Right now, think of any product you want to buy. Your next move would be pulling out your phone or opening a web browser to search for the product.
This scenario right here is why On-page SEO is important for all business websites.
As business owners, you need the search engines to present your website when someone types something related to the product or service you offer. This way, you can convert motivated buyers into happy customers. However, it wouldn’t matter how fancy your website is or how great your social media is; these potential customers may not find you from their quick searches without proper SEO.
The best way to promote your business, make your website show up, and ensure long-term success is by understanding the efficiency of SEO.
What is On-Page SEO?
On-page SEO is a type of SEO (Search engine optimization) known to focus on optimizing web pages according to search engines’ needs. You earn organic traffic, which improves your website’s ranking in SERP (Search Engine Result Pages).
The aim is for search engines to find and register websites adequately such that it ranks high from a related query. On-page SEO is done by optimizing the page’s HTML, Meta title, Meta description, keyword density, internal links, and ensuring the website content and images are relevant and high-quality. The contents need to be written such that it includes specific keywords that relate to your business. Doing these On-page SEO practices improves the webpage.
Asides from the activities on your website, off-page SEO is another factor that has direct or non-direct effects on ranking in the SERP. It involves backlinks from other sides, brand mentions, social media, and shares.
Websites are built of content, including text, metadata, HTML code, CSS, JavaScript, multi-media, and more. Also, Marketers term this aspect of SEO as On-Page SEO since the entire practice is done within the website.
Everything about on-page SEO relies on the webpage’s actual content. This will equally mean that anything within the website is a factor that can affect the SEO.
Regardless, on-page SEO is the central area of focus for search engines, and with the critical role it plays in ranking your site, on-page SEO should be a target for any SEO marketing strategy.
Why is On-Page SEO Important?
For a searcher to find your website from related queries on Google and other prominent search engines, your website content needs to be appropriately optimized. On-page SEO helps these search engines analyze your website’s structure so that it becomes possible to identify the relevant queries to your website.
Almost half of all websites get their traffic from search engines like Google or Bing. Google shows that the 1st result from a query receives more than 32% of keyword traffic, and 91.5% of traffic goes to the first page of the search result.
Even after you spend thousands of dollars to get your website running, you may not have a chance, and your site may keep getting pushed down the search result by competitors without on-page SEO. So why risk it?
Since 40% of online revenue comes from search traffic, SEO remains one of the most popular and reliable digital marketing strategies for maximum return-on-investment. With the possibility to help websites grow and bring passive traffic for years, on-page SEO, in particular, is a digital marketing strategy that offers the best ROI for long-term benefits at a relatively low cost.
As the search marketing world continues to grow, many companies now prefer to hire an SEO agency for better on-page SEO performance. Whether your business is big or small, when someone types your target keywords in the search engine, the on-page SEO helps the search engine understand your website and know how to rank it.
However, it’s also true that Google has become smarter, and your on-page SEO score is no longer the only determinant to rank any website. With regularly updating algorithms and more sophistication that can better understand a searcher’s intent and deliver results that meet the searcher’s needs, there are stricter decisions to index websites on Google SERP.
Some other factors like Domain authority, social signals (shares, tweets, likes, follows, and other social activities), Page Authority backlinks, and many more come into play.
This is why your primary goal should be to writing readable and valuable content even while focusing on the SEO efforts and optimizations to the latest practices by search engines like Google and Bing. As Google’s algorithm develops, you need to keep your website content (i.e., media, images, contents, metadata, HTML) balanced and enjoyable for your viewers.
Benefits of Performing On-Page SEO on Your Website
We have introduced on-page SEO and explained the importance. Now below are some benefits you get from performing on-page search engine optimization on your business website.
1. Low Cost to Gain the Right Audience:
When you compare the cost of on-page SEO to paid ads, the difference is clear. You only invest time and patience to create great content, and you can find yourself on top of the search engine results. On-page SEO offers a chance to sit back and watch your website gain traffic without having to set aside a monthly budget for paid ads like Google Adwords.
These paid ads may profit you for a while, but once your budget runs out, the traffic also stops, while SEO continues to supply you with traffic. With created backlinks to your webpages, users can keep linking your content and gaining authority for your website on the focus topic.
2. Higher Authority and Credibility for your Brand
When searchers punch your keyword into search engines like Google, they tend to have more trust for the top-ranking results they see on the search result page. Businesses that rank high are often seen as more reputable. Optimizing your site according to the search engine’s regular updates keeps your site on top of the search result page.
