Marketing & SEO Strategies For 2021

Gabby Regalbuto

M Posted 3 years ago

t 9 min read

 Digital Marketing

An SEO strategy helps brands position themselves within the digital ecosystem. A strong SEO strategy will use data, technical SEO, and user intent to create content that answers the user’s needs and is easily found by prospective visitors.

Your SEO strategy should make up the cornerstone of this online presence. With 53.3% of the traffic arriving on your website coming from organic clicks, and about 60% of clicks going to sites in the top three spaces, the position and visibility of your site on the SERPs will have a dramatic impact on your ability to draw in new customers.

Over the past decade, SEO and digital marketing have become increasingly competitive. The amount of data in the digital ecosystem is projected to increase from 130 exabytes in 2015 to 463 exabytes in 2025 daily, a ten fold increase. Content created by brands, and consumers themselves, has driven much of this data growth. The content creation process and output intensifies each passing year. Due to the pandemic and how it has affected the world, 94% of content marketers change the way that they drive and market their brands. This exponentially increasing content competition means that brands need a clear SEO strategy to guide their campaigns and accurately measure the results. The right strategy will be tailored to the unique needs of the business, maximizing resources and driving success.

Upcoming trends for B2B content marketing in 2021:

Video content. Video is versatile and you can reach audiences in many ways by leveraging it. It’s important for your brand to discover both how to create video content and how to make it successful. More and more consumers are seeking video content rather than written.
Webinars. Webinars are informative and are a great way to build trusting relationships with consumers. If you don’t know much about a topic, you shouldn’t create a webinar on it. Therefore, creating webinars will help your brand look like an industry expert – especially if the information follows E-A-T guidelines.
Podcast. Podcasts are becoming increasingly popular – especially while so many professionals are on the go. They’re easy to access in the car, on a train, walking, etc. Being able to listen in on industry experts anywhere, at any time is convenient and worth looking into.
Featured snippets. If you’re page is ranking well anywhere in the first SERPs page, it’s a good day for your post! Google is adding more featured snippets than seen before and scoring one of them will get you more clicks and more traffic. Optimize for them! You can track your featured snippet success within Data Cube.
User-generated content. User-generated content, like reviews and testimonials, are important for boosting both your page ranks and the trust consumers have for you. Spend time getting to know your users and ask them for reviews. It’ll go a long way.
Search intent. Understand the buyer’s journey. Search intent is important because searchers will start with a simple search and end up on your page from that. In order to be there for them, you have to understand what they’re looking for – hence search intent.
Partner operations. Building partnerships with brands that can assist you in promotion can also assist your SEO. Gaining backlinks to credible sites will increase exposure to your site.

The modern SEO strategy

As the digital ecosystem becomes more crowded, and therefore more competitive, the world of SEO has become increasingly complex and sophisticated. High rankings and strong positions can no longer be driven by guesswork and instincts. Instead, marketers generate these results through careful measurement and intentional actions. The modern SEO strategy must be data-driven and carefully planned and executed. In a successful SEO strategy, organizations must have an intimate understanding of precisely who the campaign targets. They must know the pain points of their audience. Through keyword research, they can also uncover the topics and interests of their audience, enhancing their ability to create content that people want to read.

Digital ecosystems puts you in a position to focus on driving business value eliminating frustrations with outdated, legacy B2B solutions. It’s important to maintain a great relationship with your customers and to always be better today than they were yesterday. A digital ecosystem adds true value to those relationships and consistently helps you meet customer SLAs, quickly surface exceptions, and provide fast remediation to ensure your business stays on track.

The marketers working for these companies must also accurately target the user intent of their prospective visitors when they make particular queries, allowing them to create content that is highly relevant for the target audience. What types of content should marketers be focused on optimizing? Below are some options:

