On-page SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a critical aspect of digital marketing that focuses on optimizing individual web pages to rank higher in search engine results and drive organic traffic.
In this article, we'll explore the key on-page SEO factors that can significantly impact your website's visibility, from keyword optimization and meta tags to internal linking and mobile-friendliness.
Understanding and implementing these factors can help improve your site's search engine rankings and overall online presence.
Let's get started.
What you will learn
- What on-page SEO is and why it’s important
- The difference between on-page and off-page SEO
- 12 on-page ranking factors every search engine optimizer must consider
- Best practices for performing your on-site optimization
What is on-page SEO?
On-page SEO refers to optimizing individual web pages to improve their ranking in search engine results and attract more relevant traffic.
This involves enhancing various on-page elements, such as content, meta tags, headings, images, internal links, and the overall user experience.
The goal of on-page SEO is to make a webpage more understandable and relevant to search engines while also ensuring it provides valuable and accessible information to users.
What is the difference between on-page and off-page SEO?
On-page SEO optimizes internal website elements such as content and meta tags, while off-page SEO focuses on external factors like backlinks and online reputation management.
While both are important, you have far more control over your web pages' code and content, making focusing on on-page SEO factors a good starting point for any efforts to improve search rankings.
Why is on-page SEO important?
On-page SEO is important because it directly influences how well your website ranks in search engine results by making your content more relevant, accessible, and understandable to both search engines and users.
Proper on-page optimization helps search engines accurately index and rank your pages, improving visibility and driving targeted organic traffic, which can lead to higher engagement and conversions.
In their quest to provide searchers with the best answers to their queries, search engines like Google parse your website's content to determine its quality.
On-page SEO tells them what your site is about and demonstrates the value you provide to visitors.
While off-page SEO should not be neglected, on-page optimization should be the baseline for any organic traffic growth strategy.
Simply communicating your site's relevance for specific searches can sometimes be enough to start ranking for your targeted queries.
12 on-page SEO ranking factors
Here are 12 key on-page elements search engines consider when deciding where to rank your website.
1. Meta title tags
Meta title tags are HTML elements that specify a web page’s title. They are a notable ranking factor, as confirmed by Google's John Mueller.
Meta title tags are the header text shown on search engine results pages, indicating the page's contents. For example, this is a meta title:
In addition to helping search engines understand your web page, this critical on-page SEO element directly correlates to click-through rates and influences organic traffic.
A well-optimized meta title should be concise, descriptive, relevant to the page content and include the page’s primary target keyword.
Each page should have a unique meta title that describes only it.
In most cases, Google will display the first 50-60 characters of a page's title in search results, so your title tag should fall within this range for maximum visibility.
Note that meta titles and page titles are not the same thing.
The meta title describes the page content but is not displayed on the page itself. The page title is the text displayed on the page to introduce its content to visitors.
This is the page title for the same link:
However, Google has been known to change the title and description in search results, so it's a good practice to keep the meta title and the page title identical.
If you want to see your meta title tags, free tools are available, like Spotbibo’s Google search results preview tool.
2. Page URL
While web addresses don’t play as large a role in determining page rankings as they once did, they’re still an important part of on-page SEO.
One of the first things a search engine crawler looks at is the page’s URL. To help you maximize your content's impact, you should follow a defined pattern, be descriptive, and include your target keywords.
This is better for both users and SEO.
Generally speaking, shorter URLs are preferable to long, complex ones. Other best practices include:
- Don’t use numbers and dates in your URL unless unavoidable – If you have to change your URL to update a page, you’ll lose all the juice and authority it previously had unless you set up a redirect.
- Use hyphens to separate words – HTML does not like spaces, and in URLs, they’re normally encoded with a %20 or + sign, making them harder for users to read.
- Avoid using special characters or hashtags – they don’t render in browser bars.
3. Heading tags
The use of headers like H1,H2,H3, etc., make it easier for both human readers and search engines to understand your content.
Use them to indicate hierarchy and help organize your content for a better reading experience.
This emphasizes relevance and importance while improving readability and navigation.
