On-page SEO is the cornerstone of any website’s search engine marketing strategy, as on-page signals have been the primary ranking factors since the inception of search engines. Google has evolved tremendously since their inception, and the algorithms used to deliver search results have continually changed. However, on-page SEO is still vitally important for delivering the best possible results to users. If you’ve done any searching or surfing online, you’ve likely come across snippets in search results that lay out the topic of a webpage, providing context for the title link. Have you likely clicked on a link that contained the exact answer you were looking for or was closely related to your inquiry? On-page SEO is what dictates how snippets appear in search results. The better your snippets are, the better the chances of someone clicking through from their query results page and visiting your site with the intention to convert.
Many SEO practitioners spend the bulk of their time on off-page actions and may neglect anything done on the pages. With Google’s approach becoming more user-centric in delivering the best results, optimizing your webpage content and HTML source code could be the difference in ranking higher than competitors or completely missing out on any traffic. In this beginner’s guide, we’ll go through every official recommendation and related advice to help you on your on-page optimization journey. We’ll also cover examples from every type of content on the web and how they fit into the current search landscape. Consider this a comprehensive dive into the factors surrounding on-page SEO. We’ll also take it page-by-page to make things easy to digest, so you can start optimizing your pages regularly without becoming overwhelmed by the process itself.
Understanding the Importance of On-Page SEO
When beginners set out to learn about SEO and its many components, they’ll learn right away that there’s more than just one type, rather it’s a combination of various practices that help websites rank higher in search engines, thus increasing visibility for their respective audience. If you think about it, SEO is like the science of marketing — trying to reach your audience where they are and deliver what they need. One of the key ways you can optimize your website for search visibility specific to the page is through on-page SEO.
What is on-page SEO? As the name suggests, it’s the optimization of the elements on the page itself in order to satisfy search engines and user intent. You might already know that search engines survive off of crawling and indexing websites in their database. The elements that you can optimize on your pages are more geared towards indexing, which in turn, determines the ranking of your website, such as title tags, keyword targeting, meta descriptions, structure, content, and internal linking. If search engines can easily parse your page and understand what it’s about, they will index it with the right query, thus local users searching using that keyword may find your business.
Key Elements of On-Page SEO
A search engine’s algorithm determines what pages are the most relevant for a given query and then organizes that content in a search result snippet that ranks how likely the users find that content helpful. The higher the ranking, the more likely the user clicks on that snippet, visits that page, and finds the search query helpful. That’s why optimizing on-page SEO for a page also optimizes its search results snippet.
On-page SEO optimization is not as straightforward as it may sound. It has to be done at both the search engine and user level, thus requiring a fine balance between optimizing for the algorithm while making the content compelling to read. A number of different elements come into play when it comes to whether a page is optimized for on-page SEO. These include: title tag, meta description, heading and subheadings, URL structure, content quality, image optimization, and internal linking. Nowadays, it is also recommended to optimize for mobile-friendliness and page load speed.
The easiest way to optimize all of these elements of on-page SEO is to do it in one go with an SEO plugin. An SEO plugin programmatically sets all of these elements of on-page SEO when you create content for a page with the content editor. Think of an SEO plugin as a spell-checker for on-page SEO. When creating a page, an SEO plugin will tell you if you’ve optimized all aspects of on-page SEO sufficiently with a traffic light that’ll change from red to orange to green as you fine-tune your optimization.
Title Tags
It’s not by chance that title tags are supporting actors in the SEO process. On web pages, title tags are the most overt way for someone to tell search engines and users what the content is about. Title tags are primarily designed for search engines, though not depending on how far we want to go. Search engines display title tags as the clickable title for URLs in search results. If users find the title appealing and enticing enough, they will undoubtedly click on it. Choosing the right words for your title tag is important because by default, you will not choose how search engines display the link to your site when they show up in their results. Thus, you need to provide search engines with all the elements to create a title that accurately describes the content of your page. In addition, title tags can appear whenever a specific URL is shared, for example, on social media. The title is usually the most visible element of a shared link, doing the job of a hook for someone to click on it. But it’s not merely for search engines that must show the content. A good title also provides a good overview of the page, helping users who land on it to understand what to expect next. When writing content, it’s important to remember that at the end of the day, human beings are reading it. SEO can’t work without consideration for humans. If users don’t enjoy a website, it won’t be successful. So, balancing SEO needs with the user’s perspective is crucial.
Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions provide an opportunity to engage searchers on the search engine results page and convince them to click on your link. These descriptions show up directly below the link to your page and typically provide the most information about your page’s content, but do not directly influence rankings. Instead, getting clicks on your result can positively impact your ranking indirectly.
