What is on-page SEO?
On-page SEO is the optimization of visible elements on your website. This includes working with text, images and design elements on the website. The aim is for the website to be user-friendly and present correct and relevant information that responds to what users are searching for! In addition to presenting relevant information, on-page SEO is about user-friendliness and making the site easy to navigate.
On-page SEO differs from technical SEO, which is work on the technical elements that lie "behind the visible" on the website. It is also distinguished from off-page SEO, which is work done outside your own website.
Why should you work with on-page SEO?
If you have a website that sells products or offers services, on-page SEO should be part of your marketing strategy! Of course, it's important that you have high-quality content on your website, but it also needs to be presented in a way that search engines can understand.
If you can identify with the fictitious "Ida content producer", you may be writing and publishing content on a website that offers a service or sells products. If so, there are many benefits to working with SEO, and it's on-page SEO tools in particular that you should have in your toolbox.
By working with on-page SEO, Ida makes it clear to search engines what the various pages on her website are about. You show both the search engines and users that this is a website with quality content, which increases the authority of the website as a whole. When search engines recognize that Ida's website is good and relevant, she will experience increased visibility. The fact that the site appears to more people in the search results and that users actually find exactly what they were looking for leads to higher engagement. This is a short route to increasing enquiries from potential customers and more sales!
The importance of Google E-A-T and YMYL
When Google launched its Search Quality Rating Guidelines, E-A-T was presented as a very important factor for ranking high in search results. E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. In other words, Google promotes websites that have a high level of expertise in their field, are trustworthy and have authority. There are different ways to achieve this. Read more about what E-A-T means in our explanation of terms!
Google E-A-T are not rules for what you MUST do, and (unfortunately) do not provide a recipe for how to achieve it, but are principles Google emphasizes. Therefore, it is definitely something you as a marketer should think about!
In its guidance, Google writes that E-A-T is especially important for YMYL pages. Google is very fond of acronyms. But what is a YMYL page? YMYL stands for Your Money Your Life. YMYL pages are pages that present information that could be detrimental to users' health or finances, should it be misinformation. The YMYL principle is also about not only presenting relevant information, but also being correct. Google is actively working to avoid showing pages with misinformation. Therefore, YMYL pages that are found to contain misinformation will be penalized by the search engine. Read all about what YMYL entails here.
How to do on-page SEO optimizations?
Topic clustering
One thing both you and your Ida content producer can do to follow the principles of Google E-A-T is to start with topic clustering. In short, topic clustering is the categorization of content based on theme. It's a way of distributing and structuring content that shows search engines that you have extended knowledge of different subject areas.
Let's say that Ida's website offers interior design advice. Then she should write several articles about kitchen inspiration and add links between the different articles. She should do the same for bathroom inspiration, etc. Then the search engines will see the different categories, and that each of them has a lot of information attached to it. Google loves that! This is just a small part of what topic clustering involves. You can read more about topic clustering here!
Good side structure
When Ida writes all this content (categorized with topic clustering, of course), it's important that she thinks about page structure. In other words, she looks at how different pages are placed throughout the site. The different themes for e.g. kitchen, bathroom and bedroom should have their own subpages and the relevant articles she has produced with topic clustering should be placed under each main page. A well-thought-out page structure makes the website more user-friendly, which in turn leads to more people wanting to spend time on the website. It's also a factor in achieving higher rankings in search results. Read more about how to ensure good page structure on your website here!
Keyword analysis
To know what she should create content about, and how she should design that content, Ida needs to do a good keyword analysis around what her interior design company has expertise in. Do consumers know it's called an L-shaped kitchen, or do "ordinary people" call it a corner kitchen? A good keyword analysis gives you a clue. Finding out what people are actually interested in and how they search for it is one of the most important aspects of on-page SEO work! See how you can conduct a good keyword analysis here.
Avoid keyword cannibalization
One important thing to remember when mapping keywords and distributing content is to avoid keyword cannibalization. Simply put, this means that you shouldn't have several pages on your website that talk about exactly the same topic. This can lead to them competing against each other for organic visibility. Read more about keyword cannibalization here!
Things to optimize in on-page SEO work
As mentioned, on-page SEO is generally about optimizing visible things on the website. When Ida needs to optimize the content of her website, there are several things she can work on. Here we go through the most important things to optimize on-page.
