On-page SEO is one of the most important aspects of website optimization. The question is: How can you start with on-page optimization? And what’s next? We’ll guide you through the most important things you need to consider if you want to optimize your website correctly.
How to do On-Page SEO correctly. The help for real search engine optimization
On the page SEO Basics
Before we delve into the specifics of on-page optimization, let’s answer some basic questions you might have when starting with SEO.
What is on-page SEO?
On-page SEO refers to the optimization of website structure and content – everything that is on the page (as opposed to off-page SEO).
If you imagine SEO as a bowl of soup (our favorite metaphor), off-page SEO primarily covers link building, and on-page SEO covers these two aspects:
Content
Technical stuff
HOW to do on-page SEO?
Mastering on-page SEO requires broad knowledge, as it encompasses many aspects. In this guide, we will walk you step-by-step through the most important on-page success factors and techniques.
WHY should you work on on-page SEO?
Because it is an integral part of SEO that can help you achieve higher rankings, reach a larger audience, and get more organic traffic.
Unlike off-page SEO, on-page SEO is entirely within your control.
WHEN should you perform on-page SEO?
Some things require a one-time setup when starting with the website (e.g., page structure, HTTPS, website speed optimization), while other activities are needed from time to time – you need to consider on-page optimization every time you publish a new blog post.
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On-page SEO should also be performed even if you are already ranking first in search results, as SEO is an ongoing process.
Who should perform on-page SEO?
Every website owner, blogger, online marketer, or SEO specialist. In fact, anyone trying to rank a website in search engines.
WHAT are the on-page SEO factors?
On-page optimization consists of many steps.
Here is a list of the 12 important on-page SEO factors that have a direct or indirect impact on the success of your website.
Crawlable website – the website is crawlable and indexed by search robots.
Page architecture – there is a clear structure and logic in the architecture of the pages.
High-quality outbound links – the website links to high-quality external resources.
Website speed – the pages load quickly on all devices.
Mobile usability – the page is displayed correctly on every device and browser.
Use of HTTPS – the website is secured and has an SSL certificate.
User-friendly URLs – URL addresses are simple and UX-friendly.
Targeted content – the page targets a specific search intent.
Keyword optimization – the page uses relevant keywords in relevant places.
Image optimization – the images are optimized for search engines.
Readability and UX – the text is well optimized, readable, and UX-friendly.
Click-through rate – the page has an optimized title tag and meta description.
Things like HTTPS or page speed are confirmed ranking factors. This means that Google uses them directly in their ranking algorithm.
But many of them are not used by Google, or at least not directly.
There is a lively debate among SEOs whether things like CTR or outbound links influence rankings. We will not go into that debate here.
The thing is – whether Google uses these factors as a ranking factor or not, they are important because they improve overall user experience and provide added value to the website visitor.
Note: There are hundreds of ranking signals, but no one knows with 100% certainty what they are and how they work. The people at Google are very secretive about their formula to prevent potential misuse. They only provide official statements/confirmations on some sub-aspects of their algorithm.
Although not all factors mentioned in this guide are ranking factors, they all correlate with higher rankings. This means that high-ranking websites generally perform very well in these areas of on-page optimization.
We have verified the importance of all factors with this great list of SEO success factors by Cyrus Shepard, supported by case studies, expert opinions, and statements from Google.
In the following chapters, we will go through all these factors step by step.
Let's start with technical SEO.
Technical Material
A large part of on-page SEO consists of technical optimization. For many, it’s just a necessary evil, but knowing the basics is actually not that difficult.
Checking robot accessibility and page indexing
The accessibility of your website is the foundation of technical SEO. Search engines crawl web pages and index them in databases to show their users the most relevant results.
How do I find out if my pages are indexed? With Google Search Console.
If you're not using it, set it up immediately!
How to set up Search Console
To connect to Search Console, you need to sign in to a Google account and verify your domain.
In the past, you had to verify all versions (http://, https://, www, non-www), now you only need to verify your ownership via the DNS record, which is quite easy to do. You can follow this step-by-step guide.
