In the dynamic and often confusing world of search engine rankings, on-page SEO is the one aspect of the process you have full control over. If you get your on-page SEO right, you improve the chances that Google and other search engines understand the topics of your pages. And, more importantly, improving on-page SEO is something that your customers will love you for.
On-page SEO refers to a set of practices for optimizing on-page content for search engines and users. The practices include but are not limited to:
Even covering these fundamentals goes a long way towards helping both search engines and customers have a better journey when navigating through your site and trying to understand what your business is about.
A relatively common on-page SEO issue seen in search results is sites using the same title tags (known as meta title tags) across multiple pages. From a user’s perspective, the title tag is what stands out most in search engine results when the user looks up a particular query. When you duplicate the same title tag across several pages, you immediately confuse potential customers or leads because they aren’t sure which search engine result to click on to meet their search intent. The likely outcome is lower click-through rates to your valuable blog posts, sales pages, etc.
Duplicate title tags are also not optimal for helping Google and other search engines figure out the intent behind a specific page. It’s a good SEO best practice to insert the primary keyword you’re targeting for a page in its meta title tag. Take a keyword, such as “best waterproof jacket” and look up that query on Google. You will find that several results on the first page use that exact keyword in the title tag of the page.
On the same note, avoid duplicating your meta descriptions. These are brief summaries of what a page is about, and search engines display them to users in search engine results pages. While meta descriptions don’t carry anything like the weight of title tags when it comes to ranking a web page, they do make a difference to click-through rates.
Try to write unique descriptions for each of your site’s pages. Bear in mind that Google sometimes chooses to display its own meta description based on what the search engine’s algorithms believe is the most interesting content on a page. If you lack the time or resources to write unique meta descriptions, you’re actually better off with blank meta descriptions rather than duplicates.
The takeaway here is that each of your pages should have a unique title tag that reflects the intent and/or primary keyword of that specific page. Each page should also have its own unique meta description, whether it’s chosen by the search engine or written by the site owner.
Websites created by local businesses, such as hotels, guesthouses, and local tour guides, are often quite thin on content. If you run a local business, it’s worth trying to figure out if there are any opportunities to add more pages to your site. Some examples include tips about what to do in a specific area, reviews of local attractions, restaurant recommendations in your locality—there are endless opportunities.
This localized content can attract new leads or provide current customers with a better experience. You may find that there are low-hanging fruit opportunities to rank for area-specific keywords because many other local businesses don’t think of using SEO beyond a simple three- or four-page website to find customers.
You can extend this concept beyond local businesses to more general businesses with websites that are short on content. Good content ideas come from thinking about how you can deliver more useful information to your customers. This information should be related to what your business does. Try to become a thought-leader in your particular niche, whether that’s selling specialty cheese to local customers or offering SaaS web design services!
In today’s mobile-first Internet, the ability to market your site to customers must extend to delivering value through a seamless mobile browsing experience. In fact, the mobile site must look as good and work as well as the desktop site. Too many websites today—including some owned by big brands—don’t offer a good enough mobile browsing experience.
One area worth focusing on is optimizing images for mobile devices. Along with the words on your pages, your site’s images are crucial content assets. Whether you’re displaying products for sale or showing potential customers some images of your accommodation, being able to easily view and flick through images definitely helps conversions.
Here are some quick tips:
There are many websites online that have great content published on them but nobody ever sees this content. One reason behind this misfortune is that search engines follow links on websites to discover new content. Each time you publish a new blog post or page and you don’t link to it, that page becomes an “orphan page”. Users can’t find orphan pages without a direct link to them, and search engines can’t discover them.
Aside from impacting discoverability, interlinking between multiple pages spreads link equity throughout the site. With more widely distributed link equity (or link “juice” in SEO parlance), when one of your site’s pages gets a good external link from a reputable domain, some of this linking power flows to other pages. Increasing the number of links between your site’s pages boosts each individual page’s potential to rank for target keywords.
When creating any new piece of content, always ask yourself if there are any opportunities in that content to link to related pages on your site. Furthermore, when publishing new content, check for existing pages on your site from which you can add a link to that new page. Conduct an audit once or twice each year of your internal linking structure with a tool like Screaming Frog to detect orphaned pages and address any issues.
Many small businesses selling products online can find some easy ways to optimize their product pages both for search engines and users.
