How to Create an SEO Strategy for 2021 [Template Included]

Creating an SEO Strategy can boost leads and sales. What if you could do it in 3-months?

I explore how you can develop an SEO strategy to drive pre-qualified website traffic and grow your business online. Your SEO plan is an essential part of any digital marketing strategy.

SEO is a confusing topic for most marketers. It’s hard to know where to start, what works, and how much time you need to invest in it.

If you want your website or blog to rank well in search engines like Google, Bing & Yahoo, then this guide will show you the right way of doing it.

This SEO strategy guide will teach you everything from keyword research and on-page optimization tips to link-building strategies and ranking factors that can help boost your rankings within days!

Is your website traffic producing enough leads and converting to sales?

Do you know how many websites leads it takes for you to reach your sales goals?

Your about 97% of your first-time visitors if not converted will never come back. About 2-3% will convert if you have forms, landing pages, and contacts forms strategically placed to capture emails.

So if 50,000 visit your website in a month, 48,500 will never return. Out of the 1,500, you capture plug that number into your sales funnel with conversion ratios.

You have your digital expected sales leads, 1,500. How many of these are real, versus tire kickers or have no need or budget.

What if you could get site traffic results like this in less than 90 days?

An SEO content strategy will drive higher quality leads when done right. Your SEO keyword strategy is just part of the equation. You need great copywriters.

I’ll answer these questions and more:

• What is an SEO strategy?
• How do I build an SEO plan?
• How do I implement an SEO strategy?

The sales funnel represents a practice area of a top worldwide digital marketing agency based in Denver, Colorado.

It’s 2021 and advances in SEO are improving. You need to stay on top of this.

Let’s look at SEO; for example, Google now uses 200+ factors in its algorithm, including social signals, user-interaction, and trust. How can you know which ones to focus on first?

The reality is that you will NEVER be able to hit all 200 the right way.

Even I don’t focus on everything. Why? Because it’s nearly impossible.

But I’m still able to get amazing results like no one else because I’ve figured out a handful of tactics that move the needle.

Creating an effective SEO strategy can boost leads and sales. What if you could do it in 3-months?

Do you want results like this? #1 out of 63,300,000 searches. Read on.

Matrix Marketing Group has been working in digital marketing since 2002 and with the right SEO knowledge and testing, you can see results like this too. #1 out of 55,300,000 searches.

Matrix Marketing Group has been working in the search engine optimization services business since 2002. We know a thing or two about SEO strategies. How did you find this article?

In this article, I will explain proven SEO techniques and SEO strategies that will bring you more traffic, conversions, and revenue.

An SEO Strategy is Not Rocket Science

SEO is not rocket science but can get complex. I’m here to help take the complexity out and provide you with SEO metrics and processes to help you grow your traffic, get more conversions, and sales. But like all complicated topics were going to keep it simple and build an SEO foundation for you.

This 3-month SEO strategy is not complicated just follow these SEO techniques. You can do it. So let’s dive in now.

You should understand the various elements of your SEO strategy:

• Domain Authority
• Accelerated Mobile Pages
• Alternative Text
• Backlinks
• Local SEO
• Black Hat, White Hat, Grey Hat SEO
• Bounce Rate
• Breadcrumb Navigation
• Click-through Rate
• Content Management System
• Conversion
• Featured Snippets
• Google Analytics
• Google My Business
• HTML
• Keyword Research
• Keyword Spamming
• Long-tail, Middle Tail, And Small Tail Keywords
• Meta Descriptions
•  Alt Image
• Relevance
• Responsive Design
• Schema MarkUp
• Site Structure
• SSL Certificate
• Structured Data Among Other

What is SEO and Why Should I Have an SEO Strategy?

Search Engine Optimization (aka SEO) is about making your website compatible with search engines to recognize your content and ranking it in relation to other content on the Internet.

Please note you should be creating your content for your audiences to find, read, engage, and share. So we must be creating our content for the user and structure for search engine algorithms.

You can try to follow are your keyword ranking, heck I so many I lost count. It’s just too many keywords to track on a regular basis.

In the screenshot below you can see where Matrix Marketing Group was able to rank #1 within 3-months. They receive about 40 clicks per day. Not bad from one long-tail keyword.

The Matrix Marketing Group’s web dev team used JSON Markup Language to help boost on-page SEO, and it works.

It works!