Search Console helps you analyze your keyword rankings, CTRs, possible Google penalties, and website indexing.
How can I check if my pages are on Google?
Open Google Search Console. In the Coverage view, select „Excluded“ and check if there are any pages that should be indexed in this list.
You will probably see many excluded pages. It may or may not be a problem. Search Console shows you all excluded pages, and it’s up to you to decide whether the listed pages should be indexed by Google or not.
You might see pages like these:
URLs automatically created in your CMS – /embed/, /feed/, /wp-admin/
URLs with parameters – ?ref, ?tags, ?utm
Pagination pages – ?page=2, /page/2/
Don't worry. You don't need these pages indexed.
But if you see important URLs of landing pages, blog posts, categories, or products, there might be a problem.
This problem can be caused by a small error on the website (an incorrect "noindex" attribute) or more serious issues such as duplicate or thin content.
If this seems to be the problem, try to find the possible reason (there is a good guide on indexing issues by the Hobo Agency) or simply hire a professional to help you.
Tip: There is another quick way to see if your website is indexed. Just use this search operator in Google:
To see the approximate number of indexed pages: site:yourdomain.xy
To see if a specific page is indexed: site:yourdomain.xy/page
If you see a suspiciously low number of indexed pages or no pages at all, you may have an indexing problem.
Are all your important pages indexed? Perfect, let’s continue.
Building a Perfect Page Structure
The structure of the website is one of the things you should think about before launching the website, as it can be difficult to modify it afterwards.
Having a good, easy-to-understand page structure is important for two main reasons:
It helps to make the page more crawler-friendly.
It helps to improve user experience.
Let's take a look at concrete steps you can take to achieve a well-optimized website architecture:
Sitemaps
If you have a large website with thousands of pages, you can use a sitemap.
The sitemap is a simple file (usually an .xml file) containing the URLs of all your pages. It helps crawlers find all the pages you want to crawl and index in one place.
Here is an example of a sitemap created with the Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress.
There is a lot of misinformation when it comes to sitemaps, so keep these things in mind:
A sitemap is not a ranking factor and does not grant you any „extra points“ from Google.
If you have a simple informational page, you don’t need the sitemap. Google is able to crawl and index your content without a sitemap.
What to consider when creating a sitemap
Structural Depth
The website structure should not be too deep, so that search engines can easily crawl all important content and people can quickly find the content they want.
When designing website navigation, use the so-called three-click rule:
A user of your website should be able to find all information with no more than three clicks from the homepage.
There are two types of links you should use to achieve this:
Structural links (e.g., navigation in the menu and footer, breadcrumbs, calls to action) – they go vertically, based on the hierarchy of pages.
Contextual links (e.g., in-text links, read more links) – independent of hierarchy
The structural depth is closely related to internal links.
Let’s take a closer look at the importance of internal connections.
Internal Links
Internal links are a great way to keep readers on your website. They increase user engagement and provide added value by offering relevant resources or pages.
Internal links also tell search engines which pages are important and how to get there.
Note: There is another aspect of internal links you should consider – the anchor text. It contains important information about the content of the linked page. Scroll to Chapter 3 to learn more about anchor text.
When it comes to blogs, a good way to use internal links is to follow the topic cluster model. It helps to „group“ thematically relevant posts and highlight the most important content elements.
There are two main types of content in the topic cluster model:
Pillar content – a long-form post or page that broadly covers the topic.
Cluster content – supporting blog posts that explain subtopics in detail.
Here is an example schema for internal linking within a topic cluster:
How many internal links should you actually use?
This mainly depends on the length of the text. Several internal links on the same page are perfectly fine for SEO, just make it look natural and don’t go to extremes.
For example, look at how many internal links we used in this guide. A lot!
As long as the internal links are relevant and provide a good UX for the reader, you don’t have to worry about the numbers.
