Chapter: 01 Introduction to On-Page Optimization
01 Introduction to On-Page Optimization
02 Everything you Need to Know About Keyword Research
03 Optimizing Web Pages for Search
04 Optimizing HTML Tags and Technicals
05 Using Google Tools and Platforms to Monitor Your Optimization Efforts
06 How to Refine your SEO Strategy and Rank Higher
07 After you Optimize: How to Keep Driving Traffic and Conversions
08 The Best Content Optimization Tools
09 Final Thoughts on Optimization
CHAPTERS
01 Introduction to On-Page Optimization
02 Everything you Need to Know About Keyword Research
03 Optimizing Web Pages for Search
04 Optimizing HTML Tags and Technicals
05 Using Google Tools and Platforms to Monitor Your Optimization Efforts
06 How to Refine your SEO Strategy and Rank Higher
07 After you Optimize: How to Keep Driving Traffic and Conversions
08 The Best Content Optimization Tools
09 Final Thoughts on Optimization
01
Introduction to On-Page Optimization
For all digital brands, search engine optimization is a required step in growing a business. Over 3.5 billion Google searches are made every day, and the number of searches grows by 10% each year. Most people use search engines when looking for new products, local businesses, or services, so for any business that wants to grow and compete in the digital world, ranking on the first page of SERPs is essential. In this ebook, we are going to unpack our strategy towards on-page optimization with our clients.
Google and Bing allow companies to buy temporary visibility in search results (Adwords, Bing Ads), selling clicks to the highest bidders in highly competitive auctions at prices that can be $30 or more for just a click. But SEO can drive those clicks and organic traffic at a much lower cost and for longer periods of time. When it comes to building a brand that lasts, improving traffic through organic search is a winning strategy.
But in order to earn that organic traffic, your website’s content needs to be optimized to show up in search results. On-page content refers to the visible content and HTML source code of every landing page on a website. Content can range from text, products, tools, forms, blog posts, ebooks, images, or videos, but it all needs to be high-value in the eyes of your users and search engines.
When you create content ask yourself these questions. Why should Google rank your landing pages? Are they comprehensive and well researched? How much effort did you put into building them? Is your target keyword even on the landing page? What’s your word count? If you want to create content that ranks, it needs to be high-quality, unique, long-form, informative, engaging, and have good information architecture that shows topical authority and depth.
“Most of the time I see thin landing pages without much content, or information architecture, or if there’s content it’s fluffy or generic. In Google’s GSA algorithm, they score the content quality of pages to determine your keyword rankings. In their core algo updates, they’ve specifically provided guidance that these signals are important to them. In the BERT update, and even Panda previously, we’ve seen how important content quality signals are to Google.”
- MANICK BHAN, Founder CEO/CTO OF LINKGRAPH
Having the right content and keyword strategy will drastically determine whether your landing pages get traffic from Google. But to do on-page optimization successfully, you need to have the right tools, a foundational understanding of search metrics and ranking factors, and the time and effort it takes to make your web pages worthy of page 1!
For those who want to learn how to optimize their landing pages, this is the ultimate guide on how to strategically optimize on-page content. The larger your website, the more work and time you’ll need to dedicate, so having a dedicated team of SEO-trained content creators, or seeking out the help of an SEO agency, is key for larger and enterprise-level organizations.
For those who want to learn how to optimize their landing pages, this is the ultimate guide on how to strategically optimize on-page content. The larger your website, the more work and time you’ll need to dedicate, so having a dedicated team of SEO-trained content creators or seeking out the help of an SEO agency is key for larger and enterprise-level organizations.
Why Optimization Matters
Those webmasters who take the time to incorporate the best practices of content optimization are more likely to succeed in search. Not only is content optimization more affordable than paid search marketing, 70% of marketers see it as more effective.
The primary reason why SEO has higher ROI than PPC campaigns is that SEO provides traffic to perpetuity. PPC campaigns essentially let you rent that traffic short-term and don’t provide any long-term compounding growth benefits. When a paid search campaign ends, so do the clicks. However, earning a coveted spot in the SERPs can keep organic traffic and potential customers coming to your website for years.
“I’ve spent $2 million per quarter running PPC ads for an ecommerce startup, and over $1 million per month for law firms. If I could go back and do one thing differently, it would have been to invest more in SEO.”
- MANICK BHAN, Founder CEO/CTO OF LINKGRAPH
Optimizing content as you create it, monitoring that content’s performance in Google Analytics, and re-optimizing as time passes, are the three major steps in implementing a successful onsite SEO strategy.
What is On-Page Content?
On-page content is made up of both the visible content and the onsite technicals of your website. This includes any content you’ve created to be viewed and used by the people who visit your site, as well as the invisible meta tags, HTML markup, and bot specific elements you’ve added to your site or site code to make your content easily parsable by bots and crawlers (Google Bot, Facebook Bot, Applebot, and hundreds of others).
Landing page copy
- Grammar, spelling, syntax, and diction should be appropriate for audience
- Topical depth: including all related ideas and topics adjacent to the core keyword you’re optimizing for
- Long-form content: needs to explore your topic in suitable breadth and depth
HTML/CSS/JS Code Quality
- Minimal redundant or unused code
- Compression and “minification” of all static files
- Using a CDN for static asset delivery off-webserver.