When writing your meta descriptions, start with the content on the page and focus it on the interests of the reader. Meta descriptions should be concise summaries of what the page offers, and they should include calls to action relevant to the search. Meta descriptions can use rich results or featured snippets to stand out. Additionally, write meta descriptions to be persuasive without being misleading, as doing so could lead to a higher bounce rate. Aim for about 150 – 160 characters, as SERPs typically truncate longer descriptions.
Headings and Subheadings
Headings and subheadings are more than just visual cues that organize your content for ease of reading; they also demonstrate to search engines what your page is actually about. How, then, should you approach your headings and subheadings to maximize SEO and provide the best experience for visitors?
Just as title tags convey important keyword information regarding the overall subject of a page, your headings and subheadings also demonstrate the topic of various sections within that page. Additionally, your headings and subheadings also contain keywords that search engines use to provide relevant search results when users query for those terms.
And while keywords are one of the ways search engine crawlers judge the context around a site’s content, by using keyword-rich headings and subheadings, you’re also making it easier for human visitors to parse through your information. In this way, headings and subheadings are a win-win; they help search engines and users understand your content and its structure in a similar way. And like title tags, proper implementation of headings and subheadings is enabled through HTML.
In HTML documents, there are six levels of headings, which are denoted by the h1 through h6 tags. The headings take their ranking from their announced level, meaning that an h1 tag is the most important heading on the page, whereas an h6 tag is the least. In the context of SEO, a page should only contain one h1 heading, which typically displays as a title at the top of the page, although that isn’t always the case. After your h1, you can organize your subsequent headings by importance, such that an h2 is the top subheading, an h3 is ranked lower than that, etc. Such organization mirrors the hierarchical structure of a site; as you go further down through your headings toward the last h6, the content is a more offshoot variation of the content that the main or h1 heading represents.
URL Structure
Before people land on your web pages, they will often see their URLs in the search results. A strong URL structure should give users an idea of what they’re going to see if they click. Search engines use the words in URLs as keywords in ranking pages. With that in mind, be sure URLs are relevant to the page content and unique. Make them as descriptive as possible and include keywords that are relevant to users and appear on the page. Also, make URLs short, but not so short that they become vague. In general, a good URL length is easy to read, which is usually 50 to 60 characters. In addition to what’s in the URL, search engines consider how close the URL is to the root domain. URLs that are shorter and have fewer directories are preferred because they’re easier to read. In this URL example, the main directory is /articles/ in the subdirectory. The subdirectory is: /where-exactly-did-branding-come-from. Search engines will use the main directory as a cue to what the site is about and the subdirectory as a cue to what the page is about, so organizing your site structure helps readers as well as search engines understand your content. Within a root directory, keep subdirectory names consistent and consider major topics as categories while being more specific with subdirectory names and keeping URLs short.
Content Quality
In the modern world, with its rapid pace of life, it’s estimated that 70% of online searches are performed by people who already know what content they need. And 85% of the content is found by users without using any search engine. So in such a context, it seems anachronistic to try to outrank others pages without anything unique, useful, interesting, even amazing to offer to the users. But be sure: plenty of people still insist on practicing the art of writing uninteresting, ambiguous, and even dull content. The problem is, both they and the search engines won’t be able to read minds. So for glory or not, the walls of the landing pages will have to be covered with words. If it wasn’t that easy…
The keyword is “quality.” And unlike certain art movements, which celebrate freedom from conventions and norms, we travelers of digital marketing need certain rules and techniques integrated into every description page. To establish yourself as a leader in the field, it is essential to produce innovative, relevant, unique, competent, in-depth content. Content should contain information that only you can offer, whatever it may be, from the choice of product size to insights into your work philosophy. Remember: content can always be improved. Explore the topic, it’s worth it! You can always count on exceptional quality.
That said, how to effectively draft quality content? Following content writing formulae won’t make your text the best of SEO content. You don’t need creativity, it’s about being clear. For the search engines to be able to understand the content without any doubts, its inner logic has to be ironclad. This implies rigorous semantic structures and their superordinate organization, encyclopedic structure, greater attention to detail than a ten-page analysis of a high-school essay written in a fit of rage. It is useful to use a certain tone but resist the impulse for literary embellishments.
