Imagine this: You’ve just created your dream website and are ready to fill it with amazing content that is insightful and relevant to searchers, will drive conversions, and truly reflect who you are as a brand. What now? It is time for the pièce de résistance: on-page SEO.
If you are reading this blog post, you’re probably looking to improve your website rankings in the SERPs. You will be happy to know that you have come to the right place. On-page SEO is one of the best places to start when making your website more search engine friendly, and by following on-page SEO best practises you’ll also make your pages more accessible and intuitive for your audience.
Sounds pretty good, right? Well, let’s get started. In this blog post, we will be taking you through the several aspects of on-page SEO that you have to be aware of in order to embark on your SEO journey.
What is on-page SEO?
Before we begin, it’s important to understand what on-page SEO is and how it’s different from off-page SEO. Also called on-site SEO, on-page SEO is the process of optimising your webpages to ensure that they rank higher on search engines and gain more search engine traffic. The entire on-page SEO process happens directly within your website.
Off-page SEO, on the other hand, refers to any kind of optimisation that occurs outside the website to boost its rankings. Both of these go hand-in-hand and are very important for your SEO strategy. However, for beginners, it is a good idea to start with on-page SEO factors as we have more control over them.
By focusing on on-page SEO elements such as meta tags, content, URLs and internal linking, you can greatly improve your website’s chances of ranking higher in the SERPs. To make it easier for you, we have compiled the following list of the nine essential on-page SEO elements that you need to know.
Keyword research
Start by determining the strategic keywords that you would like to target in your website’s content. Effective keyword research is considered the foundation of on-page SEO. Once you identify the relevant keywords and incorporate them strategically into your content, it becomes easier to align your website with the exact search intent of your target audience.
Useful keyword research tools include Google Keyword Planner, Semrush, or Ahrefs. These can help you identify the most relevant keywords according to your business or industry. When looking for keywords, it is a good idea to look for those with a good balance between competitiveness and search volume.
Another piece of advice is to always use well-chosen and specific long-tail keywords as well as more generic short-tail ones. For example, your sustainable sportswear brand may target competitive short-tail keywords like ‘running shoes’, but you may also go after long-tail keywords like ‘sustainable women’s long-distance running shoes’. While the number of people searching for the latter phrase will be far smaller, using long-tail keywords can result in higher conversion rates as they target users with a clearer search intent.
Comprehensive keyword research is the essential foundation for your content strategy, but no website exists in a vacuum. Make sure to evaluate your competitors’ strategies using your keyword research tool to identify content gaps and potential easy wins where you can win keywords from the competition.
Content creation
Next, it is important to ensure that the content on your website is not only useful but also engaging, original and adds value to your target audience. Search engines like Google prefer high-quality content that is useful and adheres to the E-E-A-T guidelines. Creating content with both your human audience and search engines in mind is essential for a website that ranks high in the SERPs and delivers a great user experience.
It is also helpful to note that you could organise your content and provide structure and hierarchy using heading tags (H1 tag, H2 tag, H3 tag, and so on). To help the search engines to understand what your content is about, make sure that you insert relevant keywords into your headings.
While inserting keywords, make sure you avoid keyword stuffing and ensure that they do not disrupt the flow of the content or compromise the user experience.
Meta tags optimisation
Once you have your content in place, it is time for you to optimise your meta tags. Meta tags are essentially snippets of text that describe a page’s content. Keep in mind that the meta tags appear on the page’s source code or on the SERP and not on the page itself. There are several types of meta tags but the ones that we will focus on right now are title tags and meta descriptions.
Title tags
This is the text that you see at the top of your page’s listing in the SERPS. As well as being the first element of your content that searchers see on Google, the title tag is important because this is what tells search engines what your page is about. This means that the search engine can figure out how relevant your page is for various search queries.
While writing your title tags, remember to keep them as concise and compelling as possible. A character limit of 59-70 characters is preferable. You should also include your primary keyword for better visibility in the search results.
Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions, as the name suggests, are an attribute that give a brief description of the page. These show up on the SERP directly underneath the meta title.
As with the meta titles, while crafting your meta description, keep them as concise as possible, with a character limit of 155 characters. Remember that this is your chance to entice the searchers to click through to your website. While meta descriptions are not a ranking factor, they do affect the click-through rate (CTR) and hence are very important for your SEO strategy.
Want to find out more about meta tags and why they’re necessary? Check out our blog ‘How Important Are Meta Titles and Descriptions for SEO?’