This means that when users conduct searches on content relevant to your business, your brands show up and gain higher credibility and trust than the lower-ranking sites.
3. First-Page Attention
When last did you click the ‘next’ button of a Google search result page? This is evidence that most searchers never move past the first page of search engines. Proper on-page SEO is needed for your website to gain and maintain the first page of the search engine.
When your business is not on the first page, you miss out on potential clicks and the overall brand awareness you should be gaining. Being on the first page of the search engine result guarantees a continuous stream of visitors to your website while establishing your brand as a leader in your field.
4. Access to Leverage Data for Lead Generation
By monitoring your website’s analytics, you can see the products or services people visit the most on your website. You can also see the queries they use in the search engines that drove them to your website. With this data, you can easily find the gaps in your content.
You can present the content with gaps to potential clients before your competitors and watch these leads come to you. Using tools like Google search console and Google Analytics, you can easily access valuable customer data to benefit your business in the long-term.
5. A Step Above your Competitors
Let’s face it, on-page SEO is not so new. With all the benefits on-page SEO offers, your competitors may already be finding this practice extremely valuable and are already enjoying the benefits.
Knowing that your competitors are possibly taking full advantage of the on-page SEO and are ranking on Google should be enough motivation to push you. You need to optimize your website content for the correct keywords and catch-up with their advantages. If you find that they are not taking full advantage of SEO, you can capitalize on where they lack focus and use it to move out of their online reach.
Basic Aspect of On-Page SEO That You Need to Know
Choose the Right Keywords
Like we’ve been discussing so far, the role keyword play in on-page SEO is as important as the practice itself. The right set of keywords, or keyword phrases, helps optimize your website and target your internet market.
Choosing the keywords is always the first step for every online marketing campaign. More so, to determine your target audiences and increase their chances of becoming paying customers, your web pages need to have the right keywords.
There are a few things to keep in mind when choosing the keywords.
- Go for keywords that are in line with the subject of the page.
- The right keywords are easily searchable.
- Complications are disadvantages, so use keywords that work smoothly within the text.
While using keywords, they need to have correct placements in the content without going too far.
Publish Valuable Content
Besides using keywords inside your content to aid your Google analytics, the idea is still to write amazing copy that keeps the searchers can consider useful and unique. Keep in mind that content is key, and compromising your content’s value only makes all your SEO efforts useless. Not only will Google notice your content’s worth, but it’s also going to be evident to everyone that visits your site.
Knowing your audience gives you a better chance to offer valuable content. It should follow a path that answers any question the audiences have concerning your business.
Create useful content that is not too short and also not plagiarized to avoid been penalized by Google. Content comes in different forms, but with a decent length, it ranks higher.
We recommend 500-600 words for short articles and 2000 words or more for longer pieces. As regularly as possible, keep the content on your website up-to-date with fresh content. Your SEO moves up the rank quickly when you get plenty of new visitors and keep the current visitors coming back.
Build User Experience:
Some of the factors that determine User experience include responsiveness, your site’s loading speed, and lots more. When you have a properly researched keyword and valuable content that users consider useful, you need them to have good experiences and an enjoyable time on your site.
Users bouncing back from your site and never coming back will affect your ranking. Your ranking drops as rapidly as they hit the back button. To Google, this means the searcher can’t find their answers on your site. Ensure visitors coming from any search engine have a good time on your site, reduce your bounce rate, and answer your readers’ questions.
After attracting readers with meaningful content, go further and build a relationship with them by answering your post’s queries. Use the enabled comments section and regularly answer your visitor’s questions to keep them visiting and reading your article.
Optimize your Metadata:
Using content and metadata such as title tags and meta description, your webpages need to be optimized such that they are search engine friendly.
- Title Tags
The title tags are an essential factor of on-page SEO that serves as text advertisement potential readers can see on their browsers before loading your actual page. It helps the search engine understand your topic better and attract engagement with your content.
A reasonable title tag can have a size between 50 to 70 characters. After the user makes their query on the search engine, they will be more interested in exploring your site to see what it holds if they find your title tag unique, descriptive, and attractive.
- Meta Description
The meta description is a basic summary of the content on your webpage that appears during a search result. It’s another factor of on-page SEO that helps the reader understand the topic and entice them to open your page to see more of your content. It shows up as the short description on the search result page, which you see under the title.
A good meta description should include the keywords of the content and match the page’s content. It also has to be concise, meaningful, user-friendly, and attractive for searchers to click on them. The targeted keyword in the meta description contributes to ranking your webpage on Google search engine.