The top result in Google gets 27.6% of the clicks with the highest click-through rate (CTR). The chances of clicking through a website drop significantly after the first result on the first page. Also, 75% of users never look past the first page of results. These numbers show that the first Search Engine Result Page (SERP) is the most coveted position for every business selling its product or service online.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing your website’s traffic and, therefore, its visibility for it to be listed on this first result page. And SEO is crucial, irrespective of which search engine users prefer. Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, or anything else, every search engine uses an algorithm to judge your content and display it to the users. To please the algorithm, you must implement SEO strategies respective to each for successfully running your business.
But how does SEO help the algorithm rank websites?
When a user types in any search query, the AI tool scans across millions of web pages and displays results appropriate to the information requested. As technology keeps evolving, the accuracy of these results is also changing. Only web pages that meet the quality standards of the search engine are preferred to be shown at the top. In 2020, Google made 4500 changes to how their search functionality works.
Why is SEO important for business? Typically, search engines display advertisements (paid traffic) and organic results (unpaid traffic) on their result page. But 49% of marketers report that organic results have the best ROI for any channel. Implementing SEO is essential to be listed among the top organic results for a search query. Being listed at the top increases the CTR of your website and the number of visitors to your page. Consequently, the opportunity to convert prospects into customers increases, which brings in revenue. So, let’s get into more details.
What Is On-Page SEO?
Optimizing your website can be divided into on-page, off-page, and technical SEO. While the former two are linked to the quality of content and marketing strategies, Technical SEO focuses on using the right technology for web development and applications.
We will be focusing on on-page SEO and on-page SEO factors in this article. On-page SEO is done to optimize the webpage to rank better for certain keywords in search engines. It brings in organic traffic by focusing on an improved user experience through meaningful, relevant, good-quality content and solving user pain points.
The users and search engines are the two main stakeholders in on-page SEO. While producing a good piece of content can do wonders in converting users, on-page SEO makes it easier for search engines to know about your website and content as well. Informing search engines is crucial because it is what carries your website to the target audience in the first place.
Why Is On-Page SEO Important?
Did you know? 53% of US consumers say that they use a search engine to research the products before deciding whether or not to buy them. That’s approximately 5 out of 10 people who judge a product based on information, reviews, and the price they see online. There is a higher probability of your brand getting recognized if you fall under the websites that provide users with this information. Quality content is vital to achieving this, and on-page SEO factors focus on optimizing this content.
When you start reading about SEO, you might feel intimidated by the new jargon. Fret not; these are all just terms Google uses to explain how their tools gauge and tag your websites for authenticity. Think of it as Google’s way of adding new websites to this big giant list (called Indexing) and analyzing your website to understand how well you maintain it and how helpful your information is (the Crawling process).
Understanding, developing, and working on on-page SEO factors are much like improving the quality of customer service in real life. Except, now it is not just people who are judging your business. It is people and AI bots. When the bot visits your website, it checks whether you have followed search quality guidelines. And this checking happens quite often, with the guidelines changing after every update.
Oh! But what is Google’s latest update that is helpful for content creators?
The new update focuses on a “Classifier process” that categorizes website content as helpful and unhelpful. As per this, sites with unhelpful content will be judged as a whole. That is, even if it has some pages with helpful content, the website will not perform well on Google owing to the unhelpful content on its other pages. Identification, elimination, and non-recurrence of such unhelpful content will be rewarded in ranking, and this will be among the many signals that go into evaluating a website. The quantity of unhelpful content also plays a role in this update’s classifier process.
On the whole, this might seem a bit overwhelming at first. No worries! We have covered it all in our checklist outlining on-page SEO factors. Keep a few points in mind, incorporate them into your webpage, and you are good to go!
What Are the On-Page SEO Factors?
Even after knowing everything about what on-page SEO is and why on-page SEO is important, it is still possible to miss out on integrating all the on-page SEO factors while writing and publishing content. Scroll on for a comprehensive list of all the on-page SEO factors you need to concentrate on:
Topical Relevance
People trust brands that demonstrate subject matter expertise. Search engines also use your website’s topic authority to decide whether to display it in answer to a search query. Building topical relevance for your website takes time, but it is one of the most powerful SEO techniques that can improve its ranking.
Decide on what subjects you want to be known for in the market. These should be related to your product or service and should be able to resolve the user’s query. Focus on regularly creating quality content on such topics and gain authority by including all the relevant keywords on your website. Leverage your content to bring in prospects and convert them into customers.
Remember, creating content irrelevant to your business will not help and can even be detrimental from an SEO point of view.
Search Intent
Keep in mind the user’s intention while performing a search when you write content. Customers want answers to their pain points and questions, not useless click baits. Comprehensively understand a user’s search intent by noting the autocomplete suggestions, “related searches,” and “people also search for” sections in Google.
Title Tags
The webpage’s title displayed on the SERP (as a blue hyperlink) is called the title tag. Write a brief title tag that describes the content of your webpage. It can include keywords or similar phrases.
Meta Descriptions
Users often decide whether to visit your website depending upon the content information in meta descriptions (MD). They are summaries that search engines displays on their SERPs. A brief but descriptive overview of what your content addresses is ideal for MDs. Google also uses MDs in snippets to answer users’ queries at times. Ideally, MDs should be 150-160 characters in length.