Perform keyword research. Going in blind while creating content is not a good strategy. Performing keyword research to understand which keywords are worth optimizing for, which have larger search volumes, which one’s competitors are ranking for, etc. is a good strategy. Begin your SEO efforts by doing keyword research.
Title tag optimization. While the content on your page is the most important ranking factor, your title tag does matter. Be sure to include a well-thought-out keyword in your title and use it to introduce readers to the rest of your copy.
Meta description optimization. Meta descriptions are not ranking factors. However, you should still optimize them accordingly to attract users to click on your link.
H1 optimization. Your H1 is your most important headline and you should only have one H1 on page that indicates what your page is about.
Internal linking and anchor text optimization. Internal linking is a great way to boost several pages at once. If one page is doing well, it has a better chance of helping the other pages linked to it, too. Be sure to choose the right keywords as anchor text. Don’t force it – but try to use keywords that indicate what you’re linking to.
Image optimization. A file name and image alt text are both image SEO efforts you should focus on. Make sure you’re descriptive enough that if your image is found, your content is easily understood.
Content optimization. Finally, the most important part of boosting your rankings and bettering your SEO is having great content that’s informative and unique. Include keywords throughout your copy but be sure to avoid keyword stuffing.

Understanding user intent for SEO strategy

User intent has taken center stage for successful SEO strategies. The goal is to optimize the content for users so that there is an increase in retaining your market along with converting them into customers and clients as well.

To push towards the improved understanding of user intent and creating a better user experience, brands must also consider the changes in how users interact with the internet. We have already seen the rise, and now dominance, of mobile usage, online chat boxes, and voice search.

Voice search is expected to see five billion searches this year in 2021 and 6.4 billion in 2022. About 20% of mobile and Android searches are expected to be voice commands.

The newest marketing trends that many will have to keep in mind for 2021 are:

Retention marketing. Market to existing customers and continue to bring them back, year after year.
Content marketing. Create a content calendar to assist in continuously creating content that consumers want to read and interact with.
Interactive content. Retain users by creating interactive content. Users only have an attention span of eight seconds – therefore quiz questions, games, videos, etc. could assist in keeping them on your site.
Chat boxes. Since it’s less common a consumer can reach a business by phone, adding a chat box to your site will allow consumers to reach out and get answers ASAP.
Nostalgia marketing. Reintroduce past products to the market with nostalgia marketing by leveraging new and old trends combined.
Voice search marketing. More consumers are looking to use voice search. It’s predicted to be the future of online marketing.

An SEO strategy must take these changes in usage into account to help the brand better understand how to optimize their content, where to focus their efforts, and the types of content that will hold the user’s interest. As brands better understand user intent, they will be able to use a variety of different types of content in their SEO strategy, including images, videos, infographics, and standard text content. The information can then be promoted to the right customers at the right moment. How do I create a better workflow and maximize SEO ROI? Find out here.

Bringing in the technical side of an SEO strategy

In addition to properly aligning content with the targeted audience, brands can also not neglect the technical aspects of a SEO strategy. The goal of SEO is to help the right audience discover the content. In order to accomplish this, marketers must also consider their site construction, navigation, and markup. Interlink site pages with other relevant content so that visitors who display interest in particular topics can then move on to other material that will also engage them. This will encourage visitors to move down the sales funnel. It is also important to create a site taxonomy that allows visitors to reach their destination in as few clicks as possible. A shallow site taxonomy that organizes pages by topic, but keeps content no more than three clicks from the home page, is the ideal setup. Learn more about how to use topic clusters for better SEO.

When it comes to the technical aspects of SEO strategy, companies want to make sure that they are utilizing all their strategies in order to speak to their audience. Three factors to consider when dealing with the technical aspect of SEO strategy is:

Know what you want to communicate. Your vision, value, topics, and issues. Things that your business stands for and passionate about.
Know what people are searching for. Use keyword research as an opportunity to study and target large audiences, the market demand, and interest online.
Understand what Google favors. Review the first page to better understand what Google deems to be the most relevant answer and try to replicate something competitive.

Once sites have completed the optimization process with the rest of their site, they should also consider the role of schema markup in their site optimization. Schema provides search engines with additional information about the website, ensuring that the content is properly understood and listed where applicable. It can also help brands obtain rich answers on the Google SERP, such as placements in the Google Events feature or earning Quick Answers.

Your SEO strategy will help drive your organization and your content forward by making your material discoverable by the search engines and the visitors themselves. Developing an SEO strategy, however, requires careful forethought and planning. You must understand the pain points and interests of your target audience while creating content that both aligns with user intent and incorporates the latest best practices in technical SEO. Brands that master this balance find themselves rewarded with a strong, profitable marketing strategy.