Pro-tip: If you run a blog, look at your latest article and check how many links go to other pages on your website. If there are none, check if there are posts in your blog that might be relevant to the reader. If so, link them! Make this process part of your routine before publishing an article.
This brings us to external links.
Link to External Quality Sources
Many SEO beginners hesitate to link to other websites. They think that their "link juice" will flow to other websites and their authority will suffer.
The truth is that linking can actually be beneficial for you.
John Mueller of Google said in the Webmaster Hangout:
„Our point of view, external links to other websites, meaning links from your website to other people’s websites, is not a specific ranking factor. But it can add value to your content and that in turn can be relevant to us in search.“
Case Study
This great case study by Reboot Online shows that outbound links can be used by Google as a ranking signal.
In short, they created 10 websites focusing on a made-up keyword. Five of them linked to other authoritative websites, while the other 5 had no outbound links.
After a while, the websites that linked to other websites ranked higher in Google for the made-up word.
Of course, linking should meet certain conditions:
It should be done in moderation.
You should link to high-quality websites (not shady, spammy, low-quality junk).
It should be natural and relevant.
There is another benefit of outbound links: what you link to is a signal of what your page is about.
You might ask: How many outbound links are okay?
Our only advice in this regard is – use your common sense and think about the reader. An article that looks like this is definitely not a good UX:
One last thing – be careful who you link to.
Legit websites tend to link to other legitimate websites, but never to low-quality, spammy websites. This way, it’s quite easy to identify the network of spammy websites. Show Google that you belong to the „network“ of legitimate websites.
Improved Page Loading Speed
Page speed is a ranking factor, and the reason is clear. In this fast-paced world, no one is willing to wait for information from a website if there are other faster options.
What happens when you open a page and wait longer than, say, 3 seconds? You probably hit the back button and look for another result.
Google collects these signals and takes them into account in its algorithm.
To test page speed, you can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights. In addition to the speed score, you will also get tips and tricks on how to improve website speed.
Tip: PageSpeed Insights only shows you results for one page at a time. Therefore, the results only apply to that page. Select several page types (homepage, blog post, product page) and test them all.
Don’t forget that with mobile-first indexing, Google views your web „via the mobile device.“ Therefore, pay special attention to mobile page speed.
Note: It’s almost impossible to score 100 on mobile devices (we couldn’t find a page that does), so don’t worry too much about it. Just try to stay out of the red zone.
To perfectly implement all technical aspects, you might need a developer (unless you are familiar with HTML/CSS minifying or DOM elements).
On the other hand, there are things you can do even if you are not a web developer.
For most users, adhering to these key best practices is sufficient to keep website speed at a satisfactory level:
Choose suitable web hosting
Hosting significantly impacts page speed, so you should choose a reliable provider.
You don’t need to worry about milliseconds, but don’t expect fantastic performance from providers offering hosting for $0.10/month.
Things to consider:
Speed
Uptime
Server location
Optimize images
This is one of the most important things when it comes to page speed.
Image files that are too large take ages to load (which can mean a few seconds in the SEO world). Therefore, you should opt for optimization.
Also, don't forget to compress image files. You can try the TinyPNG tool (it's also available as a WordPress plugin).
Large image files are the most common problem causing slow page loading. Make sure it’s not your case.
Pro tip: Try to keep the image file size under 200kB and use lazy loading if there are too many images on the page.
Enable browser caching
What is caching?
Every time someone visits your website, all elements are loaded. These elements are stored in a temporary memory in their browser, called the cache. When they visit your website again, the website can be loaded from the cache.
Caching ensures that your website becomes much faster for returning visitors.
If you use WordPress, there are many great caching plugins you can install to take advantage of browser caching and speed up your website.
Note: There are other types of caching that can drastically reduce your page load time, such as server-side page caching.
Consider a CDN
Let’s say you have hosting in Germany, but you also have many visitors from the United States. How can you ensure that the page loads quickly for everyone, even if the server is far from their location?
The answer is: Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to host your images or even pages.
CDN providers have servers on every continent and serve your images or pages from the server closest to the visitor to make page loading as fast as possible.
