Why On-Page SEO Is Important, You Need to Know In 15 Minutes

On-page SEO is one of the only things you are full expert in SEO.

And today I’m going to take you through an on-page SEO checklist that we use to grow our search traffic consistently.

What’s up to SEO Beingamaster here to talk about on-page SEO, the SEO tool that helps to grow your search traffic, research competitors, and dominate your niche.

What is On-Page SEO

Now, if you’re new to on-page SEO, it’s the practice of optimizing web pages to help them rank higher in search engines.

And while on-page work likely won’t be enough to rank for competitive terms, it’s a foundation to higher Google rankings and more traffic for your site. With that said, let’s get to the checklist.

The first step is to understand and match search intent. Search intent means the reason behind the searcher’s query.

For example, if someone searches to buy headphones, they likely want to see category pages from e-commerce stores.

And you don’t have to guess what search attendance since Google gives preference to pages that their users are happy with.

Just search for your target keyword, and analyze the types of pages that show on the first page.

After all, user happiness essentially means satisfying search intent. So let’s say you had a website where you sell supplements, and you want to create a page targeting the keyword best protein powder.

If you look at the search results, you can tell right away from the titles that they’re all blog posts that follow a list styled format.

So for this scenario, I wouldn’t advise creating a product or category page targeting this keyword because if you’re not matching intent, you probably won’t rank.

Now while it’s easy to stop here and start writing, I highly recommend visiting these pages to get a better understanding of what they’ve included in their posts.

For example, if you look at this post, you’ll see that they’re primarily focusing on categorizing protein powders by type, best grass feed whey protein powder, best-tasting protein powder, they then go on to give you a description of that specific product, and ended off by breaking down the pros and cons.

And if you look at another one of the top three results, you’ll also see that the focus is on types before brands. Analyzing the top result is like looking through the lens of Google Their job is to return the most relevant results for any given query.

Take notice of search intent and make sure your page matches it. Step two is to increase the topical relevance of your page, we ran a study and found that on average, the number one ranking page for a target keyword ranks for nearly 1000 other relevant keywords in the top 10 for on page-SEO.

So what you’ll want to do is find related subtopics to ensure your pieces thorough, and there are a few ways you can find these related subtopics. First, analyze the top-ranking pages and look for relevant keywords for on page-SEO.

So this time, you’ll see related keywords like whey isolate, concentrate grams, and calories. Second, use Google’s autosuggest, just type in your target keyword. And you’ll see a few suggestions like for women for men, weight loss, weight gain, smoothies, and bulk, which are all related to protein powder.

Just make sure that these are related subtopics and not standalone topics of their own. To do that Google This is just the keyword and if the results are completely different from the results for your main target keyword, chances are you should target the keyword with its page.

Use the people also ask box to find points worth covering. Here you’ll see common questions people are asking like what is the healthiest protein powder, and which whey protein is best for muscle building.

Finally, you can scroll down to the bottom of the page to see additional keywords and potential subtopics for your post. Now the downside to these methods is that you’re kind of guessing.

So a better way to do this is to use the hrs content gap tool, which is going to show us common keywords that the top pages rank for in Google. And to me, this is much more valuable since you’re essentially looking at the exact keywords Google has ranked a single page for.

Why wouldn’t your page be able to rank for those same keywords For On-Page SEO?

So I’m in the content gap tool, and you’ll see that I’ve pasted in a few of the top-ranking pages for the quarry best protein powder in the top section, and I’ve left the bottom section blank.

What we’re asking the tool to do here is show common keywords that any of these pages rank for where at least one of them ranks in the top 10 in this to ensure that our results are relevant. Since keywords in position 50 probably won’t be very helpful.

So let’s run the search. And now you can see data that shows you which subtopics you should cover.

To narrow our list down even further. Let’s change the number of intersections where all three pages need to rank in the top 100 and we’re down to around 140 relevant keywords to skim through.

You should talk about whey protein. You’ll also see that for women is a recurring theme here and people are also specifically looking for vanilla protein powder.

Now that you have a data-driven outline You should be able to write your posts and create content that perfectly matches the intent of your future visitors.

Let’s move on to Step Three, which is to use short and descriptive URLs. In our study on various on-page ranking factors, we found a clear correlation between the number of characters in the URL in a page’s ranking position in Google. Now, correlation doesn’t mean causation.

Let’s say that your page title is the 11 best protein powders in 2021.

Now, if you’re using a CMS like WordPress, it’ll automatically change the URL slug to the title and replace spaces with dashes. This URL is longer than it needs to be.

So as a general rule of thumbs up for on-page SEO, use your target keyword as the URL slug.

In this case, I leave it as just the best protein because it’s short and descriptive. Now there are a couple of other benefits worth noting for SEO.

First, people are most likely to click the search results that best match their search query. And descriptive URLs can help submit your page as that result. Second, descriptive URLs tend to include your target keywords. use target keywords in SEO meta description.