Image Optimization
As the name suggests, image optimization is the implementation of SEO best practices to the images on your web pages. But good image optimization actually goes a little beyond just image SEO. Think of your images as content. A web page is not just text. It has multiple elements, and in this digital age of multimedia, a webpage that just has text isn’t going to engage visitors for long. Screens are not just made for reading anymore. It’s much more enjoyable to learn about new things, like your products or services, by viewing stunning images or graphics over long passages of text. Did you know visitors are 64–85% more likely to click on your page if it has an image? More than 80% of interactions on social media have visual content. That’s why it is so important to make sure you’re using captivating images on your pages. But along with having visually-stunning images, you also need to make sure that you’ve fully optimized your images to get them appearing in search engine results pages as well as social media results. You can optimize images for SEO and around the different search engines but also social media sites. Image optimization is an important part of on-page SEO because it improves the overall content of a website. It helps search engines to figure out whether an image is relevant to the content of a page and it therefore helps with general page ranking. Plus, it also allows people to discover your images through image search and refer traffic back to your website.
Internal Linking
Internal linking refers to the links that websites use to link to other pages on their own website. Not only does it create pathways for search engines to crawl a website more intelligently, but it also helps users navigate your website more effectively – both of which help improve a site’s SEO.
The primary motivator for creating internal links is to distribute a site’s page authority and rank potential. The focus is on identifying which pages are performed well, why they performed well, and then rewarding those pages in search results for relevant queries. High authority content on a website assists other pages on that website to rank for relevant queries as well, provided that the site properly links to those pages internally.
Additionally, great internal links help link users to pages that are recognized as valuable, relevant, and trustworthy based on their own high-quality content, as well as the overall domain authority of the site. This is especially important for pages on sites that aren’t as authoritative, as they have less chance of ranking for competitive queries, regardless of the quality of content. Internal linking assists these pages in ranking, giving them more visibility and enabling them to drive traffic to the website.
In addition to the above benefits associated with page authority, internal links also help to improve the UX of a website. By giving users a path to follow while engaging with a website, internal links lead users to content they want to see more easily. You can even make suggestions for further reading to keep users engaged. By eliminating any possible frustration that may come from not being able to find desired pages, great internal links improve the quality of the whole user experience.
Mobile Friendliness
Mobile friendliness, also known as mobile responsiveness, refers to how well a website can adapt to the different devices it is viewed on. A decade ago, mobile friendliness wasn’t all that important because most people were browsing the web from a laptop or desktop computer. Today, however, it’s hard to imagine anyone not scrolling through the internet on a mobile device. Given how prevalent smartphones have become, having a website that displays properly on a mobile device is crucial for your on-page SEO. If someone is browsing a website on their phone and it doesn’t provide a good user experience — for instance, if it’s difficult to navigate, or if the text is hard to read without zooming in — they’re likely to click off the page and head somewhere else. Search engines want to deliver the best possible results, so that means prioritizing sites that are mobile friendly. If you’re using a website builder, you can often create a mobile-friendly website without needing to do any custom coding. With that said, it’s always a good idea to test how your finished product looks on different devices before publishing it. If you’ve done any kind of custom coding to create your site, there are various ways to make sure your website is properly optimized for mobile devices. There are tutorials on how to create mobile-friendly websites, as well as how to implement the rules of mobile-first indexing, which is important to note because it has been said that they’ll only be using the mobile version of a website to rank its content. If you want to check how your website is currently doing regarding mobile friendliness, there is a mobile-friendly test, as well as a page speed insights tool that shows you how quickly your site loads on a mobile device, along with suggestions for speeding it up. If your website isn’t mobile friendly, visitors will have a poor experience when viewing it on their phone. Search engines will pick up on that, which could lead to your pages dropping in ranking.
Page Load Speed
The speed at which your web pages load is often an overlooked factor but critical for driving traffic to your website and ensuring your website visitors have a good experience on your site, especially on mobile devices. A common rule of thumb when designing a website is that the page should take less than two seconds to fully load.
In addition to convincing people to stay on your pages, search engines consider page load speed an important ranking factor when determining which sites to show in search results. Longer loading web pages take up search engine resources, and by rewarding sites that load quickly, they can dedicate those resources elsewhere. Sites that load in five seconds earn twice as much in revenue as sites that load in 19 seconds. This means it’s not only beneficial for your ranking on search engine results pages; it’s a smart strategy if you want to build a profitable business as well.
If your pages take more than three seconds to load, more than 40% of your site visitors will leave. At the same time, even a one-second delay in load time can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. All this data emphasizes the importance of page load time, which is why it’s important to pay attention to and ensure your pages load as fast as possible. There are many tools available to help you test page load time.
Best Practices for On-Page SEO
So, now that you know why on-page SEO is important, what are some of the things you should be doing to optimize each page on your website? Well, you want to be sure of the following:
Use appropriate keywords in your content, including in those common areas you just learned about. Use LSI keywords and synonyms to avoid stuffing too many of those keywords in your content. Create engaging, valuable content that meets the needs of your audience, regardless of what type of content it is. Optimize your pages for user experience, making your content easy to read and understand.