Make your website mobile-friendly
As mentioned earlier, Google’s Mobile-First Index favors mobile-optimized websites in most cases.
For mobile devices, there are several options: a separate mobile website or a responsive design. Each has its pros and cons, but the best solution for SEO and analytics nowadays is the responsive version.
If you use WordPress, stay calm, as most WP themes are created responsively.
Just to be sure, test your mobile usability in a Google tool or check for any issues in the Search Console, Mobile Usability section.
If your website is not mobile-friendly, there are specific steps you can take:
Install a responsive theme – or hire a developer to work on your website’s responsiveness.
Simplify the menu – make it clear on mobile devices.
Compress image sizes – this can significantly improve page speed.
Eliminate aggressive pop-ups – self-explanatory
Optimize text – avoid long blocks of text and ensure the font is readable on mobile.
Consider AMP – AMP is a technology that enables faster content distribution on mobile devices; it is particularly useful for large blogs or news and magazines. Secure your website.
Secure your website
Is your website secure and running on HTTPS? If you are still using http:// (which you really shouldn’t be at this point), you might have a few problems.
In 2014, Google announced that HTTPS had become a (slight) ranking signal.
In other words, a secured website can help you rank better, especially if your page is compared to another page of similar quality but without an SSL certificate.
Furthermore, an unsecured website can also have negative effects on other areas:
Click-through rate
Bounce rate
Revenue
Credibility
The verdict is clear – get an SSL certificate. Nowadays, you don’t even have to pay for it. Let’s Encrypt offers a free SSL certificate that is automatically offered by all major web hosting providers.
Create short and simple URLs
How do your page URLs look in the search results? Do they help to understand the content they contain?
Here are some best practices for URLs:
The shorter, the better
Separate words with a hyphen.
Ideally, it should contain the focus keyword.
Do not use numbers or other special characters.
The URL should be short and descriptive.
Why?
Firstly, it looks better and makes more sense to users.
If we were writing a post about "10 Most Common On-Page SEO Mistakes," the ideal URL would probably be:
mangools.com/blog/on-page-seo-mistakes
On the other hand, we should avoid:
mangools.com/blog/on-page-seo → The post does not cover on-page SEO as a whole, but only the most common mistakes.
mangools.com/blog/10-on-page-seo-mirtakes → If we decided to add another mistake to the post, the number in the URL would be wrong.
Secondly, if the URL is well-structured, Google creates breadcrumbs that appear in the SERP snippets. It looks like this:
That looks much better than an ugly, long URL full of symbols and abbreviations without clear meaning, doesn’t it?
Tip: In WordPress, URL strings are automatically created from an article’s title. This is usually too long, so be sure to shorten the URL before clicking the Publish button.
Now that we have mastered technical on-page SEO, let's dive into another important part of on-page SEO – content optimization.
Content optimization
If you don’t optimize your content for Google, people probably won’t find it. On the other hand, you shouldn’t over-optimize.
Research your keywords
Although most on-page SEO guides don't cover keyword research, it's an essential step in creating new content. So it deserves some space here.
Why is keyword research important? It helps you:
find new topic ideas
find phrases that are popular, relevant, and easy to rank for.
understand what people are interested in.
The last point is particularly important when it comes to on-page optimization.
Tip: If you want to learn more, read our step-by-step guide to keyword research. You will never need another guide when it comes to keyword research 😉
Keyword research tells you what people are searching for (and how many of them). It also helps you see what exact questions they have and what phrases they use to find the answers.
Based on these insights, you can start creating content that is perfectly tailored to your visitors, and both Google and your visitors will love it.
As Google has evolved over the years, so has keyword research. Today, the focus is on these things:
High-quality content – Keyword research (and SEO in general) won’t help you if your content is bad; great content should be your number one priority.
Up-to-date keyword research – Keyword research is no longer just about finding a keyword, but also about understanding the entire topic and its terms and subtopics.
