Whether you’re running a storage facility, roofing comany, SaaS, agency, or really any business that has a website, you need to know how to do on-page SEO, as it’s the bedrock of ranking on Google. The best part about On-Page SEO is the fact that you can start ranking on Google with a little bit of time investment and waiting, assuming the keywords you choose are lower difficulty and not hyper competitive, which is exactly why you should learn the basics of on-page SEO.
In this post, I’m going to show you the few steps that you need to start your on-page SEO.
- Identify keywords – You need to figure out what keywords you want to rank for on Google. You can use tools like SEMRush or Google Ads Keyword planner to find your targetted keywords and how difficult they are to rank for, as well as search volume so you can figure out what the best keywords are to rank for. Ideally, if you’re using SEMRush, you want to keep your keyword difficulty under 25%, as your website can start ranking with on-page SEO without any backlinks, just a waiting game.
- Optimize Your Titles – your website page that you are trying to rank for on Google should have the same name as the keyword that you’re trying to rank for. In addition, your H1 tags should reflect this.
- Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions – these are what appear on Google when someone searches for your business. The meta title is the blue part of a google listing while the description comes up under the title. The title and the description should contain your targetted keyword, as well as some sales copy that will grab attention, so you can boost your click through rate. You can use tools such as Yoast on WordPress to do this, but most SEO plugins will work for this.
- URL Slug Optimization – Remember, Google ranks pages, not websites (for the most part – I can go into this on another post). Let’s say you have a page about “Roofing in Tampa” and it’s a specific location page. You have your website title, H1, and meta information all optimized. Now, you need to make sure your URL slug has the same optimization. So, your URL should look like https://mycompany.com/roofing-in-tampa. This makes it even easier for Google to read your website for the particular keyword.
- Add Targetted Keywords to your content – in the body text of your page, you should have your keywords AND related keywords in your content. Your content will normally need to be a certain length depending on the competitiveness. You can use a tool like SEMRush to see how much content are on the top ranking websites and how often they mention the targetted keywords, so your content can be better than theirs. If you have relevent content with the keywords in the body, your website will have a great chance to rank on Google.
- Google Search Console – you need to make sure that your website is linked properly with Google Search Console with the Sitemap linked as well. You can use your SEO tool that we mentioned in step 3 to generate a sitemap in most cases. You will upload this to Google Search Console so that Google can more easily crawl your site. This is a step that a lot of people overlook and they wonder why they aren’t appearing on Google after a few months worth of work. In addition, GSC can give you super valuable feedback as to what keywords you’re ranking for, the amount of impressions, and click through rates.
- Track your keywords – once you have steps 1-6 complete, you need to track your rankings. It can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months to start ranking on your targetted keywords depending on the difficulty and the quality of your content and optimization efforts. I wouldn’t recommend looking at your rankings daily, but at least twice a month just to see if it’s trending in the right direction.
Appreciate you reading this far. Best of luck with your SEO efforts and if you’re looking for an SEO service to work, please reach out for a consultation.
