Your SEO Company Guide To On-Page SEO
In this SEO Company guide we will run you through important on-page SEO factors that you can consider using to improve your SEO. Trust an SEO company, we know a thing or too.
On-Page or on-site SEO is the process of ensuring the elements on your website are correctly optimised for search engines and their users.
In this comprehensive SEO Company guide to On-page SEO, we will be taking you through a few of these elements, and guiding you on how to enhance things like keyword title tags, meta tags, schema mark-up, internal linking, webpage images, page speed and featured snippets so as to maximise your pages visibility and ranking status.
1. Optimise Title and Description Tags
1.1) Creating Compelling Title Tags
Once you have identified the keyword/s you want to use for your page through keyword research, the first step in optimising your on-site SEO is to make sure you are creating click-worthy titles. Title tags are essentially the most important factor for good on-page SEO as they provide the search engine with a clear summary of your page and therefore must be carefully considered.
Once you have settled on a good title tag, make sure to try to place your chosen keyword as close to the front of the title as possible. This doesn’t always make sense to do so, but if it is possible, therefore if your keyword features closer to the beginning it will be seen as having more weight than if the keyword feature further along the title.
Another tactic is using modifiers to the end of the title such as “best” or using the year’s date. Be sure not to save the original post like this or the URL will feature irrelevant past date in the future. Add the date after publishing the post to prevent this.
All this to say that the purpose of title tags is to help search engines as well as users identify what they are clicking onto, and therefore the easiest way to improve these tags is simply by checking that every page has one and that they are as original as possible.
1.2) Use Original, Keyword-Heavy Meta Descriptions
Although its possible search engines might override your descriptions with their own snippets, it is always recommended that you create your pages meta description yourself. An SEO company guide will tell you that Google will overwrite about 70% of title tags at time of writing. So focus on this for important pages where it makes sense.
Google works by bolding terms that match a users query, therefore, make sure you use your target keyword at least once in your description.
Here are a few more tips to improve your descriptions:
– Be Succinct: Meta descriptions should only be 160 characters or less to ensure the full description is displayed.
– Distinctive Descriptions: Crafting unique and distinct meta descriptions will help to avoid repetition and elevate click-through rates.
– Highlight Value: Define what things set your page apart and make sure to focus them in your descriptions.
– Be Explicit: Being as clear as possible in exactly what exactly the page’s purpose is in order to manage the expectations of users.
– Front-Loading: Putting the most critical information as close to the beginning as possible assists with visibility and impact of your description.
– Building Trust – avoid using any spammy or click-bait looking adjectives in order to build trust with your users.
2. Generating Compelling and Useful SEO
2.1) Prioritise Uniqueness
Being unique doesn’t just refer to duplicate content, rather, focus on bringing a sense of freshness and newness to your page’s content that isn’t just a regurgitation of what’s already out there. An SEO company would research and find good replacement content that would be current.
This could mean the use of a modern perspective, a different tip or strategy to solving a problem, presentation of a recent case study, or even an interesting approach to the UX and UI design of the page.
2.2) Useful Content
Ensuring your content is more specialised is a great foundation, however, due to the vast and ever increasing amount of content available on the internet, in order to stand out, you must also insist that your content is on top of that, super valuable:
– It’s all in the Details: Make your content as detailed as possible by including images, in-depth descriptions and step-by-steps if necessary.
– Strong Copy: Robust copywriting will make your content more captivating, ensuring users stay on your page longer.
– Relevant Material: Up-to-date strategies and using new examples goes a long way.
– Expertise: The majority of content out there has been created by random freelance writers, so content from someone with first hand experience or a high level of knowledge on the topic therefore makes your content invaluable to readers.
– Accuracy: Always endeavor to provide the most reliable and current information to your viewers, trust an SEO company on this one.
2.3) Fulfilling Search Intent
The above steps will get you onto the first page of Google, but if you want to remain there, your page (and its target keywords) must satisfy search intent and be precisely what a Google searcher is looking for.
3. Refining Content according to an SEO company
3.1) Your target keyword/s must be utelised in the first 100 words
This is a traditional on-page SEO strategy that still holds weight. You’ll want to include your keywords at least once in the first 100-150 words of your copy. Some people do this by including it in the title.
3.2) Keyword Frequency
An SEO company would agree that using the same keyword multiple times does in fact improve your SEO. As we’ve discussed, keywords are like a search engines own language to identify what a page’s content is actually about. Therefore, use the keyword phrase meaningfully in the content, enough that Google sees it as important in the interpretation.
3.3) Utelising External (Outbound) Links
By linking to external sources in your own content, it further allows Google to confirm your page’s topic and certifies that your page is also one of diverse and high quality information.
