SEO Made Simple: A Step-By-Step Guide For 2021

If we’ve learned anything from the global experience in 2020, it’s that a solid online presence can make or break your business. Positive online brand awareness made all the difference during a time when in-person shopping was stopped dead in its tracks. Now more than ever, businesses need to check their SEO performances and ensure that they’re following the best practices. But best practices have changed and they will keep changing as technology evolves. Keep reading to learn how to tweak your current SEO strategy to fit the needs of today’s technology.

Assess Your Current SEO Performance

The first thing you should do is take a look at your current SEO strategy and performance. Without knowing what’s currently working or what currently isn’t working, you won’t know what to fix. Take a look at the visibility of your website as it is organically. What, if any, keywords do you already rank for? There are a bunch of free online tools to allow you to check for this. Take all the metrics you have into consideration. Look at your Google Analytics, your conversion rates, and revenue and use them to analyze your current level of success with SEO. You’ll be able to recognize where you have opportunities for growth as you move forward with the process.

Analyze Your Competitor’s SEO

Next, check out your competitor. Finding their weak spots will give you an advantage when you craft your SEO strategy. Make a list of your competitors, including the ones in the area that you service. Pinpoint the ones who rank the highest in the keywords you’re trying to rank for. Look for which pages get the most traffic, how they rank, and what their links look like. If they have pages that perform well, create similar pages for your website. Are there best performers’ blogs or product pages? Understanding their links will help you figure out their backlink strategy so you can build your own.

Outline Your Marketing Goals

Now you have to figure out what you want your SEO strategy to accomplish. You’ll also have to determine what your KPIs, or key performance indicators, are. These are specific metrics you’ll use to measure your success. Make sure your goal follows the S.M.A.R.T. method. It has to be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Don’t just say “I want to rank higher on Google for all my keywords.” A better goal is “I want to increase my ranking by 3 places in the ‘XYZ’ keyword by the end of the third quarter.”

Find Keywords and Topics

Once you’ve defined your goals you need to decide what keywords and topics you’ll be aiming for. There are loads of tools out there to help you do keyword research on your own, but for the best advice you should reach out to an SEO agency for help. You can aim for your primary keywords by building pillar pages, or a page that contains a general idea. Each pillar page leads to the cluster topics that relate to the pillar. For example, a company specializing in selling candles for aromatherapy purposes may have pillar pages for each candle they sell. Then, the cluster topics would be the different benefits to be gained from each candle. This strategy lets you rank for all the topics that surround your primary keywords. It’s more effective than focusing on a single keyword at a time.

Do a Content Audit

Now it’s time to take a look at the content you already have on your website. Audit your content first before adding anything new. Decide what content you want to keep as is, what content you want to update to target better keywords, and what content to delete entirely. If there’s anything that ranks poorly or is a duplicate of another page, you should delete it. This step saves you a ton of work in the future. Updating your content helps you target your keyword much faster than a new page will. You won’t duplicate content and you’ll know the ground you stand on.

Create Pillar Pages and Topic Clusters

Now it’s time to create content for the pillar pages and the topic clusters we talked about earlier. Content is king. The more quality content you can push out, the better. Use the research you did in the earlier steps to help guide you in the right direction. Target keywords that you can rank for and craft content that your target audience wants to see. Make sure it’s useful and full of good information. Creating content for your website can be a full-time job all on its own. If you’ve got the funds to reach out for help in the content department, letting an expert take care of that side of things may be better for you.

Master On-Page SEO

Once you have the content, it’s time to format it so it follows SEO best practices. Optimize the title tags, meta descriptions, headers, and content with your keywords. Fix any broken links and make sure all the internal links on your blog work. Some tools can help you determine how effective your on-page SEO elements are.

Track and Adjust as Necessary

This is where your KPIs come into play. Keep track of key points that you picked earlier to help you measure your success. SEO isn’t an overnight fix for ranking high in search engines. It’s a long game and it takes a lot of consistent effort and lots of persistence to get to where you want to be. But as long as you’re keeping an eye on your metrics and adjusting your game plan as necessary, you’ll get there.

Effective SEO Marketing for 2021

Effective SEO takes time to master. There’s no ‘one size fits all’ method that will work for every business. That’s why working closely with a company that specializes in SEO is the best plan if you want to be able to focus on other aspects of your business. With technology always changing, it’s hard to keep up with the demands of effective SEO. Leave it to the experts. If you’re looking for the best SEO agency in New York, contact us today.