Content Categorization & Pillar Pages
Good content with inadequate categorization is like reading a book without any chapters. It becomes confusing to understand what the content encompasses.
Categorizing can be done based on the content type: blogs, guides, articles, infographics, surveys, etc. These can further be classified into topic-relevant or pain-point-relevant content. But remember not to overdo this classification and make it confusing for the search engine and the user.
Use pillar pages as the main page from which users can access all the content. Make it easier to reach the pillar page by displaying breadcrumb bits (website route) on top of the content on every web page.
Target Users
Identify the users you intend to convert. For example, if you are a course provider, your target would be students and young working professionals. Writing content for the intended audience will bring fruitful leads, not just visitors.
Keyword Research
The basic method AI bots use to find relevant content: match keywords queried by the user to the keywords in your content. Use keyword planners to find relevant keywords and incorporate them into the content. A ratio of 1 keyword for every 100 words of content is recommended and considered a green flag by search engines.
Internal Linking
Link to the content on other pages within your site. Internal linking helps search engines understand the structure of your website and determine its quality.
Headlines
You have 5 seconds before users judge your content’s quality, which happens through the headline. Provide a crisp, catchy but relevant heading that informs what your content elaborates. Use headline analyzers to evaluate its quality and ensure that the content solves the query or meets the promise in the headline.
Header Tags
A good framework for any content is to break it down into smaller, easy-to-comprehend sections. To differentiate these, use header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) but use them sparingly. Sometimes Google extracts these sub-headers and displays a list in snippets as answers to a search query. Snippets will appear at the top of SERP, and utilizing your content to feature in snippets is an excellent way to improve ranking.
Whitespace & Content Structure
Unlike books, reading from devices strain the user. Therefore, structuring the content with adequate whitespace and breaking it down into smaller pieces appeals to the readers and helps with better engagement.
Structured Data
It is a code you can add to the back end to display information such as product reviews and cost in the SERP, in addition to a brief description. Adding structured data to content help gain visibility and improve your website’s performance. These are called rich snippets. The latest content update is set to include a pros and cons list in rich snippets, which can be added as part of structured data. Google gives priority over the list provided by you over what it otherwise extracts from your content.
Optimize Images
If your website contains interesting infographics or images as part of the content, help the search engine identify it by giving a brief description of the image or using the alt attribute to inform the users about the picture. Also, use standard image formats. This also enhances the accessibility of your website.
Other Media
Not all of your target audience might be comfortable reading several pages of text. Alternate media, such as audio, video, infographics, carousels, etc., can show up on the SERP and are excellent for reaching out to everyone.
Industry Experts
The core idea of SEO is to build Expertise, Trust, and Authority on your website. This can happen when you receive contributions to your content from industry experts. Get in touch with them occasionally to get some valuable inputs for relevant topics and publish tagging them.
Adding CTA
With good SEO practices, you can bring in visitors. But you need to give them a call to action (CTA) button to sign-up for your services or buy your product. Ensure you include a CTA to a relevant product or service page with every piece of content you publish.
Avoid These Bad On-Page SEO Factors
Irrelevant Keywords and Keyword Stuffing
Search engines use synonyms and consider location and past interaction data to decide what is relevant to display to a user. Therefore, stuffing your content with keywords will not help with better ranking. Avoid irrelevant keywords, as they wouldn’t solve the user’s query and form a negative association with your website.
Not Making Any Changes to the Old Unoptimized Content
If you concentrate on only optimizing new content, your existing web pages are still classified as unhelpful, which will, in turn, harm your website’s ranking.
Not Tracking How Well Your Content Is Performing
Even if all the guidelines are followed, learning from what works and what’s not can be beneficial. You can do it by tracking the website and content performance using various metrics so you can use them to the maximum and get even better results.
Publishing Too Much Content Without Clarity
While a good quantity of content represents regularity, publishing just for the sake of it on irrelevant or vague topics is not a good idea. Always strategize content for a quality user experience.
Redirects That Destroy Credibility by Linking to Spam Domains
301 and 302 redirects are bad for SEO as they show one page to the search engine and display something else to the user. Redirects reduce the overall quality and credibility and reduce your website’s ranking.
Not Removing Backlinks From Spam or Low-Domain Authority Websites
Time and again, checking which other websites link back to you and removing the spam ones is essential, as association with such spam pages will also decrease your website’s ranking.
Final Thoughts
Remember, on-page SEO factors are additions that throw shine on your content and are not the only ones that matter. The quality of your product or service and your website’s content make a huge difference.
Search engines are being developed and continuously updated to meet the requirements of people. The message is more likely to spread if your content is original and unique. So, putting in time for researching and writing for the people and following SEO guidelines will help you long-term.
Incorporating on-page SEO factors requires consistent work as search engines keep getting updated. For sustainable results, start building a content framework, fix SMART goals and regularly monitor its performance using metrics.
Whether strategizing content for on-page SEO or digital marketing for off-page SEO, we are specialists in all domains and can help you promote your brand. Reach out to us to grow your business digitally!