3.4) Optimise URL’s
The URL structure of your page is an often overlooked element of SEO but have become super important as the URL in both mobile and desktop SERPS is now structured above the title tag.
To create SEO-friendly URLS, simply make sure your URL is short, and include a keyword in every URL along with an extra word or two if need be.
4. Optimising Your Page for Click Through Rate (CTR)
Your site’s organic click through rate comes into SEO two-fold: it is likely a Google page ranking factor, and plays a major role in directing more traffic to your page.
4.1) Inquiring Title Tags
One of the most unexpected SEO findings is that utelising title tags that are question-based has a higher CTR. So whenever it makes sense to do so, it is recommended to create questioning title tags.
4.2) Missing Meta Descriptions
Earlier, we talked about how to create compelling meta descriptions. However, these descriptions need not be perfect all the time because even just ensuring that you have one alone increases CTR by at least 6% vs pages that don’t, studies find.
4.3) Emotional Title Tags
Studies show that people are more attracted to titles that tap into an emotional response, but only to a point. You need to be extra careful here, as emotional titles do have a 7% higher CTR than bland ones, yet can also be decreased by up to 12% if a title is too superfluous as this comes off as spammy and gives the impression of clickbait.
4.4) Adding the Current Year to Titles and Descriptions
This certainly won’t make or break your CTR, but updating your pages title and descriptions can definitely have a more positive effect as it keeps content that might go out of date quickly current.
5. Take note of On-Page UX Signals
UX signals are used by Google to measure how users interact with your content. Google pays attention to user interaction signals like Dwell Time and Bounce Rate, so that means you should be too, just like an SEO company.
5.1) Drive Content Above the Fold
Say someone has now successfully landed on your website from Google, they will now want their answers and fast. In order to avoid bounce, make sure your writing and headline is front and centre, pushing all images further down the page.
5.2) Segment Your Content
Because readers want their information as quickly as possible, they usually skim over content instead of reading every word. To cater to this, block your content into easily digestible elements by using things like bullets and lots of subheadings.
6. Advanced On-Page SEO
Here are some further tips and tricks that go above and beyond to really take your on-page SEO to the next level, like how an SEO company would do it.
6.1) Use Original Images
Using stock photos consistently might be negatively affecting your page’s SEO. Wherever possible, using your own unique photos will consistently help you outrank those who don’t.
6.2) Internal Linking
Adding internal links is huge for SEO. Some pages on your website might be doing better than others for a variety of reasons. You want to link those higher-authority pages to those ones that might need a boost.
Adding links to related pages that are not performing as well as high-authority pages can seriously improve their SEO. An SEO company would think of the bigger picture here.
6.3) The Importance of Comprehensive Content
Google will rank your page higher if it can show its users that everything they need is on a single page, ie: comprehensive content. If your page covers an entire topic, it improves its ranking massively.
A way to do this is by using long-tail keywords. We spoke about these earlier, and are defined by longer phrases that a searcher might use in order to track down more specialised and niche information. Typically, employing more long-form writing and content on your page increases the odds that these keywords are present and increases the likelihood that these topics are covered.
6.4) Boost Page Speed
Google does look at PageSpeed in the sense that if you under a certain speed it is a negative signal. This makes the speed of your page extra important. Test your page speed with any available online tool, and if your page loading time is below standard, definitely consider moving your website to a faster host.
This is not just best practice, but actually a critical step in ensuring your website meets ever-evolving on-page SEO standards.
6.5) Image Descriptions
Google uses images to understand the content of your page, therefore, adding descriptive file names and alt text that contain your target keywords helps them understand what your page is all about.
6.6) Optimising for Voice Search SEO
The voice search capability on search engines is becoming increasingly popular among users and growing fast. The single best way to make sure your content is optimised for this is by creating FAQ pages. Google seems to pull voice search results specifically from FAQ pages, this may have to do with the succinct nature of this content, but for whatever reason there is a correlation.
6.7) Regular Monitoring and Updates
It must be known that achieving exceptional on-page SEO is unfortunately not a once-off task, and if you are committed in making SEO work for you, you must also be dedicated consistently ensuring the content of your page maintains it relevancy and is constantly inline with changing SEO standards. An SEO company helps here so that you can focus on your own business.
To maintain a high SEO ranking, you must continuously monitor and review your pages metrics in relation to its traffic trends, bounce rate, CTR, and targeted keyword ranking to make sure your content is as optimised as possible.
By following this guide closely and successfully implementing these expert solutions, you have all the knowledge you now need to ensure your pages SEO is of the highest standard. Remember to regularly go through this SEO company guide in order to ensure current on-page SEO criteria is always being met in order to avoid a possible decline in your rankings.