Your H1 should include your primary keyword, with secondary keywords and variations being used in your H2-H6 tags.
4. Relevant keywords in body
Google considers many factors when determining where to rank your web page, but content is still the most important factor. And that means keywords are the backbone of any successful SEO strategy.
But the days of keyword stuffing to game the algorithm are long gone. In the age of natural language processing (NLP), search engines want content that provides value to visitors.
To find these, start by conducting thorough keyword research.
You’ll probably already have some ideas about target keywords, but to ensure that your content coverage is complete, it’s a good idea to use resources like keyword tools, Google Autocomplete, Answer the Public, and Google Trends.
Include your keywords strategically throughout your copy in a natural manner.
You can leverage Surfer's Content Editor to help with that.
In the Content Editor you can see which keywords to include in your content and how often.
You can also leverage the Auto-Optimize feature, which will include the keywords naturally in your content.
5. Meta descriptions
Meta descriptions are another HTML element that provides a brief overview of your page’s content in search engine results pages.
While they don’t directly influence Google rankings, these are important for generating clicks.
If you want visitors to click on your page, you must have click-worthy meta descriptions.
Your goal is to match your meta description to the query intent and show searchers that your page has the information they want.
You should also include your main keyword in the meta description so Google will bold it.
Google may choose to ignore your carefully crafted meta description and choose its own where it feels appropriate, but here are some best practices for creating them:
- Include at least your primary keyword for the page – and, if possible, secondary ones as well.
- Keep meta descriptions within 150-160 characters (920 pixels) to ensure they display correctly in search results.
- Make it actionable and include a call to action like “shop now” or “explore your options.”
6. E-E-A-T factors
Quality content is the single most important thing for SEO. To help you rank as highly as possible, keep Google’s Search Quality Guidelines in mind.
Google assigns your site a score based on various factors, including your experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T)
This score is essential to your site’s reputation from Google’s perspective.
If you have high E-E-A-T, it considers your site a reliable source on a topic, particularly if you’re in the “your money or your life” (YMYL) arena.
There are a number of ways you can enhance your E-E-A-T profile, including:
- Create a trusted author profile – add a relevant biography including a name, credentials and relevant portfolios or work history.
- Write quality content that will acquire backlinks from reputable and noteworthy sites – a co-sign from authority sites; these transfer “juice” to your own pages.
- Explain your review process if you’re in the affiliate industry.
- Publish your review board if you’re in YMYL.
Above all, you should take care to avoid “black hat” SEO practices, which are dishonest or unethical attempts to game search algorithms and artificially boost rankings.
This can include thin content pages, which offer little to no value to users, the use of bad AI-created content and the aforementioned keyword stuffing.
7. NAP citaitons
Ensure that your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) are consistent across all online platforms, including your website, social media profiles, directories, and local listings.
Inconsistencies can confuse search engines and users, potentially harming your SEO efforts.
While most commonly associated with local SEO, it’s not limited to that and should be included for every brand.
Google wants evidence that your website represents a real organization or business and that you have real people with whom visitors can get in touch.
Here's an example of a listing in a local directory.
8. Internal linking
Internal links, or hyperlinks from one page on your website to another, are one of the ways in which search engines find and understand your site’s structure.
It shows them which pages are related to one another and helps crawlers discover new pages. They can also pass on link juice to underperforming pages, helping them rank higher in SERPs.
Properly optimized anchor text and internally linked pages are important to establish topical clusters and create page relevance.
More than that, they help users navigate within your site and help increase dwell time.
You can use Surfer to add internal links to your content automatically.
Monitoring your links should be a regular part of your SEO strategy. Broken links create bad user experiences and negatively impact search crawlers, so you should replace them with working links or redirects as soon as possible.
9. Image alt text
Image alt tags, or alt descriptions, are the text that appears on a user’s screen if an image fails to load or the user hovers over it with their mouse.
Alt text provides context to your page for both search engine bots and humans.
Alt text is important for a number of reasons, most notably for accessibility, in that it describes images to visually impaired visitors.
Use descriptive file names that include relevant keywords to maximize the positive impact of your alt text. Be sure to keep them brief.
