An on-page SEO strategy is a plan for optimising each page of your site so search engines understand it and searchers want to click it. It starts with one target keyword per page, then lines up the content, title tag, headings, URL, internal links, images and page experience with what people searching that keyword want.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of a website’s search traffic.
Whether you run a big or small business, it is important to optimize a website’s on page SEO to improve the websites’ organic search result.
Key takeaways
- An on-page SEO strategy optimises each page around one primary keyword and its search intent.
- The key factors are keywords, titles and headings, meta tags, links, content, URLs, CTR and UX.
- There is no ideal keyword density, so use the keyword naturally alongside synonyms.
- Google has no character limit for titles but truncates long ones, so about 50 to 60 characters is safest.
- Core Web Vitals targets: LCP within 2.5 seconds, INP of 200 ms or less and CLS of 0.1 or less.
- Start with Search Console pages that have high impressions but low CTR, then measure and repeat.
What Is On-Page SEO?
On page SEO also known as on-site SEO is the practice of optimizing a websites’ content to rank higher on SERP. It includes various tactics that help the web pages’ content rank higher for a target keyword and deliver search results that meet user intent.
Why Is On-Page SEO Important?
In order to understand your websites’ content and determine whether the content is a relevant result for a particular search term, Google checks some of the following:
1. Fresh Content –
Google prefers if your content is always up to date.
2. Keyword Usage –
The number of times it has been used in a piece of content
3. High-quality content –
While writing any blog or for that matter any piece of content for a website it is important to main quality.
4. Internal & External Links –
Thus, On-page SEO becomes important.
Without this, your website could be missing out on opportunities to rank higher for relevant search queries related to your business.
Without a search engine optimization strategy your website would get pushed down in search results by your competitors.
Therefore, developing an effective on page SEO strategy to improve your rankings in search results becomes necessary.
What Are the Key On-Page SEO Factors?
1. Target keyword and placement
On-page SEO starts with finding the right keyword for a particular blog or article through keyword research. The target keyword should be relevant to the main topic or theme of the content and should have a high monthly search volume & relevant to your target audience so that it improves your websites’ search ranking.
You should select one primary keyword for your content. You also need to make sure your primary keyword isn’t assigned to any other piece of content.
Once, you have selected your primary keyword you should develop a content plan for your keyword. This would help you in knowing how and where you will use your keyword. You can also decide whether the keyword would be a timely blog post, evergreen content, or a landing page.
After all this, you need to perform keyword optimization to improve keyword rankings. Here’s a quick checklist for that:
- Include your primary keyword in the title of your blog post or article.
- Use your primary keyword once in the first 100-150 words of your article.
- Avoid keyword stuffing.
- Use the primary keyword naturally where it helps the reader. There is no ideal keyword density, so use synonyms and related terms too.
- Adding the primary keyword to Meta Title & Description
2. Title and subheadings
Wrap title in an H1 tag:
The title of your page should be wrapped in an H1 title tag. An H1 title tag is an important ranking factor and is used by search engine bots to figure out what a page is about.
Wrap subheadings in an H2 tag:
Wrapping the subheadings in an H2 tag helps search engines identify the subheadings in your content and the main points of your content. Break the content into sections and use descriptive subheadings (H2-H6) for hierarchy.
3. Meta title and meta description
A meta title is the first thing that users look at and it is also the blue colour title that appears on Search Engine Results Pages.
Here are a few good practices for creating a good meta title
- Keep it short. Google sets no character limit for titles but truncates long ones to fit the device width, so roughly 50 to 60 characters is a safe target.
- Include the primary keyword near the beginning of the title.
- Add a unique title for each pageÂ
- Write for the customer
- Avoid duplicate title tags.
A meta description is a piece of information that summarizes and describes the content of your web page to help users and search engines understand the content better.Â
Google often shows a web page’s meta description as a descriptive snippet in the SERP.Â
You can use these tips to write a compelling description:
- Match search intent by providing relevant content for what searchers are looking for.
- Use active voice in the content to address the searcher directly.
- Be concise.
- Include your primary keyword.
- Have fewer than 160 characters
4. Internal and external links
Linking is an important part of on-page SEO. Linking to relevant internal and external sources can help you direct visitors to sources of information. Example: Facts, Statistics etc.
Adding relevant internal links from blogs or pages to other potential pages helps drive traffic to new content, additionally, it is recommended the anchor tag is set to a target keyword to build relevancy.
Links leading to other websites (external links) also helps search engine robots understand your content. Links that other websites point at you (backlinks) are a separate, off-page signal that you earn rather than add yourself.
5. Content
The most important element of SEO is content. Even when you are creating SEO content for ranking, you should always remember that your primary focus should be your readers.Â
Both readers and search engines like content that is easy to understand. You should aim at creating high-quality page content that is useful, valuable, and well-written.
Having low-quality content or irrelevant content with good quality backlinks on a mobile-friendly site won’t help you to rank on SERP as effectively as reputable sites.
To gain a higher search ranking, you should focus on the following factors:
- The uniqueness of Content: A unique content doesn’t always mean avoiding duplicate content, it involves various other content elements too. The uniqueness of content is defined when something new is added to a piece of content. This something new could be a new strategy, improved design and UX, a new case study, and so on.
