings provide 24/7 promotion
SEO is 24/7. It does not sleep. Yes, that’s another one of the benefits of SEO. Your rankings do not disappear overnight. You can increase your website traffic all day, every day. Once you rank high in search engines, they will promote your business while you are sleeping.
15. SEO receives 90% more clicks than PPC
SEO trumps paid to advertise. This is because organic SEO listings receive 90% of clicks. Many users of search engines tend to skip paid advertisements.
This is most likely due to their trust in Google’s algorithm. By investing in SEO, you will likely gain more traffic than the advertisers on the same keywords.
16. SEO makes your customers more informed
Your customers are using search engines to research. They use their findings to help them make informed decisions on available options.
High SEO rankings allow you to educate potential customers. This indirectly builds trust, but most importantly helps them make an informed decision.
17. Your competitors are using SEO to grow
Your customers start their internet journey with a search. Your competitors are using search to grow their business.
In fact, based on a recent study, 61% of these marketers stated that optimizing their website is their top priority. Sooner or later, if you are not using search to grow your business, you will not have a business!
18. SEO improves the speed of your website
As you are working on growing your website’s SEO, you will improve the speed of your site. High-speed websites will help you offer the best user experience to your visitors. Besides, high SEO rankings will also correspond with higher-speed websites.
19. SEO Does Not Involve Paid Ads
Low overall costs are one of the biggest benefits of SEO. While most digital marketing professionals bank heavily on or strongly recommend one form of online marketing over another.
We believe that a good combination of both paid and non – paid marketing methods is the key to success. While paid marketing accounts for around 15% of a website’s traffic, it may not always be the best course of action for smaller businesses that are just starting and have budget constraints that make it difficult for them to take on the high per-ad costs.
On the contrary, SEO needs only a one-time investment in human resources and can produce long-term results.
20. SEO is a laser – targeted
SEO is keyword-based. This means that listings appear based on the keywords people search for.
The advantage here is for you to reach people who are looking for exactly what your business offers. The keyword targeting ability of SEO is one of the primary reasons why it delivers the most qualified traffic to your website.
2.
20 Actionable SEO Techniques
Understanding SEO is crucial to significantly increase your traffic and brand awareness. SEO is made up of multiple different elements and knowing what they are and how they work is the key to understanding why SEO is so important.
1. Google Maps In any one industry there must be at least 100 competitors fighting for the number one spot. Unfortunately, there is only one spot at the top and if that is not you, you need to look for other alternatives.
We are seeing more local businesses focus on maps to outrank large corporates in their niches. Google Maps is a quick and easy way for local businesses to rank.
What is advantageous about Google Maps ranking is that they appear higher in the SERPS than the first organic listing. That being said, maps do not outrank Google Ads, which still dominates the top of Google. Did you know that 46% of Google searches are for local businesses?
2. Site speed We all know that site speed is important or else it wouldn’t be a Google ranking factor. With more and more people using their mobile phones to go online, your website needs to load quickly as they live their fast pace life on the go.
Did you know a 100 – millisecond delay in load time can cause conversion rates to drop by 796 Sobe Unbounce If your website takes long to load it could be turning customers away?
One of the ways to increase your site speed is to ensure that your images are compressed before uploading them onto your site. This is usually the biggest cause of a slow load time.
3. Create a Basic Measurement System Determine which metrics to measure as well as how and why you should do so.
Build a strategy around these metrics, but don’t go too crazy. You don’t need anything too complicated. Then take key actions such as: Set up Google Analytics and Google Search Console • Integrate your CRM and marketing automation with lead capture sources.
4. Perform On-page Optimization This process involves aligning your content marketing strategy with specific search terms, topics, and user context.
5. Main Keyword Paragraph One. You may have heard before to put your main keyword in your first paragraph. There is a lot of truth to this. There have been bloggers time and time again who forget to do this.
This is a simple, effective SEO technique that directly shows Google what your information is about. Don’t miss this one. It’s crucial when it comes to your rankings.
6. Crawl Your Website and Fix Technical SEO Issues This step should be taken particularly if you’ve been producing content for a while.
Search engine crawlers will index all your site’s web pages and validate backlinks based on the HTTP response code. There are several SEO tools you can use, like Screaming Frog (which has a freemium version), to crawl your website. This guide from SEER Interactive will help you make sense of the spreadsheet-formatted report.
7. Internal Linking. Once you’ve been blogging for a while, you’ll have enough content to start linking between blog posts. Linking between blog posts not only helps your reader explore some of your older posts, but it also allows for some link juice to be spread throughout your site.
In case you’ve only been linking to your money page. It is important to remember to link to other content as well. The goal here is to give the end-user an ultimate experience. Internal linking is an excellent method to raise your blog posts in the SERPS and deliver more value to your readers.