Content formatting
While we've already mentioned the importance of H tags for on-page content, other formatting options like bold, italics, and bullet points can also help to break up text and make it easier for users to scan and understand the content.
Well-formatted content doesn't just aid in enhancing readability and user experience. It also means your content will be more likely to be featured as rich snippets or answer boxes in search results. This will then further increase your site's visibility and organic traffic.
URL structure and optimisation
URL optimisation is important for your SEO strategy as this helps provide additional context to both search engines and users. The structure of your URLs should be simple, descriptive and also readable. It is preferable not to use numbers or random characters at the end of your URL.
When talking about URLs, we cannot forget canonical URLs. Sometimes, you may have a group of pages with similar content and URLs – for example, an eCommerce site may have separate pages for the same dress in different colours.
By using a canonical tag, you can indicate to search engines that one particular URL is the best representative page from a group of duplicate pages. This helps search engines and other web crawlers to understand which version of a webpage should be indexed and displayed in the search results.
Image optimisation
Image SEO is an often overlooked step while optimising a website. However, optimising your images to ensure that they are easy for search engines to find and read can help you improve your website’s user experience, visibility and rankings.
Start by optimising your file names and using descriptive file names for your images. The names should reflect the content of the images themselves so avoid using random names. You can also try to insert relevant keywords into the name.
It’s also important that you include alt text for all images. Alt text is basically a brief and accurate description of the image. Using alt text can improve accessibility for visually impaired users who use screen readers while also helping search engines to understand the content of the image. This means that search engines can better understand the content of a page as a whole and show it in relevant search results.
Internal linking
Internal linking is the process of linking between different pages on your website. This has two key purposes. Firstly, this improves user experience and navigation, allowing your audience to find their way around your website. Your customers can’t convert if they can’t find their way to conversion pages in the first place!
Secondly, effective internal linking can help search engines to discover and index new pages while also distributing link equity throughout your website. Internal links indicate to search engines which pages are relevant to each other and helps them better understand the content of your website.
When thinking about internal linking, remember to use relevant anchor text and descriptive keywords. This will help both search engines and users to better understand the relationship between the linked pages and the context. You could also use strategic internal linking to improve the visibility of the important pages on your website, such as your key conversion pages.
Mobile optimisation
In such a mobile-dominated world, it's absolutely essential that you optimise your website for mobile devices. In fact, Google now has a mobile-first indexing policy, meaning that the search engine will predominantly look at the mobile version of the site instead of the desktop version for indexing and ranking.
So, what exactly does mobile optimisation mean? In short, mobile optimisation ensures that your website is just as responsive when viewed on mobile devices and tablets, providing a seamless user experience across different devices. Make sure you're implementing responsive design and UX techniques while optimising page speed for mobile devices.
Through implementing mobile optimisation, you'll be able to improve your website’s search engine rankings and drive more organic traffic in the long run.
SEO content audits
On-page SEO isn’t a one-and-done task. Over time you will continue adding new content to your site, internal links may break, or search engine algorithms may change to prioritise different ranking factors. All of these changes can impact your website’s SEO performance, so it’s essential that you continue to keep SEO in mind to enjoy continued great performance.
For this reason, SEO content audits are an essential part of your ongoing SEO strategy. By carrying out audits, you can identify content that isn’t performing as well as you’d like and identify strategies to boost it, check how your content compares to your key competitors’ pages, and find easy ways to improve your SEO performance.
For a full break-down of the benefits of continued SEO content audits, read our blog ‘Why Do An SEO Content Audit?’
Conclusion
If you're looking to start optimising your website for search engines, it's essential that you understand the basic fundamentals of on-page SEO. By following the basics of on-page optimisation, including optimising title tags and metadata, using heading tags, writing high-quality SEO-first copy, focusing on mobile optimisation and effective content formatting, you'll be able to form a solid SEO foundation that will improve your website's visibility and rankings.
Once you've mastered these SEO basics, your website will be well on its way to higher search engine rankings and better user experience. While we can’t promise that on-page SEO alone will shoot you to the top of the SERPs immediately, it’s a great place to start in your SEO journey.
Looking to strengthen your business's SEO strategy? We're Viaduct Generation, nice to meet you! As a mission-led SEO agency, we're all about empowering under-represented and allied businesses through holistic search strategies. Feel free to contact our team today to book your free SEO audit to find out more about how you can boost your website’s rankings, organic traffic, and conversions.