I’m doing 3 things extremely well:

• Create an amazing user experience Google doesn’t want to rank the best optimized at the top of the Google search page. Google wants to rank the site that search users love the most at the top. Therefore, you should focus on providing the best user experience you can. In the long run, you should rank higher.
• Overall organic traffic growth keywords have trends. They are changing in popularity as time goes by. If you are focusing on a handful of keywords or even a few hundred – rethink this! In 2020, we at, Matrix Marketing Group, have changed our strategy. Now, we are focused on increasing our overall sales conversion and top-of-funnel educational content. As long as it keeps climbing quarter over quarter, I’m happy.
• Conversion rate just because you have more traffic doesn’t automatically guarantee more sales. We are continually reviewing and optimize our conversion rates. We want each organic user to have a higher chance to convert into a customer.

These are three things that can help you. But wait there is one more. It’s updating our old content. That is the fourth!

How will SEO Techniques Increase Web Traffic, Conversions, and Sales?

If you have a business online, you are likely to have a website that you want your target market to find and engage with.

You might ask why are my target prospects not reaching me via my website? Or why is my website not ranking on the first page of Google?

These are great questions.

If you have not created a demand waterfall start there. This will give you the process and metrics for each stage.

To calculate your demand waterfall start with historical data from Google Analytics or make some assumptions. Here are some.

• What is your average sales deal size?
• What is your marketing leads to sales accepted leads ratio?
• What is your close ratio?
• What is your Web visitor to lead rate ratio?

With that create your demand waterfall. Now create a spreadsheet with target keywords, competitiveness, and estimated traffic. After that, you can begin creating great content to support your target keywords.

We’ll show you a step-by-step SEO strategy and what you need to get a proven, simple SEO strategy running for your website.

If you have an ecommerce site then an SEO strategy for an ecommerce website must be built which is different from a service-based website. The SEO strategy for small businesses that are local is different from an international enterprise. This is called local SEO.

Keep this in mind. There is no one-size-fits-all.

THE 3-MONTH SEO STRATEGY FOR SMALL BUSINESSES

MONTH 1 Research & Competitor SEO Analysis

SEO plans and search results take time. A new business or a website with low domain authority can take up to 6-months before you see results. Therefore, selecting the right keywords is essential.

However, we have seen overnight success too.

For example, Matrix Marketing Group offers SEO services and while choosing a keyword we find excel data analysis as our keyword. You must write great content, be tuned for SEO, have great search results, and our readers love it.

Now, we are getting more traffic, but it’s not website traffic that will turn into customers for our SEO services. We selected the wrong keyword. This keyword, excel data analysis, did not align with our SEO service offering.

SEO STRATEGY: STEP 1

So think about keywords that relate to your target audience and develop content around that. Start with an SEO audit to get your baseline for your SEO strategy. You have to do this. What is your web traffic? Bounce rates? And top web pages?

If you don’t we can help. If you’ve to create any digital programs you have to understand Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Take it a step further and work with Google Lighthouse Dev App.

To help determine keywords think about what your target audience reads and in what mediums. Do they read a blog post, eBooks, Whitepapers, Checklists, Infographics, and other educational content?

Step back for a minute and think. Why are you reading this post about SEO strategies? How did you find this article? That’s the mindset you need. Think like a reporter.

Once you have some keyword ideas in your head, it’s time to get organized. 

SEO STRATEGY STEP 2

The next step is to start to research the keyword you picked and what your competitors are ranking for. To perform this keyword SEO analysis, we will need some SEO tools. There are tons out there, but we use the best. Here’s is a list of FREE and PAID SEO research tools.

• Google Keyword Planner (FREE)
• Ubersuggest (FREE)
• SEMrush (PAID)
• Ahrefs (PAID)
• MOZ (PAID)

Once you have accessed these tools and familiarized yourself with them and follow this SEO approach.

Add your keywords from the spreadsheet into the tools and look for these elements:

• Low competition
• Relatively high search volume
• High CPC (cost-per-click)

To help fine-tune your keyword research, we like to see what our competitors are up to. We do this to help us rank right along with them with the ultimate goal of ranking higher.

SEO STRATEGY STEP 3

We use three tools to spy on your competitor’s keywords. SEMrush, ahrefs, and SpyFu. We’ll use SEMrush as an example and follow this process.