We’ll go into more detail about each of these best practices below. But keep in mind that these aren’t hard and fast rules that you have to stick to in order to see SEO results. They’re more like ideas to keep in mind as you’re creating or optimizing content on your website. With that in mind, let’s jump in!
Keyword Research and Placement Before you can optimize your existing pages or create new pages, you need to know which keywords you’re trying to rank for. And you can’t pick just any old keyword. You need to conduct keyword research to find keywords that are relevant to your content, have a decent search volume, and aren’t too competitive.
If you’re struggling to come up with content ideas, that’s okay. There are a number of ways you can come up with good keywords to target, such as brainstorming keywords, looking at other sites in your industry, or even checking out your competitors’ backlinks. But keyword research tools can help you find the best keywords to target as you conduct research.
Keyword Research and Placement
A frequently asked question as it relates to on-page SEO is: How many keywords should be used on a page? The answer is almost one. Even with LSI, synonyms, and topical relevance, targeting more than one keyword on a page is difficult. Keyword stuffing is a thing of the past, though it is still commonly done. This is an age-old on-page optimization technique in which you never leave your keyword. And that’s exactly what Google is trying to get you away from. If you have a high ranking page that does not have lots of keywords throughout the copy, it’s possible the reason might be topical authority. Well-established brands who get so many clicks from their reputation that Google might choose to rank them high, despite their lack of on-page optimization.
Keyword placement focuses on where the keywords are. You definitely should have your focus keyword or phrase at the beginning of at least one heading, preferably H1 or H2. You should have the keyword in at least one other header tag on the page. The keyword is also best at the beginning of your title tag. After that, the keyword as often throughout the body copy as possible without doing keyword stuffing. You should have the keyword in your first paragraph and then have variations of the keyword throughout the copy. Keyword usage is something that would be best to check if using an on-page optimization tool.
Keyword research is the backbone of your on-page SEO. Keyword tools are essential for not just finding the keywords that people are searching for but also how many people are searching for them. It’s best to use a combination of two or three platforms. You search for a keyword you are considering and compare the search volume between them. If one platform has a significantly higher volume than the others, it might be an outlier (though volume can also be significantly different, depending on the tool).
Using LSI Keywords
Among the factors supported by Google’s ranking algorithm, up to a point, is the contextual relevance of your content. We know by experience and observed data that pages that include semantically relevant words and phrases rank higher than those that don’t. Google is concerned about two things: the user’s search intent and how trustworthy your site is as a source of information. You can send signals on both fronts by including words semantically related to your main keyword phrase. This is so well known that there is a name for these topics: Latent Semantic Indexing Keywords.
LSI keywords describe things related to the main subject. If a semantically related word appears in the same context, it tells Google, and your visitor, that both words are strongly related. In fact, Google’s natural language processing technology uses LSI words to aid in understanding the context and meaning of a piece of content. When you Google the main keyword and see the phrases under “People Also Asked,” each of those questions contains an LSI keyword phrase. The other LSI keyword phrases are found in the “search results snippet” section: “Featured Snippet,” “Top Stories,” or the “People Also Search For” section.
How can you discover LSI keywords? Well, there are a number of valid options. The SERPs are a fantastic resource, as you can simply follow the instructions above to find phrases suggested by Google. Another approach is to use LSI keyword tools, which include various keyword research tools. In fact, keyword research tools allow you to find related phrases that may even have search volume. While the above tools offer keyword inspiration, paid traffic analysis can also be used for performance, as well as organic keyword analysis tools.
Creating Engaging Content
The most basic on-page SEO definition is that you create content for visitors and not search engines. Search engines work to help users find the information they are looking for, so there’s an incentive to make sure that the two are in agreement. But there’s nothing saying that you can’t make requirements for both; in fact, the two have to work together. If your content is geared toward your target audience, it will naturally be better than the rest of the results for a given search term.
Search engine algorithms do change and are affected by limitations of language, but they have gotten to the point where they can sort good quality content from the bad. You have to focus on visitor intent and give them what they want, which is great content. Tell them something they don’t already know. Help them in a way that is simple and straightforward — but longer than everyone else’s posts. Use media and formatting techniques to create a great experience because the time the average visitor spends on your page has a huge effect on your rankings.
So how do you create the best content available? Instead of writing simply because you have done keyword research and utilized what you have learned about keyword placement, use a strategy. Start with topic research to make sure there’s enough interest in that subject; conduct competitor research to find out how the currently ranking posts are doing it, and conclusively do SERP analysis to see if you really should be targeting that keyword at all. By doing some extra legwork before you write your content, your post won’t just be better than the others — it will be the best available. And that’s really what search engines want to give to users.
