A Step-by-Step Guide Showing You EXACTLY How To Optimize Your Website Using Beginner to Advanced On-Page SEO Best Practices

On-Page SEO is the cornerstone of every well-rounded SEO campaign. Being on the first page of Google can be a game-changer when you rank for keywords that are profitable for your business.

The impact of #1 rankings cannot be understated.

Search engines like Google work to deliver the best results every time a search is entered. Higher search engine placement means more traffic.

When you increase the number of people discovering your business, the number of people contacting your business goes up.

More contact = more customers.

The internet is “word of mouth”.

Local SEO, or local search engine optimization, is the process of optimizing your website to rank higher in local search results. Many factors play into how sites are ranked.

If you want to get more mileage out of your SEO campaign, you need to focus on these 3 key areas:

1. The quality of your content and site structure;
2. The number of backlinks pointing to your domain;
3. The number of legitimate citations mentioning your website.

Here is what you need to understand about SEO: the company that hones in and executes first is usually the one that dominates its market.

When someone types a phrase like “personal injury lawyer” into their search bar, Google will also show local results, even though the specific city is not mentioned.

With local SEO, you’re dealing with a much smaller geographic area.

You’re not targeting a national audience, so the competition pool is much smaller.

You’re dealing with fewer businesses vying for the same customers.

This gives you a twofold advantage:

Easier to rank for geo-targeted keywords.
Easier to attract potential new clients that need your services.

By optimizing for your city or service area the majority of your website traffic comes from people who are local to you, interested in your services, and looking for a solution — right now.

Do yourself a favor: optimize your website from the get-go.

SEO takes time.

The longer you put off optimizing your site, the longer it will be until you see results. Bottomline.

What is On-Page SEO?

On-page SEO is how well your site is optimized, from code to content.

Is your site responsive?

Has your website been built to w3c standards (i.e. clean, readable code)?

Have you used your keywords throughout your site?

Are you using the right keywords?

On-page SEO is critical. Forget all the talk about links for a second. Yes, backlinks are important, but your first priority is making sure your website is optimized from the very beginning.

On-Page SEO Factors

Google looks at several different factors to determine if a site or web page has been optimized correctly. In the next few sections, you will learn everything you need to know to optimize a web page.

Our On-Page SEO Checklist is broken into two sections:

Basic On-Page SEO Optimization: Learn the exact steps you should take to optimize any webpage.

Advanced On-Page SEO Techniques: Dig into advanced on-page optimization strategies that you can implement right away.

On-Page SEO Checklist

Backlinks are still the #1 Google ranking signal, but good SEO starts with on-page optimization. Here’s how to optimize your site, page by page.

#1 Title tag

Place your keyword at the beginning of your title. The closer your keyword is to the beginning of your title, the easier it is for Google to determine what your page is about.

Tip: Make your title more than 40 characters, but no longer than 70 characters. Any longer and your message will be cut off in search results.

#2 Meta description

Be sure to include your keyword in your meta description. While meta descriptions do not hold major weight in terms of SEO, a well-written meta description helps increase CTR (click-through rate), which is something Google looks at.

Tip: Keep your meta descriptions under 160 characters and be as compelling as possible. Scope the competition and check out Google Ads to see what others are doing and use these examples to optimize your own.

#3 Maximize CTR (clickthrough rate)

If your search results listing isn’t getting clicked on it sends a strong signal to Google that visitors are not finding your content useful.

The opposite is also true: more clicks, more relevancy.

Google will usually give you a bump in search results if more people are clicking on your result. You can maximize your CTR by writing extremely compelling copy that is geared towards making people click.

Hint: Check out what messaging is being used in Google Ads for the keyword you are targeting. What are they communicating? What calls-to-action are being used?

You should be able to come up with some ideas from the ads. Ads that are higher up on the page have typically proven to have good click-through.

Of course, you cannot maximize CTR until you reach Page 1, but having an optimized title/meta description will help you get there.