1. Go to SEMrush and type in your URL and it will list out your closest competitors.
2. If you already know your competitors (those who sell the same product or service as you do), type in their URL and it will show you:
3. All the keywords they are buying traffic for using paid ads on Google
4. All the keywords they are ranking for on Google, which of the pages on their websites are ranking for those keywords, and how many visitors they are getting from those keywords
5. If you know your competition is successful, this will tell you the main keywords/phrases to consider going after

SEO STRATEGY STEP 4

Set up Google Console. It’s a free tool that breaks down how your website is doing. You won’t do anything else with this during month one, but you want to get it set up early on so it can begin tracking data for you to utilize in month two.

(NOTE: If you don’t already have Google Analytics set up on your website, you will need to set up Google Console.)

MONTH 2 Optimize Your On-Page SEO Strategy and Building Content

What is On-Page SEO? On-Page definition: On-Page SEO is all the internal factors that make a website and webpage useful for the visitor.

It’s the SEO stuff like page title with the keyword, user-friendly URL, meta-description, internal linking, image alt text, header tags like H1 and H2 for easy skimming.

In simple terms, Google reads source codes (not the language you and I speak or read!), so it’s your job to make sure Google can read our websites so that we can rank in its searches.

SEO STRATEGY TOOLS

We use SEO tools like Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress websites and SEO Plug-In for Shopify websites.  These plug-ins handle most of the on-page SEO activity for you. We’ve been testing a new SEO WordPress plugin called RankMath and love it.

It walks you through the steps (in a very user-friendly way) to make sure Google can read your pages. They are a must for implementing your SEO strategy.

Set up the free Yoast SEO Plugin on your WordPress site to optimize your on-page SEO. Yoast is a super user-friendly plugin that will handle most of your on-page SEO needs.

The plugin will walk you through how you can optimize your site. Scroll down to the bottom of each of your posts to find the Yoast area. HINT: You want to try to get both Readability and Keyword circles to be green.

We suggest that you set up both Google Analytics and Google Console in month one. Google Analytics shows you your website traffic and Google Console shows you the keywords that are driving that traffic.

You will find both of these free resources helpful to see what’s working on your site as you begin implementing your SEO strategies. Set a task or calendar reminder each week to check in on your website traffic and the keywords that are driving that traffic.

SEO STRATEGY TOOLS

Building high-quality content on a consistent basis on your blog will drive more traffic. To drive more traffic to your website, you need content. You will be adding your keywords to the content you create. Here is a guide to help you implement when you write your blog posts/articles:

• Create one blog, article, video, or audio content every single week. (NOTE: As far as SEO goes, video and audio content does not rank as well in Google, but it’s still great for growing relationships.), so make sure to have plenty of text-based content in the mix if you are a producer of mostly video and audio content.
• Create content that is engaging for the viewer (Google can tell if you have an engaged viewer on your website because they are spending more time on your site scrolling, clicking, and looking at images.)
• Write in a conversational tone
• Create thorough content (NOT short), about 1,600 words or more
• Use sub-headings
• Keep paragraphs short (4-5 lines)
• Use images, videos, and audio clips where appropriate
• We suggest all blog posts have a conclusion and end with a question

Building Links and Getting Social Shares

The final part of this 3-month plan also includes what is known as off-page SEO. What is Off-Page SEO? If you Google the phrase off-page SEO, here’s the definition Google shows in the SERPs:

We use this off-page SEO strategy for amplifying, gaining social shares, and gaining engagement for our marketing content.

Social sharing will not directly affect your SEO, it has an indirect impact by increasing website traffic. Social sharing builds social proof, which creates awareness and authority.

Links from other people’s websites to yours, called backlinks, can boost your SEO and ranking.

Google loves seeing links, but not just any links. Google algorithm is smart and knows the domain authority and relevance of where those links originate.

Therefore, if you are linked to a very well-known authority in your industry, versus someone who themselves doesn’t have much authority or who doesn’t have much to do with your field.

Who is Google going to give more credibility to? If you guessed the one with higher authority, you guessed right.

Building Links and Getting Social Shares [SEO PLAN 1]

Get other sites linking to your content.

• Start with a goal of getting 10-20 backlinks per month
• Authority links: Links from people/websites with authority in your niche space
• Relevant links: Links from similar sites in your niche space

Building Links and Getting Social Shares [SEO PLAN 2]

Locate potential authority websites that can provide authority links back to your site.