- Minimize post-pageload HTML DOM modifications (like inserting forms, videos)
- No render blocking javascript
- Quick time-to-first-byte (TTFB) from your webserver
Meta tags and structured data for search engines
- Title tags
- Meta descriptions
- Header tags (H1, H2,H3)
- Schema.org markup and microdata
Information architecture
- Internal Linking
- On-page navigation like jump-links and tables of contents
Rich media
- Images
- Videos
- Embedded tweets, etc.
Onsite SEO, then, are the optimizations you can make to the above components so your content ranks better in search engines. These optimizations can range from changing HTML tags and meta descriptions, to including more keywords and headings, but this eBook will provide you with guidance on the many ways you can optimize your site from the comfort of your own computer.
02
Everything you Need to Know About Keyword Research
Before you start optimizing, you have to do your keyword homework. Keywords can be tricky; they trend, they change, they grow long-tails...yet keyword metrics are the most valuable data sets you can have before you start optimizing.
SEO experts are well-versed in the data of search metrics, and much of our work involves helping clients narrow in on relevant keywords. But with a keyword research tool like ours, so can anyone else, from content writers to bloggers, or online marketers to webmasters. If you create online content of any kind, you should get comfortable using a keyword tool prior to your content creation.
The best keywords to target are those that your ideal audience is already using to find products or services. It’s important to choose keywords that not only your site stands a good chance for ranking for, but puts your site in front of the audience seeking your product or services. This is where a keyword research tool is necessary.
Using a Keyword Research Tool
Keyword research tools are designed to help you make the most strategic decisions about optimization. By understanding key SEO metrics, you will learn which are the most profitable keywords to target to get you in the relevant searches and in front of your ideal audience.
You can utilize our Keyword Research Tracker for free available in your LinkGraph customer dashboard, or you can find another tool that provides the search volume, keyword difficulty, and CPC metrics necessary to make informed decisions about which keywords to target.
In the above images, you will see some keywords alongside their accompanying search metrics. By understanding these terms, you can make some inferences about which keywords provide you the most potential opportunities to rank.
Organic Difficulty (OD)
This score determines how difficult it is to rank for the keyword
Search Volume (SV)
Number of searches for this keyword in a particular period of time
Cost-Per-Click (CPC)
The amount you would pay-per-click to target this keyword in a PPC campaign
Understanding how all of these terms relate to each other is another important factor in successful optimization. Popular keywords are usually accompanied by higher monthly search volume, but that doesn’t automatically qualify them as the best choice for you. You need to take more than that into consideration when it comes to gaining visibility in the search engine results pages, particularly if you're a webmaster that's just starting out.
“We created our own Keyword Difficulty metric because after using other SEO software tools with our clients, we found their metrics to be a poor representation of the actual ranking difficulty. When we built our keyword research tool, we realized we needed to make it easy for SEOs to understand which keywords they actually had a chance of ranking for, so we created these metrics for an easier benchmark that was far more true-to-life.”
- MANICK BHAN, Founder CEO/CTO OF LINKGRAPH
How to Evaluate Keywords
There isn't always a direct correlation between the most popular keywords and the keywords that are the right choices for your website or business goals.
For example, the search phrase, "Discount Shoes," gets 18K searches a month. That's an attractive number of searches, but the competition level for that target keyword is extremely high. Websites like Zappos, DSW, and Famous Footwear have high domain authorities and already occupy the top spots in the SERPs for that given keyword phrase.
When it comes to smart keyword research, the general rule of thumb is this: The best keywords to target are the ones you stand the best chance of ranking for and the best chance of converting from. Every new piece of content you create--whether a new landing page or a blog post--should target a new keyword so you have more opportunities to rank in more SERPs.
The best keywords should meet the following criteria:
Strong search intent for your content
Does your content provide a high-quality, in-depth answer to what users are searching for?
Meaningful search volume
If your keyword doesn’t get any search traffic, you’ll be optimizing your landing page for nobody.
Search difficulty should be achievable for your website
You will stand a chance of ranking for the keywords that have a Search Difficulty that is less than or equal to your website’s Site Authority. If you’re trying to rank for a very competitive keyword like “buy yankees tickets,” try a longer-tail variant like “discount yankees tickets” that is less competitive.
Check the CPC for higher conversions
CPC is a proxy for the economic value of searches. For publications and certain companies this may not be as important, but if you’re targeting high-value keywords this can be a useful barometer of conversion potential.
A Little about Long-Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords can be a great way to make the most out of your optimization efforts. Long-tail keywords are usually search phrases over 4-5 words.
Targeting these long-tail search phrases with blog posts can be very effective because they have a more specific search intent and are far less competitive than other keywords.
Targeting long-tail keywords can also be an effective optimization strategy because it tends to result in higher conversions. Those users who rely on long-tail search queries are usually further down the sales funnel and more ready to make a purchase, fill out a form, or offer an email address.
So I have my Keywords….Now What?