#3 URL

Use SEO-friendly URLs and be sure to include your keyword. Your URLs should never look like this:

http://www.firm.com/practice-areas/criminal-defense/dui/

Or this:

http://www.firm.com/dui/

Your URL structure should be localized, contain your practice area and include the word “lawyer” or “attorney”:

http://www.firm.com/chicago-dui-lawyer/

It is immediately obvious what the page is about and where they serve clients, just from the URL structure.

If it is obvious to you, it means search engines can quickly understand what the page is about as well.

How you structure your URLs should never be an afterthought.

When creating new content — and especially designing a new site — you should plan your url structure before you plan anything else. This gives you a roadmap for content and a strategy for internal linking.

#4 H1 tag

The H1 tag is the most important tag on the page. Be sure to make it your first heading tag and include your keyword (with a modifier).

#5 Optimize images

Use your keyword to name your image. Be sure to include your keyword in the title and alt descriptions as well.

For example, using the example from Mary’s chocolate donuts, you would add an image to the page with a URL structure like this:

Notice how the image is named with the keyword? You’d also include image and alt tags that further described the image.

#6 Keyword in the beginning of your post

Make sure you use your keyword in the first paragraph of your post. This is one of a variety of ranking factors looked at by Google and other search engines.

Tip: If you use WordPress, install WordPress SEO by Yoast. You’ll get clear instructions on how to optimize each page of your site in a very easy to understand way.

#7 H2 and H3 tags

Adding H2 and H3 heading tags helps structure your content for readers and search engines. They provide a hierarchy for the page that tells search engines which heading should have more weight.

You should include variations of your keyword in your headings to give your on-page SEO a boost.

#8 Use variations of your keyword throughout your content

Your keyword should appear throughout your post. Include your keyword (and variations) in your body text, headings and images. Synonyms of the word or alternative phrases are also important to add.
Advanced On-Page SEO Techniques

#9 Use outbound links to credible sources

Link to 1-2 authoritative sites. Do not use a “nofollow” tag. Linking to reputable sources adds trust to your site in Google’s eyes. Plus, it’s a great way to offer your readers additional value by pointing them to new resources they can discover.

#10 Make your content easily consumable.

People read differently online. We scan pages.

Very few of you will read every word of this post.

Part of the reason is the sheer volume of content that is published online. The other half is the fact that our new digital lives offer far too many distractions.

Brevity is key. Breaking up the text in your posts makes your content more consumable and easier to read. Break up the text on your page and be sure to ditch publishing big blocks of text.

#11 Publish long-form content

Content over 1,000 words performs better in search and gives you ample room to naturally add keywords throughout the page.

SerpIQ analyzed the top 10 positions on search results pages and counted the words in each article. Their data included all text on the page (including sidebars and comments), so that’s something to keep in mind. As you can see, the higher the word count, the higher the rankings.

What it comes down to is effort.

Good content gets links. Great content gets shared.

#12 Link to other posts and pages

Link internally within your site to important posts and pages. This keeps Googlebot on your site longer, which means more pages get crawled on your site. It also helps improve visitor time on-site — meaning more opportunities to convert traffic into conversions.

#13 Improve Google Pagespeed

A fast website is one of the quickest (no pun intended) paths towards better conversions. Google measures bounce rate and dwell time.

A slow website impacts the user experience and therefore can ding you in the SEO department.

Here are some things you can do to speed up your website:

• Minimize HTTP Requests
• Reduce server response time
• Enable compression
• Enable browser caching
• Minify resources
• Optimize images
• Optimize CSS Delivery
• Prioritize above-the-fold content
• Reduce the number of plugins you use on your site
• Reduce redirects

You can see how fast your website is using Google Pagespeed Insights.

#14 Expand the content depth of your site

The number of pages your website has a correlation to how your website ranks in Google.

This doesn’t mean you can just publish a bunch of useless pages and rank, however, you can easily speed up the content depth of your site by creating location pages or other resources that are easy to replicate.

Keep in mind that it’s not just the number of pages.

These pages need to be easily accessible.

