OnSite SEO Best Practices To Get Your Website Ranking

Tired of putting in effort and seeing no results when it comes to your SEO? Well, this blog might be able to explain the reasoning behind that - on-site SEO.

See, if your website isn’t optimised correctly you could be missing out on tonnes of valuable traffic, which could be potential clients. 

By fixing your onsite SEO, you’ll have much greater results in your SEO campaign, by getting better search visibility from ranking higher in SERPs

Well, so how do you get to this stage? It turns out that it’s a lot easier than you’d expect. In this blog, we’ll cover all the things you need to know about on-site SEO and how to fix it in simple, easy-to-follow steps. 

What is On-site SEO?

On-site SEO, also known as on-page SEO is the process of optimising web pages and their content for both users and search engines. It’s basically making sure everything the human eye can see on your website is well-optimised and follows the correct procedures. 

Search engines conduct a process called crawling in which they scan the content on your page, they look at the code and everything in between. So, if they don’t know what’s going on on your website they won’t be able to rank you. 

The same goes for humans, if they can’t read or understand your content they won’t stay on your page for long, telling search engines that your website isn’t relevant and doesn’t provide value to the user. 

When you take this strategy and focus on elements that you can change, you start to rank better in SERPs, leading to better traffic, more traffic and hopefully more conversions for you. 

One of the most important factors for on-page SEO is relevancy, you should ask yourself: How relevant is the content I’m posting to the users I want to reach? How relevant is my content to user’s search queries and what is the intent behind my content? Understanding and knowing the answers to these questions helps you understand your audience better. And well if you know your audience better you can create better content. 

Why is Onsite SEO important?

Well, as we mentioned before it assists search engines to understand the content and structure of your website better. 

When a user enters a search query, Google will use keywords on the page and other on-site elements to see if it matches the user's search query, can you see how understanding your audience helps with this? It makes it so that your content can be tailored to those users, increasing your traffic and leads (hopefully).

Another important factor apart from making sure search engines can index your content, is the relevancy to the user. Google puts a BIG emphasis on customer satisfaction and user experience. You get this by making sure the content on your page is not only relevant to the target audience but make sure it’s actually valuable and up-to-date information. 

Onsite vs Offsite SEO?

As you take more of a deep dive into SEO, you’ll come across other terms, such as off-site, on-site and technical SEO. We won’t cover technical SEO in this blog but we’ll cover the former two and their differences. 

Onsite SEO: Focuses on the changes you can make to your website to improve rankings.

Offsite SEO: Focuses on external factors that impact your site’s rankings. 

With onsite SEO, you focus on aspects of your site you can control such as factors like

• Keyword Selection
• Speeding up your site’s load times 
• Optimising page titles

These are direct things you can do to improve your SEO ranking. 

Offsite SEO focuses on external factors that you can’t control but they can influence your site’s ranking. These factors include:

• Links to your website from other authoritative sites - this is called link building, a direct component of Google’s EEAT
• Social Media Management - Making sure your socials are running, active and posting valuable engaging content. 
• Review management - Managing what people say about your business or website. 

8 On-page SEO techniques for your website

These are best practices you can do to make sure your website is running smoothly and getting the most traffic possible. 

1. Write unique, helpful and relevant content 
2. Place target keywords strategically
3. Write keyword-rich title tags 
4. Write click-worthy keywords meta-descriptions 
5. Optimise URLs
6. Add Internal links 
7. Use headings and subheadings to structure your page 

Let’s look at these in more detail

1. Write unique, helpful and relevant keywords 

As we’ve mentioned before, creating content that meets the user's needs is probably

the most important factor when it comes to onsite SEO. You should create high-quality content that meets the user's needs. 

Start by performing keyword research to find relevant topics to speak about and then find your target keywords. 

Our best practices for keyword targeting would be to target high-volume, low-competition keywords, it’s all about finding the mix between the two. 

To make high-quality content you should:

• Naturally, incorporate keywords into your writing
• Make sure your content matches the search intent of your target keywords. 
• Fully answer the query, your content should be useful
• Write unique content that offers something your competitors don’t
• Include visual content

2. Place target keywords strategically

So after you have your target keywords, it’s time to strategically place them in your content. 

Google scans your content to see what it’s all about and readers will do the same, so you should include your target keywords in your

• H1
• First paragraph 
• Subheadings (H2, H3, etc)

This will help Google gain content of the page and users will be able to see if the page is what they’re searching for. 

3. Write Keyword-Rich Title Tags

Title tags are pieces of HTML code that indicate what the title of a page is. And display that title in search engines, social media posts and browser tabs. 

Additionally, they can influence whether a user clicks on the page or not. 

Here are some best practices when it comes to title tags:

• Keep it brief - We recommend keeping title tags between 50 and 60 characters so Google doesn’t cut them off 
• Include your target keywords - So google and the user know what you’re talking about 
• Be unique - Avoid duplicate tiet tags so that each individual page’s purpose is clear to Google. 

4. Write Click-Worthy Meta descriptions

A meta description tag is an HTML element on a site that provides a brief summary of the page. Search engines like Google may use it to generate a snippet. 

It’s the description that shows up on the SERP below your page’s title. 

Although they don’t directly affect your ranking, they can be the deciding factor for a user if they click on your page or not. 

We recommend these best practices when it comes to your meta descriptions. 

• Consider mobile devices: Google truncates meta descriptions after about 120 characters on mobile. So it’s best to keep them on the shorter side.
• Include your target keyword: This helps users determine if their page matches their search intent. Google also bolds keywords (and synonyms of keywords) that match the user’s search query. Which stands out visually and could boost clicks.
• Use active voice: Active voice saves space and communicates your message more clearly.
• Add a CTA(call to action): Entice users to click with CTA phrases (like “try for free,” or “find out more”).

5. Use Headings and Subheadings to Structure your page

H1 tags and just headings in general allow users to easily skim your page, it helps Google understand the hierarchy of your page. 

Headings also help Google better understand your page’s structure and determine whether your page matches a user’s search intent, which can help you rank higher for relevant keywords.

You can use keywords and keyword variations in headings to give Google more context about the structure of your page and what information you cover.

You should use H1’s for your page title or headline and H2’s to cover subtopics. 

6. Optimise URLs

Google recommends you use simple URLs that don’t look like a foreign language, they should be easily readable. 

Use words that are relevant to the content on your page.

When a page gets published it will most likely just be a bunch of random numbers and letters, so it’s important to remember to change that before it’s published. 

7. Add internal links 

Internal links are hyperlinks that point to different pages on your website, just as you’ve seen in this blog today. 

Internal links are important for several reasons in on-page SEO, such as:

• Helping search engines better understand your site’s structure and how pages are related to each other
• They allow Google crawlers to discover and navigate new pages 
• They signal to Google that the linked-to page is valuable 
• They help users navigate through your website(keeping them on your site longer)

Now that you know what on-page SEO is, why it’s important and how you can fix it. Your SEO will hopefully be on its way to driving the traffic you need. 

A reminder that SEO doesn’t drive results quickly. It’s a long-term game but with the right practices, you’ll be on your way to getting in those top-ranking spots. 

If this all seems like too much to do and handle yourself, book a call with us. We can take care of all things SEO for your website. Book a call with our founder Matt, we promise no sales jargon just a friendly chat to see if we can help you get where you want to be business-wise.

Our SEO experts will get you to those higher-ranking spots in no time, give us a try!