To ensure Google can crawl your webpage accurately to display it in search results, you’ll need to optimise your On-Page SEO. To do this you need to make sure the content on your pages is relevant to the search terms you are attempting to rank for. Your content also needs to be detailed and useful – if you want it perform well.
Google scans your page to see what words or phrases it contains. If it sees a certain keyword being repeated, it will assume your page is about that topic. This is why it’s important to use the RIGHT keywords and phrases in your content. There are certain things you can do to boost your On-Page SEO. Once of the first things you can do, if you have a WordPress site, is to install the Yoast plugin, as this makes it easier to set up your page and optimise your site. It also helps you easily create your title and description tag. Some other platforms such as Shopify include SEO features that are like Yoast’s, making optimisation of your On-Page SEO that much simpler.
Let’s look at some of the other ways you can enhance your On-Page SEO:
1. Use Your Keyword in your Title Tag: This is crucial as your title tells Google and searchers what your page is about. By using your keyword in your tag, you’re directly informing Google that your page is about that topic. Make sure you do your keyword research and use the best possible keyword in ALL your titles.
2. Optimize your Meta Description for clicks: This isn’t as important as your title tag, but it’s still a crucial step. Google might have stated that this isn’t a major factor when it comes to their algorithm, but it’s vital for another pivotal reason. Your meta-description is your chance to encourage people to clickthrough or not, and they DO read this short summary. Make yours as enticing and relevant as possible by using appropriate keywords and creating short, punchy copy that’s easy to read. Include your main keyword in your description too, as Google highlights this in bold whenever someone searches for that keyword, which helps your site attract searcher’s attention.
3. Use your primary keyword in your body copy too: You’ll also want to make sure your primary keyword is included in the main content on your page. This is often called body copy, and it’s especially important to ensure you include your main keyword in the first 150 words. You should also include it throughout your copy, so Google gets a good idea of what your page is about. Don’t overstuff as this will do harm to your search engine rankings and can even get your website ignored by Google. As a general guide, if you’ve written a 1500-word piece of content, use your main keyword at least 3-4 times in the body, and once in the title and meta-description.
4. Use related keywords: As well as your primary keyword, you should also be including other, relevant keywords in your content, as this will maximise your reach by allowing you to rank for lots of different keywords. You can find related keywords using Google Search Suggest direct from the Google search box, or in the Google Keyword Planner, simply by entering your main keyword. For example, if you were writing a post about how to do influencer outreach and wanted to find related keywords for the topic “influencer outreach”, you’d type that into the Google search box and see what other terms related to that topic people had been searching for. Use the most appropriate related keyword suggestions Google throws up in your content, meta description, and sub-headers, to increase your pages chances of getting found.
5. Optimize Images: It’s super-important to optimise your image SEO, especially if you have a website with a lot of visual content. Google has a difficult job analysing images to find out what your site is all about. To help it do this it reads your images filename, alt text, and title.
Simple 3-step to optimising your image SEO:
- Make sure your picture has a relevant, descriptive filename that’s related to your page topic. If you’re displaying a screenshot that shows people how to optimise their image SEO for example, you might call it something like imageSEOoptimisationguide.png
- Include image alt text that matches your image, so people have more detail as to what it’s about. This will also help to retain people on your page who have trouble loading your image, or who are on slow internet connections. You could say “Screenshot guide to optimising images” for example or “Visual guide to image optimisation”.
- Ensure your image’s title is accurate and RELEVANT to your page topic. This isn’t as important as the other two steps –but it doesn’t mean you should skip it. Something short and snappy that relates to your image and page should usually do the trick, like “Image SEO Screenshot.”
6. User Experience: You might have primed your page for SEO but if you haven’t considered the user experience, you’re not going to rank well for long. Although user experience is difficult for search engines to assess, it DEFINITELY has an indirect effect on your SEO score. Think about it – if your site is hard to navigate, or cluttered and hard to read, people aren’t going to stick around long enough to engage. They also aren’t going to share it or link to it, which will critically impact your Google SEO score, as links and shares are an important ranking factor.
To improve your website user experience, consider your layout, colour scheme, font, and navigation. Ask the following crucial questions:
- Does my site make easy for people to find what they need?
- Are the most important things highlighted?
- Do they appear high up on the page?
- Is my site well-organised into clearly labelled sections?
- Is my font clear?
- Is my colour scheme appealing and easy to read?
- Is my menu easy to navigate?
- If I have many pages, are they organised efficiently into relevant, clearly labelled categories?