Once you have identified which keywords you want to target, it’s time to transition to doing the work of including those keywords into your content. You need to incorporate your primary keywords in both the primary text of your landing page and the HTML title tags and meta descriptions.
If you use our copy optimizer tool, the process for doing so will not only be easier, it will help you avoid keyword stuffing. Because our tool provides you with the LSI terms that have topical relevance to your webpage content, the distribution of your keywords will appear more naturally and in a way that appeals to search engine crawlers without disrupting the readability or quality of your content.
03
Optimizing Web Pages for Search
Once you’ve chosen the best keywords, the next step is to start writing and optimizing your landing page copy.
But optimizing content goes far beyond simply hitting a keyword quota. In the early days of SEO strategy, simple keyword stuffing tactics worked, but search engines keep getting smarter and better at understanding the content of a web page.
For this reason, a content optimizer tool like ours can help you include your primary keyword phrases alongside Focus Terms that Google is expecting to see on your landing pages. These Focus Terms are topics, ideas, and phrases that we’ve determined are related and important to the keyword search you’re trying to rank for. Incorporating Focus Terms will help your landing page demonstrate topical depth and expertise.
Focus Terms vs. Keywords
Unlike keywords, which are the search phrases you want your own site to rank for, focus terms are semantically related terms that Google bots use to understand the topical depth, relevance, and quality of your web content in relationship to users' search queries. The LinkGraph content optimizer scans the top ranking pages for your target keywords, as well as all of the content on those pages that are appearing in the search rankings, and provides you word suggestions and related topics for the content creation process. Essentially, it helps you create better content in the eyes of Google bots.
High-ranking content often shares certain similarities. Long content, original research and reporting, infographics, and authoritative content all tend to have better content performance in search engine rankings. Google's algorithm rewards quality content, and making your own content more rich and in-depth becomes easier with the help of a SEO content optimizer tool like ours.
Like the Keyword Research Tracker, the copy optimizer tool is available in your LinkGraph customer dashboard. You can also download the LinkGraph Chrome extension to automatically transfer your web page content into our tool with 1 click and start your optimization work right away.
Using the Copy Optimizer Tool
Whether you are creating a brand new piece of content, or revising an existing landing page, our tool makes the process of optimization easy, even for SEO beginners.
As you draft your content, our tool will keep track of the Focus Terms that you have incorporated and will provide you with a content score. Think of it like a content performance score: the higher it is, the more likely your content will get a higher ranking for your desired search term. Even small changes to syntax, vocabulary, complex sentences or phrasing can help you maintain the readability of the content while also optimizing for search.
Also, the content optimizer’s color-coded highlighting alerts you to which terms you have sufficiently included, which need to be included more, and which are being overused.
And because the content score takes length into consideration, it encourages you to create more in-depth content that allows the space for the keywords to naturally appear. Longer content tends to do much better in search, so our copy optimizer uses 2500 words as an ideal benchmark. The tool will also provide you with an overall Content Score. A score over 80 is considered very good.
Whether you want to update a page of content that is already on your site or use our Focus terms as a starting point for new ideas, our tool is the easiest way to see SEO success in not much time. In the below video, you will find a tutorial on how to use the copy optimizer tool to create the best content on your landing pages.
If you are optimizing an existing piece of content like your site’s homepage or current landing pages, adding our copy optimizer chrome extension to your toolbar will allow you to automatically transfer the content of any existing landing page into our tool and start your optimization work from there.
Additional Considerations when Optimizing Content
Starting in 2017, Google’s search quality teams have been specifically focusing their engineering efforts towards content-quality signals and have pushed core algorithm updates every quarter. Their BERT update in October 2019 was one of the most meaningful content related updates they have rolled out in years.
Bert has helped Google crawlers understand language and keyword usage the way that human's use it. Google will continue to do a better job of identifying quality content among its index as algorithms and content-quality signals become even more refined. For this reason, the sole focus of your copywriters and content team should be to simply create great content, because creating high-quality content is essential to the success of your optimization efforts in the long run.
Although quality may feel subjective, Google's webmaster guidelines are clear about what quality looks like in the eyes of Google bots. Search engines want to rank good content, and they look for hints about the quality of every web page they index, from headlines and subheads to keyword density and url structure. Each element of website optimization communicates to Google whether your content will keep readers' attention and whether they will find your content valuable and useful.
Factors like content uniqueness, content length, external and internal links, anchor text, headings, grammar, syntax, and readability all influence whether or not your content ranks. On their blog, Google advises webmasters to consider multiple questions about the pieces of content they create.
- Does the content provide original information, reporting, research or analysis?
- Does the content provide a substantial, complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
- Does the content provide insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
- If the content draws on other sources, does it avoid simply copying or rewriting those sources and instead provide substantial additional value and originality?
- Does the headline and/or page title provide a descriptive, helpful summary of the content?
"In our correlations studies, I found that pages that rank on the first page of Google have high scores in our Copy Optimizer. This is because Google loves pages with good topical depth and long-form content. The best pages have topically-rich content inside interactive on-page elements, like a table of contents, jump links, expandable content modules, and interactive javascript or videos."
- MANICK BHAN, Founder CEO/CTO OF LINKGRAPH