Optimizing for User Experience
But what is UX? Simply, UX is the process of creating products that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users. There are several principles to follow to create a website optimized for user experience: – Fast: Website load speed is the time it takes to show up the first thing visible to users. If a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, it’s considered slow (and it means users will probably leave!). – Accessible: A basic example of accessibility is to include an “alt attribute” to your images, so even if it doesn’t load on someone’s device, the person will know what that image was about. Or making sure all items on your page can be accessed by keyboard. – Responsive: A responsive website means its design adapts to the user’s device. A responsive website is accessible on mobile devices without having to zoom in and out – a plus since most users access websites from their phone. – Scannable: Users don’t read a website from top to bottom anymore. They scan it to see if it has the information they’re looking for and only read it if it’s worth their time. – Useful: It seems obvious, but your content needs to be relevant! When a user clicks on your page, they must find the information answered in an easy-to-read manner. – Error-Free: typos and 404 pages should not exist on your website. A quick proofreading session can help you catch errors that might let others know your website lacks authority. And a good website builder should make sure none of your links break!
Common On-Page SEO Mistakes to Avoid
Despite the advantages of optimizing individual web pages, most SEO tutorials gloss over the topic or ignore outlining the important details. In this section, we outline some common on-page SEO mistakes to avoid.
Keyword Stuffing
When working to optimize your website for search engines, repetition is key — but sometimes less is actually more. Keyword stuffing is one of the classic SEO blunders: attempting to boost a page’s ranking signals by unnecessarily repeating certain keywords or phrases in the content. The goal is for search engines to understand a piece of content to make it more likely to rank for those search terms, but when done excessively or inappropriately, keyword stuffing is dysfunctional for both humans and bots. Keyword stuffed articles may seem unnatural or strange, so they ultimately dissuade readers, leading them to bounce and lowering your rankings.
Search engines have gotten smart enough that keyword stuffing doesn’t generally pay off anymore, anyway. Once the principle works against the hopes of websites that do it — since search engines are designed to deliver relevant results to the queries that users type in, it doesn’t make sense to continue sending people to low-quality pages that weaken their experience. Search engines use algorithms that can easily detect keyword stuffing, so it can get a website slapped with ranking penalties too severe to recover from. If you want to optimize your articles around specific keywords or phrases, it’s best to do so by including them in the titles and headers, and otherwise following a natural writing flow. Quality content that provides value to readers should always be the goal of your web page, as that’s what search engines intend to use and improve by ranking.
Neglecting Mobile Optimization
Today, more than half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices, so it’s critical that pages load quickly and properly on these devices — otherwise you risk losing potential customers and causing annoyance. Mobile optimization is important to the search experience. It adjusts its rankings based on whether or not you’ve successfully implemented this type of on-page SEO.
While responsive design is the recommended way to optimize your web pages for mobile devices, there are many other things you should check as well. These include: elements that are actionable are easy to tap, mobile page load speed, interstitials that don’t obstruct content access, and small font size. Optimize for mobile users specifically, and you can avoid the frustration of wondering why a page that is clearly done well is still not ranking.
When a user is searching on a mobile device, it means they are looking for information that is important and relevant on the go. They don’t want to click on a page link only to find a hard-to-read site with small elements that are difficult to interact with. User engagement will be poor and the chances of them quickly abandoning the site will be high. They’ll likely just follow the links of competitors who have invested the necessary effort for mobile SEO. These high bounce rates send signals to search engines that the site is not providing the needed content for users.
Ignoring Meta Tags
Meta-Tags should not be ignored, nor used mindlessly. If they are used, they should be carefully selected and customized. The category of meta-tags usually consists of meta-titles and meta-descriptions, and they are proofs that tell search engines what each page is about. A properly completed meta-title and meta-description help search engines better understand the content of your page, and do not forget that these two elements will also be visible for search users. Having a clear meta-title and meta-description is especially useful when multiple pages on your website use the same keyword. In these cases, you should write unique and distinctive meta-descriptions for all the pages in question, which will be useful not only for search engines but also for the users who will carry out the search. If you think about it, these two elements are like a mini-advertisement for your website: if they’re good, users will click on them. Meta-tags serve a very important purpose for search engines, thus, if these two on-page elements are ignored, it would be a mistake that could cause the indexation of your website to be less effective. Using a reliable CMS, the page builder or SEO plugin allows you to flexibly configure all your meta-tags, making them unique, and distinctive for each page on your website. Not only that: the best plug-ins for SEO also allow you to test how your meta-title and meta-description will look like in the search results, so you can adjust them if necessary before making them visible.