And since people often use URLs as anchor text, when linking to a page, it can be helpful. Now if you already have URLs that are long and or not descriptive, I wouldn’t worry too much about changing them if you’re getting a good amount of search traffic.

For example, Medical News Today gets around 53 million search visits per month. And if we go to the top pages report, which shows us their pages with the most organic traffic, you’ll see that their pages still get a ton of search traffic, despite having numeric URL slugs.

Now step 4 for SEO is to add your target keyword in your title, meta description, and headline1 tag if and when it makes sense.

And there are two reasons why I highly recommend including your target keyword in your title tag description in the h1 tag. this is very important for on-page SEO.

Number one, when I study 2 million keywords, we found that there was a small correlation between rankings in the strategic placement of exact match keywords. And number two, it can help searchers quickly understand that your page is the most relevant for their search query. For example, let’s say you want to find an article with reviews on refrigerators.

You go to Google and search for refrigerator reviews. Now if you were to see these two results, which one would you be more likely to click probably the first one since it uses the words you use in your search query.

In other cases, exact match keywords can look quite spammy. For example, you wouldn’t create a title like this, simply because the keyword has a bit of search volume.

So bottom line, you don’t need to stop exact match keywords into your titles, or even content for the sake of it. You can use synonyms, stop words, and connecting words, Google is smart enough to figure things out.

Just make sure your content is on point. Alright, Step five is a super low hanging way to improve your on-page SEO.

And that’s to optimize your images with alt tags. Image alt tags allow you to provide descriptive text for images on your page. Here’s what the code for a typical image looks like.

And when you add the alt attribute, you would describe the image by adding alt equals your description. Now there are a few reasons why this is important to do. First, when your image fails to load on your page, the alt text will appear as a replacement to the image.

8.1 million Americans have a vision impairment. And oftentimes, they may rely on the screen reader. All texts can help provide a more rich experience for your users.

And the third ALT text (alternative text) can help you rank your images in Google Images. JOHN Mueller confirms this by saying all text is extremely helpful for Google Images if you want your images to rank there.

Looking at our Google Search Console data, you’ll see that in the past three months, we’ve had around 4 million impressions from images alone, which lead to over 5000 clicks to our pages. Bottom line, it doesn’t take much effort to add a few words and describe your images, which could lead to big returns.

All right. Step six is to add structured data where it makes sense. And I’m sure you’ve seen search results with things like star ratings.

This is the result of review structured data, which can have a positive impact on your click-through rates. But using this isn’t just about increasing visibility in Google search.

Since not all schema types create additional details in the SERP. It’s about making it easier for search engines to understand what your pages are about. So while it isn’t a direct ranking factor, it may still help you rank higher in Google.

Here’s what John Mueller had to say. There’s no generic ranking boost for structured data usage. However, structured data can make it easier to understand what the page is about, which can make it easier to show where it’s relevant, improving targeting and maybe ranking for the right terms.

Alright, alright – my dear SEOs and web developers – if there’s something you’d want each other to know or if you have questions you don’t dare to ask each other, fill in this form and we may address that in an upcoming video series!https://t.co/rF2oLM3wac pic.twitter.com/RWM0cDqr3k

— Martin Splitt (@g33konaut) February 5, 2021

You can use Google’s structured data markup helper to quickly generate your code. So for this article, I’ll select the title of the article and set the property as the name. And then I’ll do the same thing for the author’s property.

Once you’re all done, click the Create HTML button and a piece of JSON code will pop up which you can then add to your page as instructed here.

Or if you’re a WordPress user, there are plugins out there that make adding markup super easy.

Alright, step seven is to make sure your content is simple and easy to read. Creating clear and concise content can help search engines piece together what your content is all about.

But what’s even more important, in my opinion, is making it simple and easy to read for real people. It’s believed that Google looks at user signals like dwell time, and time on page to influence rankings.

If your content is complicated and difficult to understand, your visitors will be heading straight for the Back button, which is never a good thing.

Here are a few tips to improve readability for on-page SEO. Avoid big words if you don’t have to use them.

For example, don’t say proximity when you can say near you short sentences and paragraphs.

This can simplify the read for users as big walls of text can be intimidating.

Finally, as a general rule of thumb right as you speak everything that you’ve read is scripted.

And if you’ve made it this far, it’s because it was easier to digest.

Had I written the script in an academic tone, you would have probably been gone a while ago. to benchmark readability, you can use a free tool called Hemingway editor. just paste your content in there and you’ll get a readability score.

I suggest aiming for around a fifth or sixth-grader level.

For the most part, this is the on-page SEO checklist you can use for on-page SEO.

Now if there’s anything I’ve missed that you find to work particularly well regarding on-page SEO, let me know in the comments. And if you enjoyed this blog, make sure to like share, and subscribe for more actionable SEO and marketing blogs.

So keep grinding away. put your best foot forward for each step and I’ll see you in the next blog.