In this work, we studied a (2 + 1)-dimensional Sawada-Kotera equation (SKE). This model depicts nonlinear wave processes in shallow water, fluid dynamics, ion-acoustic waves in plasmas and other phenomena. A couple of well-established techniques, the Bäcklund transformation based on the modified Kudryashov method, and the Sardar-sub equation method are applied to obtain the soliton wave solution to the (2 + 1)-dimensional structure. To illustrate the behavior of the nonlinear model in an appealing fashion, a variety of travelling wave solutions are formed, such as contour, 2D, and 3D plots. The proposed approaches are proved more convenient and dominant for getting analytical solutions and can also be implemented to a variety of physical models representing nonlinear wave phenomena.