Tools for On-Page SEO Analysis
As we’ve mentioned, on-page SEO is a broad topic, which might leave you wondering where to start! There are tools that can help you analyze your pages, and discover what you’re doing right, and most importantly, what you may be doing wrong, so that you can prioritize your changes. On-page SEO analysis tools come in many shapes and sizes, but they can typically be categorized into a few main types.
SEO Auditing Tools
An SEO auditing tool crawls your website and checks your pages against known SEO best practices. The specifics vary from tool to tool, but quality auditors assess factors like page titles, headings, text content, internal linking, and various technical optimizations, like page load speed, mobile compatibility, XML sitemaps, indexability, structured data, and more! These results are usually divided into error and warning categories based on the severity of the issues detected. SEO Auditing Tools offer a great starting point when it comes to on-page SEO. They’re usually less in-depth than dedicated, other specialized tools, but they cover a lot of ground and provide a lot of valuable info in a single report.
Keyword Research Tools
While some SEO auditing tools include keyword data in their reports, keyword research tools specialize in keyword data. They’ll show you what keywords your pages rank for, how much the keywords are searched, how competitive they are in organic and paid search, and may even offer suggestions for related keywords. This data can help you check if your pages rank for relevant keywords, and if they rank well enough that they’re likely to drive traffic. Keyword data is usually divided by country, so it’s advisable to set your target country beforehand. If you’re running a multilingual site, it’s advisable to use a trustworthy tool that accepts various locales, or to perform your analysis one locale at a time.
SEO Auditing Tools
What if you could find out everything about your on-page performance in one place? You can. SEO auditing tools check your site for things like:
Findability — We crawl your site, just like Google does. Are there pages we can’t find? Are you blocking Google from crawling or indexing pages? Technical status — What pages are returning server errors or redirects? Are your images huge and slowing down your site? On-page factors — Do your title tags, meta descriptions, and headers conform to best practices? Titles, metas, and headers — Are your title tags, meta descriptions, and H1s well-written and optimized for keywords? Structured data — Are you using structured data properly? Do you have any warnings or errors? Excess bloat — Are there any pages with excess JS or CSS file sizes? We’ll tell you about them. Linking — Are your internal and external linking structures and anchor texts doing you more harm than good? More specialized audits — Are there any things we can audit that are more specialized? For us, we can look for misconfigured security headers, open redirects, thin content, and more.
You can also take your SEO game to the next level with more specialized tools. For example, a broken link checker will find you all the broken links on your site. A page-speed checker or benchmarking tool will tell you how quickly your page loads. A structured data validator will check the validity of your structured data. If you have accessibility issues, there are tools to check for those too.
However, possessing lots of steely tools doesn’t make you a master craftsman. Auditing tools give you information and suggestions, but you’ll make the best use of the tools by applying your expertise in implementation, identifying specific tactics for your website, and executing modifications according to the implementation plan you develop.
While you’re familiarizing yourself with the various types of on-page audits and other tools available, it might help to rely on a bigger picture conceptual framework when considering how to tackle the different areas of on-page optimization.
Keyword Research Tools
Keyword research is a crucial part of on-page SEO. You should choose which keywords to focus on carefully, using at least one keyword tool to help identify the best opportunities for each of your pages. Generally speaking, a good keyword tool will help you see how often a keyword is being searched, how difficult/expensive it will be to compete for, and suggest some synonyms or related keywords you could consider targeting instead.
There are many different keyword research tools you could use. The most popular are the following:
- Keyword Planner
This is a free tool that will suggest keywords based on the content of your website and give you search volume and cost estimates. As a tool made by the search engine itself, expect it to be an accurate resource. However, you’ll need to have an account in order to use it. The tool also only displays averages for search volume, meaning you won’t get exact numbers for how many people are searching for your query.
- Keyword Magic Tool
This is an excellent alternative that gives you a lot of data as well as unique filters to help you find the right target keywords for your SEO or PPC strategy. It has filtered groupings for different keyword intents, including local, question, and related keywords. You can also get keyword difficulty scores, CPC, and SERP features all in one place.
- Keyword Explorer
This is a user-friendly tool that’s great for getting exact monthly search volume for keywords. It also provides keyword difficulty, ranking distribution, and detailed SERP analytics where you can see the top ranking pages. One of its coolest features is a list of click metrics – it can tell you how many people clicked on search results using that keyword and where they clicked.
Analytics Tools
Analytics tools pour some cold data over you, and in order to take decisions or at least get clues to get your decisions from them, you’ll have to do a lot of number fusion and interpretation. Nevertheless, analytics is key in order to advance from the very first step of your SEO efforts and go until you actually convert your traffic into sales. Web analytics will put you in the right (or wrong) path to take in your keyword strategy, the pages you want to bring traffic to, and the variables you’ll have to adapt to optimize the whole profit part of SEO.
