What is on-page SEO?
On-page SEO refers to optimizations made to the visible elements on your website. This includes, among other things, working with copy, images, and design elements on the site. The goal is for the website to be user-friendly and to present accurate and relevant information that answers what users are searching for. In addition to presenting relevant information, on-page SEO is about usability and making sure the site is easy to navigate.
On-page SEO differs from technical SEO, which involves working with the technical elements that sit “behind the visible” parts of the website. It is also distinct from off-page SEO, which covers activities carried out 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! It is of course important that you have high-quality content on your website, but it also needs to be presented in a way that makes it easy for search engines to understand it.
If you can identify with the fictional “Ida-innholdsprodusent”, you might be writing and publishing content on a website that offers a service or sells products. In that case, you stand to gain many benefits from working with SEO, and it is especially on-page SEO tools you should have in your toolbox.
By working with on-page SEO, Ida clarifies for the search engines what the different pages on her website are about. You show both search engines and users that this is a website with high-quality content, which increases the overall authority of the site. When the search engines recognize that Ida’s website is good and relevant, she will experience increased visibility. The fact that the site appears for more people in the search results, and that users actually find exactly what they were looking for, leads to higher engagement. From there, it’s a short path to increasing inquiries from potential customers and driving more sales!
The importance of Google E-A-T and YMYL
When Google launched its “Search Quality Rating Guidelines”, E-A-T was introduced as a very important factor for ranking high in the search results. E-A-T stands for “Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness”. In practice, this means that Google promotes websites that demonstrate strong expertise in their field, are trustworthy, and have authority. There are various ways to achieve this. Read more about what E-A-T entails in our glossary!
Google E-A-T is not a set of rules for what you MUST do, and (unfortunately) it does not provide a recipe for how to achieve it either, but rather principles that Google emphasizes. Therefore, it is definitely something you as a marketer should keep in mind!
In its guidelines, Google writes that E-A-T is particularly 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 which could be harmful to users’ health or finances if it turns out to be misinformation. The YMYL principle is also about not only presenting relevant information, but ensuring that it is accurate. Google actively works to avoid showing pages that contain misinformation. Therefore, YMYL pages that are found to contain misinformation will be penalized by the search engine.Read everything about what YMYL entails here.
How to do on-page SEO optimizations?
Topic clustering
One thing both you and Ida, the content producer, can do to follow the principles of Google E-A-T is to start with topic clustering. Topic clustering is, put simply, the categorization of content based on themes. It is a way of distributing and structuring content that shows search engines you have extensive knowledge across different subject areas.
Let’s say Ida’s website offers consulting within interior design. She should then write several articles about kitchen inspiration and add links between the different articles. She needs to do the same for bathroom inspiration, etc. This way, search engines can see the different categories and that each of them has a lot of information connected to it. Google loves that! This is only a small part of what topic clustering involves.You can read more about topic clustering here!
Good site structure
When Ida is going to write all this content (of course categorized with topic clustering), it’s important that she thinks about site structure. This means looking at how different pages are placed across the entire website. The different themes, such as 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 site structure makes the website more user-friendly, which in turn leads to more people wanting to spend time on the site. It is also a factor in achieving higher rankings in the search results. Read more about how to ensurea good site structure on your website here!
Keyword analysis
To understand what kind of content she should create, and how she should structure that content, Ida needs to carry out a solid keyword analysis related to the areas where her interior design company has expertise. Do consumers know that it is called an L-kitchen, or do “ordinary people” refer to it as a corner kitchen? A good keyword analysis gives you a clear indication. Identifying 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 carry out a good keyword analysis here.
Avoid keyword cannibalization
One important thing to keep in mind when mapping keywords and distributing content is to avoid keyword cannibalization. Put simply, this means you should not have multiple pages on your website that cover exactly the same topic. This can cause them to compete with each other for organic visibility. Read more about what keyword cannibalization means here!
Things to optimize in your on-page SEO work
As mentioned, on-page SEO is generally about optimizing the visible elements on the website. When Ida is going to optimize the content on her site, there are several things she can work on. Here, we walk through the most important elements to on-page optimize.
H1 tag – The headline
The H1 tag is an HTML tag in the website’s code and appears on the site as the main heading. There are several heading tags, but H1 is by far the most important. Ida needs to make sure all H1 tags are optimized and that the key keywords are included. The heading is actually a very important ranking factor for search engines. Read more about what you need to consider when writing H1 tags here!
Subheadings (H2, H3 etc.)
Even though the H1 tag is the most important, it is also crucial to SEO-optimize the subheadings on a website. They have their own tags in the HTML code, such as H2, H3, etc. It is therefore 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, working with websites, and the fictional content producer Ida need to take into account is the website’s design. It is essential that her site is easy to read both on small mobile screens and on larger desktop screens. This functionality is called responsive design. It is a factor search engines consider when ranking pages, but most importantly, it matters for users. You wouldn’t bother completing a purchase or leaving your contact information on pages that were impossible to navigate on mobile. Read more about what a good, responsive design entails here.
Quality content – well-written content
Even though we’re talking about many very concrete and SEO-related aspects, you must not forget the importance of maintaining high-quality written content on your site overall. It’s crucial to have clear language and well-structured copy. Core principles of good writing—such as a compelling introduction, a comprehensive main body, and a conclusion that summarizes the content—are still essential.
As mentioned in the keyword analysis section, it is also important to adapt the content to what the target audience is actually looking for when they perform the search that leads them to your page. In Ida’s case, she needs to assess which professional terms she should use; perhaps she should explain the names of different interior styles more clearly than she thinks? Such considerations affect the quality of the text, and she needs to keep them in mind throughout the entire content production process.
ALT text on the images
When search engines value websites that are easy to navigate and understand, that applies to everyone. That’s why there are several things Ida can do to improve the functionality of her interior design site. One step she should take, which both makes the site more readable and is appreciated by search engines, is using ALT text on images. ALT text is a type of image caption that is added in the code and describes what the illustrations on the page show. This makes the site more accessible for visually impaired users, or for those who have disabled image display online. Read more about how to add a good ALT text to your images here.
Link text – Anchor texts on links must 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 high 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 she chooses to place the hyperlink on should make sense on its own, and should definitely not only be “click here” or the link itself (such as this: https://www.solidmedia.no/guider/on-page-seo). Here we write more about how you should write anchor texts.
