When the traditional PI speed control strategy is adopted for permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM), the requirements of small overshoot and quick response cannot be balanced at the same time. In order to solve this problem, a control strategy based on two degrees of freedom (2-DOF) PI control is presented. In addition, the load torque changes, motor parameters variation and other disturbance factors are regarded as total disturbance of the system. A disturbance observer based on extended state observer (ESO) is designed to observe the total disturbance. The observed value is used for feed-forward compensation. Simulation results show that the speed overshoot can be reduced, the speed tracking performance and the system capacity of anti-load disturbance can be improved by the proposed 2-DOF PI control method. It is also demonstrated that the capacity of anti-load disturbance can be further improved by the proposed control strategy of 2-DOF PI control based on ESO. The system also has a fast response without speed overshoot. The validity and effectiveness of the proposed control strategy are verified.