The most famous web analytics tool is a popular analytics platform. Besides tracking the basic metrics of your site, like traffic sources, page views, page referrers, sessions, and bounce rate, this tool also ties your site data with all the related services, and that offers a whole new world of analysis, such as conversion metrics, transactions, costs, and even revenue. The only drawback is that it’s a major platform. The public, and therefore, the government, won’t stop pointing it as being a too powerful major monopoly. If you don’t want your logs and analytics data to settle with the Big Brother, you can always rely on other available on-premise analysis tools. Use these alternatives only if you feel you’re not going to bother the whole internet, and only if you have a dedicated server with enough resource available to gather and crunch thousands or millions of logs.
Monitoring and Measuring On-Page SEO Success
Just like with any other digital marketing strategy, measuring and monitoring the success of your on-page SEO is an absolute must. After all, how do you know if the SEO changes you made on your pages were successful? In this section, we’ll go over a few different ways you can monitor your strategy to ensure it’s effectively achieving your goals.
Tracking Organic Traffic
SEO efforts can get you a lot of traffic, but how do you find out how much? Tracking website traffic is one of the first tasks you should tackle for any SEO campaign, so that you can understand how your efforts will support the website owner’s business goals in terms of incoming traffic. Tracking this metric also allows you to optimize your SEO strategy and make necessary adjustments over time.
You can get a glimpse of the organic traffic category by selecting Acquisition > All Traffic from the left navigation, but to see only the traffic from search engines, select Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels. From the Channels screen, select the Organic Search option. This will bring up a view of all the traffic to your website over the time frame you’ve selected coming exclusively from search engines. You can adjust the date range and apply any relevant segments from there.
When you click on the Organic Search option, you’ll see a new view that includes data on which sources are sending you the most traffic. You can use this data to identify possible issues. For example, if a significant percentage of your organic search traffic is coming from one source, you would want to have a discussion with your website owner about the SEO efforts that are in place. On that same view, you can see which landing pages from organic search results are bringing you the most traffic. This report can help identify optimizing opportunities. For example, if a page you’re not optimizing is bringing in a significant amount of search traffic, you might want to learn more about the keywords it ranks for and use that information to plan better SEO on that page. You might also want to take a deeper dive into keyword data using other tools, to help discover new keyword opportunities.
Analyzing Bounce Rates
When someone visits your website and leaves without clicking on anything, that’s considered a bounce. A high bounce rate can be a clue that your page doesn’t match the visitor’s intent or isn’t engaging enough to encourage them to stick around. You can track your bounce rates and see a bounce rate for your whole site, as well as for each individual page. If they leave your site immediately after landing on it, you might be in trouble! A high bounce rate could mean visitors are expecting a different type of experience than what your page delivers. For example, if someone types “best tacos in Beaverton” and sees your organic result for “best tacos in Beaverton,” and then immediately leaves after landing on your page, you could assume that your page didn’t provide them with what they were looking for.
This might indicate that your title and meta description are misleading, making visitors expect something different from what they’ll find on your landing page, or that your page isn’t giving them a good answer to their search — or it could just mean that the searcher was looking for an answer to their query instead of a nice afternoon out at the taco truck. There’s no easy way to tell why visitors bounce. Some pages naturally fit into their searchers’ journey as a side note rather than something they intend to dwell on. If your site has pages that are meant to serve as side notes (like your location page or your hours page), you might not need to worry about their bounce rates. However, for most pages on a site, you’ll want to keep an eye on your bounce rates. You can even use them to evaluate what improvements could benefit your site as a whole.
Assessing Conversion Rates
As a valuable metric, conversion rates gauge user interactions with businesses after reaching an optimized landing page through search engines. An online business could have one or multiple conversion goals, including lead generation, sales, downloads, calls, form submissions, etc. Conversion tracking conveniently handles all goals via the “Conversions” section in the left-hand sidebar. Click “Goals” to view the relevant metrics that help monitor the overall goal completion rate, or select a specific goal listed on the right to analyze its conversion rate, duration, sessions per goal, etc. Whichever method you choose, make sure that options such as goal duration or expected source are customized, to ensure the conversion data is as relevant as possible to your on-page SEO evaluation.
Here’s how you can review conversion metrics. For an eCommerce site, you can check the overall conversion tracked; the number is the total revenue earned in that specific period. You can analyze your best performing product or product groups under Product Performance to gain valuable information regarding your product range. This can help with various conversions, such as product bundling, expansion or reduction of specific product groups, or discounts on the least performing products. You can even view the target eCommerce revenue, so that you can create a roadmap to increase it in the future.