Also, sites with fewer areas served will not benefit as much using this tactic, but if you serve clients state or nationwide, you can definitely use this to your advantage.

Example: Let’s say you are a personal injury lawyer that helps injury victims across your entire state.

You can target the major cities (prioritized by where you have physical offices and by population) by creating location pages.

Each of these pages should be offshoots of one page that is loaded with highly researched, well-written content.

This can either be your home page (ideally), or another page.

First, you would have your parent page:

https://firm.com/injury-lawyer/

Then, you would build out city pages as child pages:

https://firm.com/injury-lawyer/CITY-A/
https://firm.com/injury-lawyer/CITY-B/
https://firm.com/injury-lawyer/CITY-C/

This makes each of the city pages roll up to the main page.

To finish off the strategy, you would likely need a developer.

In order to make these pages easily accessible, you’d want to create an interactive map that linked to all these pages on your site.

This way, you can just embed that map:

This helps you easily link to multiple pages across every page of your site, which boosts your internal linking.

That’s actually another hack in itself: Using website design to strategically improve your site’s internal linking.

#15 Target keyword with Featured Snippets

There is not just one #1.

Google search results are more personalized than ever.

Different people in different locations get different results with the same keyword.
If I type in “dui lawyer” in Raleigh, I will get local results.

You type the same keyword in your city, you’ll get results near you.

You can play this to your advantage by creating question-based content that targets keywords that have what Google calls a Featured Snippet.

Here is an example:

If I just localize the search query, I get a NEW #1 result:

And I can get an entirely NEW result by changing the search to a city:

Do this with all of your content and you have a much better opportunity to not only get on Page 1 — you can make it to the very top.

Why does this work?

This isn’t a hack. If you understand what Google is trying to do, you’ll completely understand SEO.
All Google wants is to get a fast answer to their questions.

That’s it.

Think about people’s attention spans.

We want information quickly.

If we don’t find what we are looking for, we generally search something else or immediately back out of a website.

Think of this when you design your website and write your content.

Note: Keywords that have Featured Snippets are generally question-based, long-tail keywords.

This means that the search volume will be lower than a term like “phoenix car accident lawyer”.

It will also be less competitive.

So, the idea is to answer as many questions as you can.

• Think about the questions potential clients have
• Search those in Google
• Find which ones have Featured Snippets
• Create content to target those
• Localize the content and hit publish

When you create your content, just look at who else is ranking.

Make your content better.

How?

Try to answer the question in plain language in a few sentences.

You’ll want to expand your content, so Google has something to index, but what really wins the Featured Snippet box is a concise answer.

Google literally shows you this:

Your blog strategy should follow this playbook.

#16 Use rich snippets, schema, and microdata

The short version is that adding markup to your web pages gives you more visibility in search and helps improve your on-page SEO.

Here’s what Google has to say:

Including structured data markup in web content helps Google algorithms better index and understand the content. Some data can also be used to create and display Rich Snippets within the search results. For example, the Rich Snippet at the right shows search results for a movie, including review stars, an aggregate rating value, and vote count — very useful to anyone searching for information about this movie.

#17 Make fonts easy to read

Hard to read fonts make it hard on visitors. If people have trouble reading your content, it’s almost a sure bet they will click the back button. Use easy to read fonts and make sure that your font type is not too small. Avoid typefaces that are too complicated or don’t display well on the web.

#18 Optimize clicks to content

The closer a page is to your home page the better it will rank. You have to ask yourself this one important question:

What page do you need visitors to reach?

Make it no more than 3 clicks from the home page. You’ll get better rankings and conversion. PageRank will flow easier to these pages as well.

#19 Reduce bounce rate

All you have is 3 seconds. Make it count.

What you want your visitors to do should be immediately obvious within 3 seconds of landing on your site. Check Google Analytics and see what your bounce rate is, from there work to reduce the number by testing different value propositions and calls-to-action.

#20 Make your site mobile-friendly

Google’s mobile update means sites that are not mobile-friendly will have a harder time showing up in mobile searches.

On-Page SEO Resources