8. Use Effective Header Tags to Target Google Featured Snippets when developing content, you want to be mindful of how you structure your content on the page.
Every page should have content organized logically, with the most important information at the top of the page. Studies have found that 80% of readers spend most of their time looking at the content at the top of the page.
However, Google doesn’t necessarily index context solely on what’s at the top of the page. They look at the article as a whole to see whether it’s comprehensive, so with that in mind, you’ll need to put some thought into how your page is laid out.
9. Mobile Optimization While you might think that mobile matters less now that people are moving around less, and staying home more, you’d be wrong.
You know those anxiety-ridden pre-dawn hours where sleep evades you and the world can be seen as overwhelming? Those are the hours where people are prone to reaching for their phone and diving into the worldwide web to find that which might soothe them.
Be it online shopping, online therapy. online music online anything other than the crazy pre-dawn voices in your head.
10. Remember to optimize Images Often, image optimization is overlooked in terms of boosting SEO. However, when done properly, it can drive a lot of your websites.
There are also a ton of benefits to using visual content, including •Helps break up a wall of text Aligns with Google’s future goal of visual searching, Gives better context to your webpage’s content Allows readers to better comprehend written content Like written content, visual content can leverage better SEO. Image optimization helps your content rank higher on Google Image Search.
11. Strengthen Your Domain Authority Increasing the strength of your domain can have a huge impact on your ranking potential.
The more authoritative search engines see your site, the more priority you’ll receive on the SERP. If this is one of your SEO goals for the coming year, the first thing you need to do is dig into what variables go into calculating this score.
12. Use Categories and Tags Categories to help you sort your content not only for readers and for yourself but also for the search engines.
A site that has a suitable category and tag section helps search engines understand what your content is about and how to navigate through your website. Categories should be used to divide content into essential topics, while tags are discussed in an individual blog post.
13. Time on site It is no secret that time on site is a Google ranking factor. So why is it an SEO trend in 2021 then?
Well if you consider what we have spoken about above then you will see how important creating quality content and answering users’ questions is now. If users visit your website and spend a long time on your site and then leave, this tells Google that they found what they were looking for.
This means that long-form content, which breaks problems down and provides actionable solutions will perform better than short-form content.
14. Decrease Your Bounce Rate When someone clicks through to your site and leaves quickly, that’s counted as bounce by most site analytics providers.
A high bounce rate will drive down your ranking potential over time because it shows the search engine that your content isn’t relevant to a searcher’s intent.
The strategies you put in place to achieve your goal of decreasing your bounce rate revolve around matching search intent with your content, headline, and meta description. Those three elements of your page are what searchers will see when results appear in the SERP.
15. Write Original Content Part of promoting your website through a shareable and linkable blog post is a commitment to writing original content.
This goes far beyond not plagiarising and repurposing/spinning others’ articles. It’s about creating your tone and opinions, drawing your conclusions, and, ultimately, giving the reader original, valuable content that they can’t find elsewhere.
16. An Effective SEO Strategy Will Need to Include Video Online video seems forward. YouTube has more than 1 billion users. If you aren’t creating video content, now is the time to get started.
Not convinced? Here’s food for thought: According to Cisco, video is projected to surpass all other content forms in terms of consumption. How can you optimize that video content, though?
Make sure to optimize your video channel name and description. The description shouldn’t just be crammed with keywords but provide a user-friendly overview of what your channel is about.
17. Calls – to – Action (CTAs) Calls – to – action are important components of technical SEO for eCommerce and WordPress. CTAs prompt page visitors to take a specific action, such as sign up for a newsletter or make a phone call.
18. Voice Search Will Impact Search Queries Thanks to innovations of Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri, and Amazon’s Alexa, voice search technology has come a long way.
As technology has gotten better, it’s also gotten more popular. The percentage of households predicted to own a smart speaker by 2022 is 55%. To optimize for voice search, consider your keywords.
Identify longer phrases that people use in everyday conversation. Voice searches tend to do better with longer, more natural-sounding phrasing.
19. Artificial Intelligence Will Play a Larger Role in SEO Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing how people interact with online content. Google’s Algorithm is especially worth noting.
20. Create Good Website Architecture One of the most important techniques to get your SEO right is to create a good website architecture. It is best to start structuring your website in your initial days. When you have less content, it is easier to make an organized site that is good for SEO.
To put it all in a nutshell, SEO Techniques allow you to identify various ranking factors like meta tag, target keyword, broken links, landing pages, building links and title tags, etc.
Many software are available to let you do keyword research for your web pages to make it effectively compete in the digital market.