• Go to ahrefs and put in your competitor URLs (not just the main URL, but the exact page that has content similar to what you have created). Ahrefs will provide you a list of every site that is linked to your competitor’s content. Now that was easy.
• Take the list, line by line, and email the site owner asking them to link to your content. Of course, you need to give them a good reason to, so you’ll want to provide them with the competitor’s article link that they had linked to and tell them how your content is similar, yet different (aka better), and how it can serve their reader well. This is a tedious task, but worth your time and effort. So get started.

Getting Social Shares [SEO PLAN 3]

You should encourage social sharing. Social shares do not directly affect SEO, but it helps because the more people who share, the more traffic, the more eyeballs, the more engagement, the more likely others will link to your content.

• Have social sharing buttons on your site
• Encourage your website viewers and social channel followers to share your content. Sometimes people need to be asked
• We use the Buzzsumo.com tool to find out who’s sharing content similar to yours and ask them to share your content (only ask if relevant to their audience’s needs). Buzzstream is another great tool we use for this activity as well.

Here’s a recent SEO experience for our company. In one month we increased traffic by 3.78 percent. an additional 756 new users per month.

Which long-term SEO strategy should you follow?

There are a few SEO strategies I use to get more traffic. And they work well. Once you’ve got the basics working, here are some advanced SEO strategies to employ:

1. Globalization search is not too competitive outside of English. That is changing fast though.
2. Off-page SEO still impacts rankings significantly and you can’t ignore it.
3. Link building if you have a new site, you will be able to build links using it.
4. Land and expand if you already rank for terms on Google. This strategy will allow you to turn one ranking into hundreds.
5. Brand building Google wants to rank brands higher than non-brands.

There are thousands of other tactics and strategies that organizations use.

Again, Matrix Marketing Group was able to rank #1 within the 3-months test. And look at the love Google gave them. As featured SERP!

PowerHouse SEO Strategies for the Advanced SEO

After 3-months you see the needle move in fact in some cases it happens overnight.

Let’s go into the on-page SEO and off-page SEO strategies we employ at Matrix Marketing Group.

On-Page SEO to Increase Traffic

On-page SEO is just one of the critical steps you must take for your website to rank on search.

On-page SEO is essential but should be like brushing your teeth, hygiene. Thanks to the advent of smart devices and 3G/4G/5G technologies, mobile traffic’s rise, and growth have been stratospheric.

As SMEs rush to optimize their digital properties to increase engagement and conversions, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become a critical marketing tool for success as a business. On-page SEO is essential for 2019!

While creating quality content, like blog posts, for your website is great. It’s also important to ‘optimize’ your web pages to search engines like Google and Bing.

You want to do this so that Google or Bing’s search bots can realize that they deserve to be listed in Google searches and to rank in Google at the very top of their SERPs. The higher your web pages are ranked on SERPs, the higher the traffic you’ll get on your website.

Do Your Keyword Research for On-Page SEO

Instead of just attracting traffic to your website, your aim should attract the “right” type of visitors.

In addition to helping you identify the keywords your web pages should focus on, proper keyword research will help you determine what your website’s visitors are looking for.

Some useful tools can help find various related target keywords (don’t miss the LSI keywords either) you can potentially target. The major ones include Moz’s Keyword Explorer and the Google AdWords Keyword Planner.

Furthermore, it’s also advisable to target long-tail keywords for your topics as they account for 70% of all web searches. “Answer The Public” is an online tool that can help you with this.

It shows common user queries about keywords that are grouped. Words like “Which,” ‘What,” “Why,” “Where,” and “Who” enabling you to plan your content around the questions commonly asked by users.

Do Consider the Type & Length of Your Content

It’s essential that you carefully consider the type and length of the content you put on your website. Today, internet users are smarter and savvier than ever. They want detailed, specific answers to their queries.

Consequently, you’ll need to tailor your content strategy according to their needs. This means creating more detailed long-form content.

According to a study by SERP IQ, long-term content performs much better in terms of search engine rankings.

Although there are no definite minimum or maximum word limits, making your content as detailed and informative as possible can help improve your search result rankings.

Do Make the Most of Internal Linking

Making relevant internal links by relating anchor text to your business’s key search terms is a great way to help search engines understand your site better.

Furthermore, it helps distribute link equity throughout your website’s pages and also helps to ensure that search engines can go through your website without missing any pages. Therefore, make sure that internal links are included throughout your website.

Do Focus on Getting the On-Page Elements Right

It’s vital to make sure that basic on-page elements. Elements like URL structure, content, title tags, page titles, and heading tags are all implemented correctly and provide value to visitors.

Now that we’ve looked at the dos of on-page SEO let’s move on to some of the don’ts.