H1 tag - Headline
The H1 tag is an HTML tag in the website's code and appears on the website as the main heading. There are several heading tags, but H1 is the most important. Ida must ensure that all H1 tags are optimized and that the important keywords are baked in. The headline is actually a very important ranking factor for search engines. Read more about what to consider when writing H1 tags here!
Subheadings (H2, H3 etc.)
Although the H1 tag is most important, it is also important to SEO-optimize the subheadings on a website. They have their own tags in the HTML code as H2, H3 etc. So it's useful to include variations of the relevant keywords in the subheadings as well. Read more about the use of subheadings here.
Good design
Another visible element that both you who work with websites and fictional content producer Ida must take into account is the website's design. It's essential that her site is easy to read on both small mobile screens and larger computer screens. This functionality is called responsive design. It's a factor that search engines consider when ranking pages, but it's also important for users. You wouldn't be able to make purchases or leave contact information on pages that were impossible to navigate on your mobile. Read more about what a good responsive design entails here.
Quality content - well-written content
Even though we're talking about a lot of very specific and SEO-related things, don't forget the importance of having high-quality text content on the page on a general basis! It's important to have good language and a tidy text. Text principles such as having an enticing preamble, complementary main body and a conclusion that summarizes the content are still essential.
As mentioned in the keyword analysis section, it's also important to adapt your content to what your target audience is actually looking for when they do the search that brings them to your site. In Ida's case, she needs to consider what kind of technical terms to use, perhaps she should explain the names of different interior styles better than she thinks? Such considerations affect the quality of the text, and she needs to keep them in mind throughout the production of content.
ALT text on the images
When search engines value websites that are easy to navigate and understand, this applies to everyone. That's why there are several things Ida can do to increase the functionality of her interior design site. One step she should take that both makes the site readable and that search engines value is ALT text on the images. ALT text is a type of image text that is embedded in the code and describes what the illustrations on the page show. This makes the page more readable for visually impaired users or those who have turned off online image viewing. Read more about how to add a good ALT text to your images here.
Link text - Anchor texts on links should be clear
By using internal links between her own pages on the website, and external links to other sources, Ida shows that her website has great credibility. However, it's not enough to just have the links there. She should also on-page optimize the link text on the page! The text on which she chooses to place the hyperlink should make sense in itself, and should in any case not just be "click here" or the link itself (such as this: https://www.solidmedia.no/guides/on-page-seo). Here we write more about how you should write anchor texts.
In summary
Working with on-page SEO is largely about making sure your website answers what your visitors are asking for or solves their problem. All the visible elements we've discussed here should be meaningful and aimed at the target audience you want to reach. It's also important that you update your content when necessary. This also sends signals to the search engines that your website is staying relevant.
After going through a bunch of elements you should work on, these 3 stand out as particularly important.
- Make sure that the content you create matches your users' wishes! Do good analysis and find out what your target audience actually needs or wants. You also need to create content that "speaks the same language" as those you want to reach.
- Make sure your website is clean and clear at all levels. Structure your texts well and ensure that the website itself has clear categories and natural navigation. Both users and search engines navigate through your website from link to link. Make the path as easy as possible for them.
- Ensure you have a good breadth of content. When planning and producing texts, make sure you showcase the breadth of what you know. This demonstrates expertise and a high level of knowledge, which reassures users and satisfies search engines.
These are the things content producer Ida needs to do to get her interior design website to rise in the search results. When your site is SEO-optimized, chances are users will take more actions on her site, and in the long run that leads to more inquiries and new customers!
FAQ
What is on-page SEO?
On-page SEO is the optimization of visible elements on your website. This includes working with text, images and design elements on the website.
Why is on-page SEO important?
By working with on-page SEO, it becomes clear what the various pages on your website are about. You also show the search engines and users that your website has well-crafted, quality content. This increases the authority of the website as a whole and you will experience increased organic visibility. This in turn will lead to more visitors and more conversions.
What distinguishes on-page SEO from off-page SEO?
On-page SEO is work that is done on your own website, preferably work with text and images. Off-page SEO is marketing and raising awareness of your site elsewhere online. Off-page SEO is about getting references from other places on the internet that refer to your site.
What distinguishes on-page SEO from technical SEO?
On-page SEO is work with visible elements on the website such as text, headlines and images. Technical SEO, on the other hand, is about the "invisible" elements of a website. These can be things that are embedded in the page's HTML code or page speed.