- Valuable Content: Making content unique to stand out in the competition is necessary, but it’s not enough. So, to make your content more noticeable you need to make it valuable to users.
Here are some of the ways in which you can create user-friendly content:
Details: Adding details such as images, screenshots & videos help improve visual content on a website, this also improves readability
Updates: Regular updates of new strategies, and steps make content valuable.
Experts: When content is written by someone with real experience and expertise in the field, it holds more value to users. Google’s guide to creating helpful, people-first content explains how it thinks about experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust (E-E-A-T).
- Â Search intent: Content that is unique and valuable can help you rank higher on search engines. But, if you want to stay at a higher ranking your content must satisfy search intent. The content on your page should be able to satisfy what a Google searcher is looking for.
6. SEO-friendly URLs
A Uniform resource locator is mostly known as a “web address” that specifies the location of a web page on the internet. A SEO-friendly URL helps in enhancing user experience and thereby improves the websites’ search engine ranking.
Some of the best practices for URLs for SEO are:
- Keeping URLs simple, relevant, and accurate is the key to make both your users and search engines understand them (a prerequisite to rank well).
- To improve the readability, you can use hyphens to separate words. URLs should not have underscores, spaces, or any other characters to separate words.
- Avoid the usage of URL parameters, as they can create difficulties with tracking duplicate content. If parameters need to be used, use them separately.
7. Optimisation for CTR
CTR refers to the Click-through rate that is the ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who view a page, email, or advertisement. Organic click-through rate matters because a better CTR brings more visitors from the rankings you already have. Google also says it uses aggregated and anonymised interaction data to judge whether results are relevant.
Organic CTR can be improved in the following ways:
1.Identifying keyword cannibalization:
Keyword cannibalization means all your blog posts and articles on your website rank for the same or similar keyword. For example, if you have two posts on the same topic, Google won’t be able to distinguish which article should rank higher for a particular query.
As a result, both the posts will rank lower. You can identify and fix keyword cannibalization by using keyword cannibalization tools by SEMrush and Ahrefs.
2.Utilize schema markup:
Schema markup is a structured data vocabulary that helps search engines understand the content on your website. The user can easily check the details of your websites’ page at a glance which would help them decide whether to click on or move on to a more relevant one.Â
Good schema markups can even lower your bounce rate and help you get more relevant clicks to your website.
3. Structure content for the featured snippet:
Featured snippet is the search result that is featured on top of Googles’ organic search results, below the ads in a box. It aims at answering a users’ query. Featured snippets can offer higher visibility to searchers and can drastically improve organic CTR.
8. UX signals
UX means User Experience. UX signals are the behavioural patterns considered by Google to determine the user‘s experience on your website. When your UX is good, more users visit your website and this will increase the chances of your website rank higher on SERP.
Click-through rate (CTR) and bounce rate are two behavioural metrics worth watching, although Google has not confirmed bounce rate as a ranking factor.
- Click through rate: CTR is the number of users who click on your website divided by the impressions (numbers of times your site is visible) on SERP for a particular keyword.
A higher CTR means more visitors from the same position on the search engine results page (SERP).
Thus it becomes important to monitor each page’s CTR. This would help in identifying the loopholes and improving them to have a higher CTR.
- Bounce Rate: The bounce rate represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then immediately exit the site without any engagement with the site. A high bounce rate indicates that your websites’ actual content isn’t engaging or valuable to create user interaction.Â
You can improve your websites’ bounce rate by
1. Optimizing page loading time
2. Structuring content for mobile users
3. Using Internal links Â
4. Image optimization
- Google Analytics: Google Analytics can help you measure UX signals. Google Analytics 4, which replaced Universal Analytics in July 2023, shows engagement rate, bounce rate and average engagement time for each page, while Google Search Console shows each page’s CTR in search results.
How Do You Build an On-Page SEO Strategy Step by Step?
The eight factors above tell you what to optimise. This is the order to do it in, so your effort goes to the pages most likely to gain traffic first.
- Find your opportunity pages. In Google Search Console, look for pages with plenty of impressions but a low CTR, or an average position between about 5 and 20. Small on-page fixes move these pages fastest.
- Give each page one primary keyword. List your important pages, assign one main keyword to each and make sure no two pages target the same one.
- Check the intent. Search the keyword and compare your page with the top results. If they are guides and yours is a sales page, the format is the problem, not the wording.
- Rewrite the essentials. Update the title tag, H1, opening paragraph, subheadings and meta description so they answer the query clearly and early.
- Optimise images. Compress large files, use descriptive file names and write alt text that describes each image.
- Check page experience. Google’s Core Web Vitals targets are Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less.
- Add internal links and schema. Link to the page from related posts with descriptive anchors, and add structured data where it fits.
- Measure and repeat. Give Google a few weeks to recrawl, compare clicks and CTR in Search Console, then move on to the next batch of pages.
Conclusion
An effective On page SEO strategy will help you optimize your content well so that Google improves your visibility on SERPs.
But to get your website to rank better you would also need a complete SEO checklist that means adding off-page SEO and technical SEO checklist to your strategy.
Our guides to backlinks and off-page SEO and technical SEO cover those next steps, and our on-page SEO checklist turns this strategy into a page-by-page routine. If you would rather hand the work over, our SEO services team can help.
What are your thoughts on On page SEO?
If you have questions let me know in the comments below and I will be sure to answer them.
