11 Killer SEO Tactics for 2021 & Beyond

Optimising your website for search engines can be daunting, especially with an ever-turbulent digital landscape. However, despite the consistent evolution of SEO and content marketing, putting an effort to keep up with killer SEO tactics can be worth it.

Moreover, roughly 65% of digital marketers leverage SEO to convert organic traffic to sales. Aside from that, more than half of consumers rely on visually optimised content to influence their buying decisions.

To streamline a robust marketing strategy, you need to focus on improving your SEO, and we got your back covered. SEO specialists from Red Search, a leading SEO agency in Sydney have put together this guide to give you relevant and up-to-date insights on the latest SEO trends.

That said, here are 11 killer SEO tactics to look forward to in 2021 and beyond:

1. Use Basic SEO as Your Foundation

Making the most out of your fundamental SEO elements is as crucial as ever. To take your website traffic to greater heights in 2021, we recommend optimising basic SEO components like keyword research, meta descriptions, and site content.

Keyword Research

It’s virtually impossible to expect a significant traffic increase without streamlining a data-driven keyword research strategy. In 2021, keyword research will still be at the forefront of every SEO tactic, with a handful of tools and strategies to speed up the process.

Here are a few tips for implementing your keyword research seamlessly:

• Use freemium keyword research tools like KWFinder and Google Keyword Planner
• Focus on writing long-tail keyword phrases to emphasise user intent
• Grab hot topics and trending content from social media channels and online forums
• Use Ask the Public to optimise your keyword phrases for question intents

Title Tags and Meta Description

Maximising your crawl budget and SEO for ranking pages means optimising your keywords for title tags and meta descriptions. Besides, using title tag modifiers should increase your chances to rank higher in long-tail keywords.

That said, don’t forget to place your primary and LSI keywords in your title tags, meta descriptions, subheaders, and the first 200 words in your content.

Optimising Content for UX

With the advent of mobile and voice search, revamping your website to adapt to smaller devices and leverage voice search will significantly boost user experience. If you want your website content to reach a larger audience, optimising it for SEO should be a no-brainer.

You can optimise your content for UX by:

• Covering in-depth topics rather than shortlists and quick tips
• Using the skyscraper technique to build exceptional content
• Breaking down long-form content into digestible chunks
• Using popular and effective content types that rank with SEO

2. Focus on User Intent

For a long time, user intent has always been part of the big picture, yet most people take it for granted. But in 2021 (and possibly beyond), with the advent of the Internet of Things and smart homes, it’s important to focus on satisfying user intent.

Predictive Search

Essentially, we rely on search engines to answer a question or educate ourselves about a topic. That’s why Google consistently improves its search algorithm to interpret and satisfy user intent, whether from desktop, mobile, or voice search.

It implies that in 2021, SEO specialists may need to break free from the conventional practices (e.g. adding meta tags for every single page) and pour more resources to rank better in SERPs by grasping user intent.

Voice Search

The increasing popularity of AI personal assistants and mobile search pushed the need for optimising websites for voice search. Eventually, voice search will replace the traditional text-based search, together with smart mobile assistants and artificial intelligence.

Furthermore, websites that support voice search will expect an increase in eCommerce revenue by up to 30%. So if you want a stunning SEO user intent strategy, investing in voice search will put you at an advantage.

Local Search Listings

Voice searches performed on mobile are three-folds more likely about local search intent. That means local search listings will also play a role in 2021 as SEO converges towards mobile and voice search.

3. Optimise According to the SERPs

Digital brands who have been working with SEO for years should now think of their website as an entity that needs Google to understand who they are. To do that, brands need to work with SEO specialists to improve their visibility in Google’s Knowledge Graph.

In a nutshell, optimising your content for Google SERPs means improving your website’s overall digital presence and how they should appear on Google. If you can make your content rank as a snippet, make sure it speaks volumes about your brand and its content.

Long-Form Content

Another killer content type is long-form content. Regardless of your content topic and digital niche, blog posts of around 1500 to 3000 words can get three-fold more organic traffic than shortlists and 2-minute reads.

Long-form content also earns about four times more backlinks than shorter content. Pair that with multimedia content and other effective content types, and you can expect a higher search ranking over time.

4. Perform Keyword Gap Analysis

As discussed, you need to consider multiple factors when crafting a content marketing strategy. Two of the primary areas to focus on include:

• Improving and optimising old content
• Creating up-to-date and amazing content

If you’re among many who have already optimised old and existing pages, then you should immediately move on to create cunning content. Besides, many brands create content so blindly instead of finding its purpose and carefully planning a strategy before streamlining new content.

What is Keyword Gap Analysis

One way to supercharge your content planning phase is by performing a keyword gap analysis. Keyword gap analysis gives you insights on keywords for which your direct competitors rank, which you don’t. Use those broken links as starting points to build new content focusing on those keywords and fill the keyword gaps.

Relationship Between Rankings and Data Analytics

Data analytics hold real-time and relevant information about all the traffic flowing to and from your site, including crucial metrics. It helps you determine which pages get crawled, monitor site loading time, and bounce rate, among others.

Moreover, data science is another factor that’s crucial for your SEO campaign and impacts your search rankings. It lets you understand your users, visualise content marketing campaigns, and exclude some pages from crawl indexing.

That said, understanding the connection between both factors is vital, as it helps you tackle a broad range of SEO, including:

• Competitive research
• Technical SEO
• On-page SEO
• Link building
• Local SEO

5. Optimise Your Website’s UI and UX

If you notice your ranks decreasing, you may want to check your website’s UX and UI. Usually, poor navigation and unpleasant user experience can result in high bounce rates and lower conversion rates.