In conclusion, in addition to evaluating the effectiveness of a specific on-page SEO strategy, reviewing all the metrics mentioned above can help with future strategies. It is important to monitor on-page SEO data using the aforementioned techniques before assigning meaning to them.
Future Trends in On-Page SEO
Search engines have come a long way since the days of keyword stuffing and meta tag spamming. With the focus on user experience, they have made it clear many times that quality, contextual, and relevant content is what raises a site in the SERPs. To help people create content keeping the above in mind, guidelines have been launched.
With all this information available, what will the future of on-page SEO look like? It will be a continued focus on technical SEO that makes the site easy to use, content understanding improvement, especially with the rise of voice search, and of course, great content.
Voice search is on the rise – there’s no doubt about that. People have gotten lazy and would rather talk to their devices than tap-tap-tap. So we speak in longer, more natural-sounding phrases, and algorithms have become intuitive enough to answer these queries. But what if there was a way to find the best results to show? Well, that’s kind of how certain algorithms work. And with these algorithms, queries are understood better than any other before.
There’s no clear implication of this for the future of on-page SEO, but it signals a shift towards using intent and context in searches rather than relying purely on matching keywords in the query. Does this make on-page SEO less important? Certainly not. Even with the effort put in, it still can’t replace a high-quality page optimized for both users and search engines.
Voice Search Optimization
Now that voice search is gaining in popularity, optimizing your site for voice queries is becoming an essential part of your on-page SEO strategy. Voice search adds an additional challenge to search optimization because it doesn’t return a whole list of possible results as with traditional search engines. Instead, it answers the query, featuring only one result at the top of the search page, especially for local queries. This means that if you want to get traffic from voice queries, you have to secure this one position.
To outrank site pages of major players in voice search optimization, you have to make sure that your content answers popular questions for your niche. You can find all possible questions with common interrogative words people search. You can filter your results by location and language, as well as choose to include only preposition-based or comparison questions.
The next step is to make sure your answers are worthy enough to get rich results. Google displays featured snippets from high-ranking pages for voice queries, so it’s better to secure this position for your page. Do that by providing clear, concise, and informative answers. For factual queries, give a brief answer directly after the question, using the same phrasing as in the query. You can then add additional details and tweak the content to your brand voice, expanding on the answer however you want, as long as it’s relevant.
AI in Content Creation
Artificial intelligence is changing how content is created. It can quickly draft text upon request, and more sophisticated iterations can enhance that draft. For SEO, there are clear concerns. The core of the policy states that the content should benefit the user, helping them to achieve their goal – and not be created purely to attract SEO without helping the user. For now, search engines are not able to determine the best results for some searches without human experience. They cannot provide emotional anecdotal knowledge in the same way as a person. The best mac and cheese or taco recipes are derived from a home cook sharing experiences along with the recipe. The unique nature of personal experience cannot be replicated through scraping the internet and compiling information from a database.
However, AI can assist in writing, and it can be much faster at producing a draft than a human. Once complete, the human writer can edit the draft with their unique perspective, adding the subtleties that AI cannot do alone. AI tools can be used for optimizing pages too. A product description could be created with the help of AI. That is a big time savings for entry-level workers while also providing the powerhouse of SEO and writing knowledge to executives who may not be writers but understand the important aspects of a product. After all, product pages are not simply meant for search engine rankings. They exist to help the person who is searching, using keywords, get as much information presented quickly about the product.
Conclusion
How do you optimize a website for search engines? For most people, the answer would probably involve link-building or other strategies. Perhaps creating a social media presence? Paid ads?
But if you never touch the actual website, are you really optimizing it? Of course not! Links are just one piece of the puzzle, although an important piece. However, it has been shown many times that for most websites, the highest ROI comes from optimizing the actual pages of the website itself. This is called on-page SEO, and it includes the content you create, the keywords you use, your internal linking structure, image alt text, schema markup, and more.
In addition to helping your website rank highly in the search results for relevant keywords, on-page SEO is also important for another reason: the user experience. When we visit a website, we are looking for an answer to a question or a solution to a problem. Ideally, it delivers the information we want in a format we appreciate. On-page SEO is what makes that happen.
If your website isn’t helpful to visitors, they’ll immediately leave. You can know a million different tricks and hacks, but if your content isn’t designed to help your readers, it’ll never be successful. While the main task of on-page SEO is to let search engines know what your page is about, there’s also a major emphasis on the experience of the user. Everything you do should be with the goal of making that person’s visit as enjoyable and satisfying as possible.
In this post, we’ve gone through a number of strategies to create a search- and user-friendly page on your website. And while there are many, probably hundreds more that exist, they all fall under the one statement of purpose of on-page SEO: optimize content for people and search engines will follow. That is a good motto to follow.