In order to reduce miss distance errors of the photoelectric tracking stabilization platform for airborne laser communication, an observer-based internal model control strategy with two degrees of freedom is proposed. The strategy takes the velocity loop simplified using the current loop as the control object, uses the two-degree-of-freedom internal model control to correct the system, and introduces the observer-based control law into the two-degree-of-freedom internal model control to reduce the model error and influence of external disturbances on system performance. The high performance of the proposed strategy is validated by simulation and experiment. The experimental results show that the improved internal model control is better than the traditional internal model control in terms of anti-interference ability, robustness, and tracking performance. Bringing the improved internal model control algorithm into the actual system also has good tracking performance, and its tracking accuracy is about 143 μrad, which is about 24% higher than that of traditional internal model control.