If you are a business that has opted for digital marketing services, you might have heard about on-page SEO. Any good SEO agency will always tell you it is a highly competitive race that webmasters engage in an attempt to beat each other and reach the front page of Google. Higher rankings indicate more traffic, which means more leads and sales. It doesn't matter at all if you are a global e-commerce store, a solopreneur, an affiliate marketing blogger, or a small business starting digital marketing in Perth for the first time. Evidently, higher search engine rankings can lead to higher profits.
So if SEO is a tough race, there are two factors that the winners must consider. They are: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
Understanding On-page SEO
On-page SEO is all the effort you make on your business site's web page to help it compete better in the race to rank on Google SERP or search engine result pages. On-page SEO factors are the crucial things that you can generally control 100% because you are the webmaster. The on-page SEO elements contribute to the user experience and Google's ability to understand your website's structure. The better your on-page SEO efforts are, the more Google will recognise that any page or post is relevant to the user's search query.
Exploring the elements of On-Page SEO
- Quality content
- Title, headings, and meta description
- Keyword density
- Images
- Internal linking
- Schema markup
- Page load speed
- User experience
- Mobile-friendliness
On the other hand, off-page SEO is everything that happens outside your website to make it evident before Google that your content is worth ranking. Crucial elements of off-page SEO include vital things like social signals, backlinks and business citations that are often beyond control.
Google uses these factors to interpret how authoritative and trustworthy your website is. Generally speaking, the more complex an off-page SEO factor is to acquire, the more impactful it appears in the eyes of the search engine giant. For example, a backlink generated from australia.gov.au will have a much more significant impact on your rankings than a link from any random blog site.
Why does On-Page SEO matter so much?
Off-page and on-page SEO are both sides of the same coin. While Google will not consider your website as authoritative without strong, credible backlinks, it will not know how relevant you are without the appropriate on-page factors.
The SEO world is full of fed-up webmasters who acquire numerous links and social shares without finding a single upward blip on their ranking radar. Often, the root cause is a need for on-page SEO to prepare the stage for the off-page link-building campaign. However, more than paying attention to on-page factors is similar to building a house with no foundation: it will be an unsustainable mess that completely collapses in on itself in the absence of digital marketing in Perth.
On-Page SEO and user experience
Before we get into the complete on-page SEO guide, it's worth considering the role that on-page SEO has on your website's user experience (UX) and why this matters to Google.
Google's job is to deliver search results that users want to see. However, if their query is the average salary for a lawyer and the search results display the tuition for law schools, Googlebot has failed and frustrated the user (surprisingly enough, that's an actual example from Google's Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines).
In other words, Google cares about user experience.
Once upon a time, the Google algorithm relied on manual, hand-coded updates. The brains at Google would implement a change, their evaluators would assess how it impacted results, and if all looked good, it would become a permanent change to the algorithm.
This meant that the algorithm was always a little bit behind real-time results. As such, shady SEO tactics prevailed because web designers could get away with them for a time, even if they provided a poor user experience.
What does this mean for you as a business?
If RankBrain means one thing, it's that the most important on-page SEO factor is offering your readers exactly what they are looking for. It means thinking more like a human as you produce content and less like a computer—because Google is basing its search results on how real humans interact with your content.
There are undoubtedly technical on-page SEO factors that do really matter, but you want to keep the forest for the trees. So now that we've established that user experience is the essential piece of the equation, it's the perfect time to jump into the first stage of our on-page SEO guide.
Hire experts to get the job done
If you want to just avoid getting bogged down in all the technical aspects of metadata and keyword density, hire a trusted SEO agency to get it done for you. The most important thing is that your digital agency keeps progressing with your on-page SEO efforts. Every little tweak helps, so don't get so intimidated by the sheer number of factors that you never make progress. Instead, stay on it, one step at a time, and your rankings will improve.