Don’t Stuff Your Pages with Keywords with your On-Page SEO

In the early days of SEO, stuffing keywords into the content was enough to rank you higher on SERPs. However, this is 2019, and keyword density isn’t a valid metric anymore.

Search engines categorize this practice as ‘spamdexing’ and are likely to get your web pages red-flagged.

Smart content marketers use keyword density tools and optimization tactics to ensure that the density of keywords stays within the recommended 5%.

Don’t Forget About Meta Descriptions & Page Titles

Unlike page titles, meta descriptions aren’t factored into search engine’s ranking algorithms. However, they’re still a key component of SERP listings.

Therefore, they need to be enticing enough to make users want to visit the website. After all, the primary aim of SEO is to drive traffic.

If you don’t specify the page title and meta description, search engines will automatically populate it. This may result in irrelevant SERP results. So be careful.

Don’t Add Unnecessary Media and Plug-Ins

Adding loads of plug-ins and media to your web pages will increase its time for them to load. In addition to adversely affecting the user experience, slower load times will hurt the page’s rankings. To avoid this, ensure that your website is only running the plug-ins and scripts that are required.

Don’t Put ‘Filler’ Type Content on Your Site for On-Page SEO

In the old days, it was easy to achieve high SERP rankings for a web page by filling it with properly phrased ‘fluff’ content to increase the word count.

However, search engine algorithms have evolved to be highly sophisticated, and the only way to achieve high SERP rankings is to create relevant informative, high-quality content.

This will hurt your on-page SEO efforts.

As we mentioned at the beginning of this post, search engine algorithms are constantly changing and evolving.

Therefore, in addition to remaining on top of what’s current, it’s also important to consider where the SEO industry might be headed in the future.

Popular search engines like Yahoo and Google are regularly introducing new search ranking metrics and factors. An example is RankBrain, Google’s new AI machine learning-based search engine algorithm.

Now that we’ve gone over the dos and don’ts of on-page SEO in 2019, here are some “maybes” you should consider as well.

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Maybe Start Considering AMP as a Search Engine Ranking Factor

As we move into a mobile device-dominated world, how we interact, search, and buy oversees a drastic change. Naturally, search engines have been aware of this change, and they weren’t going to wait around for it.

Furthermore, users want mobile-friendly websites that are easy to navigate, but they also want speed. This is one of the primary reasons Google promotes its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project.

As we understand it, AMP isn’t being used as a ranking factor (as of yet). However, it could still have a bearing on your website’s SERP performance.

When it comes to mobile search results, AMP results often appear above even organic listings. Wouldn’t you want your web pages to feature there? If so, enhancing mobile page speed should be one of your top priorities.

Furthermore, you should also take into account the potential effect of mobile voice searches on your business. If your business is attracting that sort of long-tail inquiries, you’ll want to have content for such users and good visibility in local search results.

Wrap-up on On-page SEO

Suppose your website has not been tuned. Start with an SEO audit. You might be able to use an on-page SEO checker. These on-page SEO checkers, like RankMath SEO, are on-page SEO analyzers and can quickly do on-page SEO analysis.

An on-page SEO analysis can also be started with an on-page SEO checklist.

Your on-page SEO optimization can be helped with on-page SEO tools like MOZ or SEMrush.

Have a great tip you want to share about on-page SEO?

Now we turn ourselves to off-page SEO techniques. It’s a bit like pitching to the media with public relations only easier.

SEO Strategy Summary

I hope you find this step-by-step SEO strategy guide useful. We’ve broken down all the steps for you to understand and implement within 3-months.

Now it’s up to you to put this plan into action. How would you like to see a 564% boost in website traffic?

Sometimes you may need some help.

What Does an SEO Company Do?

An SEO company offers search engine optimization services to businesses to help them improve their visibility online. 

Now, there are two different categories when it comes to SEO: off-page SEO and on-page SEO.

Off-page SEO includes social networking, blog and forum marketing, article submission, etc.—basically, the things you do off your website enhance your SERP rankings.

On the other hand, on-page SEO is what you do on your website to boost your visibility on search engine results. These include meta tags and descriptions, page titles, and internal linking.

Each year, Google changes its search algorithm around 500–600 times.

When optimizing your web pages, it’s important to remember that major search engines like Google regularly update their algorithms to keep pace with the changing user behavior trends.

Learn how to get to the top of the search in 3-months with this SEO strategy.

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