However, pointing out the exact UX/UI culprit can be challenging, as they significantly differ for every site. But what you can do is use Google Analytics’ Optimise function to implement A/B testing and leverage advanced modeling to improve your site’s UX and consumer engagement potentially.

6. Always Build from a Mobile Device’s Perspective

As Google launched mobile-first indexing last 2019, thousands of websites have started optimising for mobile. That’s because as soon as the indexing reached full-swing, Google will treat your website’s mobile version as the primary version rather than the one for desktop.

But before you raise an eyebrow, keep in mind that this update is entirely data-driven, given that by 2025, more than 70% of consumers will use their mobile devices to surf the web. That said, you can use Google’s Mobile-friendly Test tool and get more insights on Search Console’s Mobile Usability report.

In terms of mobile crawlability and indexing, Google stated that Googlebot wouldn’t be able to crawl content that requires user interactions, such as typing, clicking, and swiping. So you may want to use those UI patterns sparingly. But more than that, make sure that your mobile and desktop versions have the same meta tags and robots.txt.

7. Earn Authority Backlinks

Gaining a sweet backlink from an authoritative site will turn tides to your favour. But earning several backlinks at scale may be daunting and outright difficult.

Because backlinks directly speak about your site’s authority and credibility, Google includes it among their top-three ranking factors. Furthermore, Google suggests that earning authority backlinks can be possible by developing relevant and high-quality content that can significantly drive organic traffic and authority backlinks.

Besides, reliable content will attract reliable backlinks, and one proven way of earning authority backlinks is by publishing digital press releases (PR). For example, you can write and promote your content to online publishers and editorials interested in covering your content and link to your page.

Some content types that are effective for digital PRs are:

• White papers and long-form content
• Research studies
• Freemium tools and calculators
• Relevant infographics
• Professional insights about a key concern

Additionally, digital PR isn’t always about handing out content through press releases. Instead, it’s also about publishing and promoting timely and reliable assets using an effective outreach strategy.

You can also reap other substantial benefits by publishing digital PRs, such as:

• Increasing your brand awareness and influence
• Having search engines and authority sites place you at the forefront of your consumers when browsing online
• Driving referral traffic to your site
• Improving social engagement, resulting in sales and revenue

8. Take Advantage of Competitors’ Broken Backlinks

Building quality and authoritative backlinks are one thing, and taking advantage of broken link building is another.

Typically that means finding broken links and reaching out to the webmaster to have it redirected to your content. But what makes it different is that you’re looking at broken and 404 pages in a competitor’s website.

If you can find a competitor’s broken links on another site, you can reach out to them and suggest they use your content in place of the broken link. Make sure to point out the potential of a bad UX had they decide to leave the broken link and how your content could reinforce user engagement.

9. Optimise Your Content’s Topics, Not Just Keywords

As Google’s core algorithm becomes smarter than ever, adjusting your focus from keyword placement to user search intent is of paramount importance.

In simple terms, you need to understand what your users are expecting, what they want in your site, and how your content can satisfy their query,

That said, building keyword-optimised content and looking at LSI keywords is not enough. You need to focus on the context you’re building around your content. We refer to it as user intent, and it will give you insights as to what your consumers want.

Get to Know Your Target Consumers

In a nutshell, the content you’re creating will largely depend on your target audience. Hence, the more you know your consumers, the more you can create amazing content.

Organise Your Content Into Topic Clusters

If you have several content pages piling up, organising them into topic clusters benefits user engagement more than grouping them by keywords. A typical topic cluster must have:

Pillar Pages — Your site’s most important pages (category pages) and the ones which could rank for a range of keywords

Cluster Pages — Lower-level category pages that link to their corresponding pillar pages. Cluster pages must branch out from pillar pages and discuss the topic in finer detail.

10. Strengthen Internal Links

Google maintains a firm stand against manipulative link schemes and won’t hesitate penalising websites that violate their Webmaster Guidelines. Link schemes are black hat techniques that aim to manipulate PageRank and link juice.

If you find unnatural links in your website’s link profile, we suggest that you run a thorough site audit and strengthen your internal links. To do so, here’s a quick checklist of toxic links and attributes to look out for:

• Paid links
• Exact match anchor text in several pages
• Guest posting campaigns and article marketing
• Bookmark website tactics and poor site directory

11. Incorporate Core Web Vitals in Your Strategy

We can expect that Google will include Core Web Vitals as part of their ranking signals in 2021. As a result, it will become part of other relevant metrics that influence user experience, such as:

• Safe browsing
• HTTPS encryption
• Mobile-friendliness
• Intrusive page interstitials

By definition, Core Web Vitals are sets of metrics that focus on site speed, page responsiveness, and graphical stability.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Your CLS score is a measurement of your total layout shift scores derived from unwanted layout shifts that occur in your page. Layout shifts occur when a graphical element in a page changes or shifts its position.

Ideally, a CLS score should be less than 0.1. Otherwise, a high score means more pixel shifts, which can negatively impact user experience and navigation.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

LCP measures how long a page loads its primary content, also known as the largest content element. Ideally, your LCP score should be about 2 seconds or faster.

First Input Delay (FID)

FID, just like the above metrics, is a user-centric measurement that focuses on page responsiveness. It quantifies how fast a page becomes interactive, with the ideal time as fast as 100 milliseconds.

A low first input delay also ensures that your page is interactive and usable.

In general, these core web vitals will drastically shift your SEO focus, from keyword placement to user experience and site structure integrity. Keeping in mind that page loading speed is key to overall SEO.

Final Thoughts

Search engine optimisation will significantly change in 2021, and it can be beneficial or detrimental for many brands. Additionally, this guide should help you keep up with market trends and the volatile search landscape.

By teaming up with a time-tested and reliable SEO agency or SEO professional, you can uncover killer SEO tactics and reshape your site to capitalise on its full potential.