For example, if your website sells birdhouses, an alt text of “sparrow-resistant bluebird house” is more helpful for visitors and more impactful for SEO than one that says “birdhouse.”
10. Schema markup
Schema is a standardized type of structured data recognized by Google and many other search engines. It highlights parts of your source code to help it stand out.
By providing context about the contents of pages, Schema make it easier for search engines to classify them. This, in turn, helps return more accurate results to queries.
It’s also what is used to provide featured snippets, ratings, carousels and other types of rich results in search results.
This can significantly improve your organic traffic, as engaging and informative snippets derived from structured data offer increased visibility in search results.
Schema can be used in a variety of ways for on-page SEO. For example, it can be used to implement FAQ for direct answers,
..or to showcase ratings for products.
Google Search Console has a Rich Results Test feature that shows you which rich results types it found on the page and highlights any errors or warnings in individual items.
11. Site speed
Everyone knows a slow-loading site drives an increased bounce rate, but you may not know it also directly hurts your search ranking.
Google has confirmed that it uses page speed as part of its page experience evaluation, which means you need to be aware of it for your site.
You can employ several tools, including Google PageSpeed Insights to test page speed.
These will give you information about how your site is being experienced by both mobile and desktop users, including your Core Web Vitals. These are a set of three metrics Google uses to measure a page speed, interactivity and visual stability:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures loading performance. This should be under 2.5 seconds.
- Interaction To Next Paint (INP): Measures responsiveness. Ideally, less than 200 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures visual stability. To provide a good user experience, strive for a CLS score of less than 0.1.
If your website pages are not loading quickly, you can take several steps to shorten load times. For example, examine your site's architecture, eliminate or reduce redirects, enable caching, and optimize images.
12. Site responsiveness
As mobile traffic has continued to grow, Google has increasingly emphasised responsiveness. It values sites that adapt seamlessly from phones to tablets to desktop computers and are easy to read and navigate on any device.
Since switching to mobile-first indexing in 2018, Google has prioritized sites optimized for mobile traffic, even for desktop search.
In other words, responsiveness is necessary for any website that values its search ranking.
As part of your on-page SEO process, you should check your site’s responsiveness using a tool like Google Lighthouse. Accessible in Chrome DevTools, as a Node module or from the command line, it runs a series of audits against a page and then generates a report.
This will identify failed audits and provide a report that includes information on how to improve the page and fix any issues.
Key takeaways
- On-page SEO is crucial for optimizing individual web pages to rank higher in search engine results and attract more organic traffic.
- Meta title tags and descriptions play a significant role in improving click-through rates and should be concise, relevant, and keyword-rich.
- URLs should be short, descriptive, and free from special characters or unnecessary numbers to enhance both user experience and SEO.
- Proper use of heading tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) helps organize content, making it easier for both search engines and users to understand.
- Keywords should be strategically placed within the content, avoiding keyword stuffing, to provide value and relevance to visitors.
- E-E-A-T factors (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) are essential for establishing your site’s credibility and ranking.
- Consistent NAP citations across all platforms ensure your business information is reliable and accessible.
- Internal linking helps search engines understand your site’s structure and can boost the ranking of underperforming pages.
- Image alt text improves accessibility and provides context to search engines, enhancing the overall SEO of your page.
- Schema markup helps search engines classify your content accurately, leading to better visibility and rich results in SERPs.
- Site speed directly affects search rankings and user experience; tools like Google PageSpeed Insights can help you optimize it.
- Site responsiveness is critical for mobile-first indexing and overall user experience; tools like Google Lighthouse can help you assess and improve it.
Boost your rankings with on-page SEO
Mastering on-page SEO is essential for improving your website's visibility, driving targeted traffic, and ultimately boosting your online success.
However, achieving the perfect balance of optimization can be challenging without the right tools. This is where Surfer comes in.
By leveraging Surfer, you can streamline your SEO efforts, ensure your pages are fully optimized, and stay ahead of the competition in search engine rankings.
Don’t leave your on-page SEO to chance—let Surfer guide you to better results and a stronger online presence.