Search intent – Search volume and keyword difficulty are not the only things to focus on when looking for keywords; also pay attention to the intent behind the query.
Which brings us to the next point…
Meet the search intent
Google is getting better and better at understanding what kind of results people want to see.
It uses a machine learning algorithm called Google RankBrain, which reviews various search queries and learns to fulfill the search intent behind each query.
Traditionally, we distinguish between 4 basic categories of search intents based on user behavior:
Navigation – Queries that serve as navigation to a specific page the user has in mind.
Informational – General queries seeking information.
Transactional – Queries that lead directly to an online purchase.
Commercial – Queries that precede an online purchase.
So how do you know if your content matches the search intent behind the keyword?
In most cases, a very effective way to hit the right search intent is to Google the keyword you want to rank for and check the results.
What do you see there? Are there blog posts, shop products, reviews, forum answers, news, interviews, images, or videos?
Why is it important to know the search intent?
Suppose you own an e-shop with climbing gear and want to rank the product page of your best-selling climbing shoes with the keyword „best climbing shoes“.
There’s a problem – if you look at the search engine results page (SERP), you’ll see that there are no product pages. Instead, Google ranks reviews of climbing shoes from various affiliate websites.
Google considers the search intent behind this query to be commercial, not transactional, so pages with this type of content are ranked.
So even if you perfectly optimize your product page and create great content, you will most likely not rank for the keyword „best climbing shoes“.
Optimize for the focus keyword
SEO is not about finding a keyword and stuffing it everywhere.
Nevertheless, it is common practice to select a focus keyword and use it in the most important elements on the page, such as title tag, headings, body text, and anchor texts.
It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use other keywords and that you can’t rank for other keywords with your content…
Focus Keyword just helps you to focus your content on a specific topic.
Wenn es um Keyword-Optimierung geht, gibt es eine einfache Regel: Erzwingen Sie es nicht.
If your focus keyword is „best content marketing strategy for small businesses,“ it would be crazy to use it in all the on-page elements mentioned here.
The same applies to exact match keywords. Google understands that „running shoes cheap,“ „cheap running shoes,“ and „cheap shoes for running“ mean the same thing. So relax and don’t keep filling your page with the same phrase just because it’s your focus keyword.
Title Tag and Meta Description
It is recommended to use the focus keyword in the title tag of your page.
Think about your potential visitors. If they search for „homemade ice cream,“ they probably expect the keyword to appear in the website’s title.
The same applies to the meta description. Just remember that Google may replace your meta description with random text from your page if it deems it more suitable for the user.
Note: Both elements strongly influence your click-through rate, so make sure they look irresistible. (More on this in the next chapter)
URL
Although keywords in the URL most likely do not affect your ranking, it is a good step that can improve the overall UX and CTR.
As we mentioned before, URLs should be simple and informative.
There’s another important reason to include the focus keyword in the URL: If someone links with the naked URL, the keyword is naturally part of the anchor text:
Headings and Subheadings
For the H1 heading, you can use the same words as in the title tag (it’s actually a common practice), although you are not as restricted in length here.
It is good to strategically use other targeted keywords, synonyms, and related phrases in other headings (H2, H3,…) as well, but it is perfectly fine if you do not.
Body Text
The focus keyword should appear in the body text. (Duh!)
Just one important piece of advice: Forget about keyword density and write as naturally as possible. (more on this later…)
Image File Name and Alt Texts
Google Images accounts for up to 23% of the search engine market share (more than YouTube, Bing, Yahoo, Facebook, and Amazon combined). This means enormous traffic potential!
That is why you need to add alt text to every informative image on your website.
Search engines cannot (at least not perfectly) read the content of the image, but they can read the alt text that describes the content of the image.
If you use WordPress, you can add alt text to each image directly in the media gallery:
Pro Tip: To find out how much traffic you get from image search, change the „Search type“ in the performance overview of the Search Console.
You will see which keywords brought you the most clicks in Google Images.
How to write great alt text?
Imagine your friend needs to find your car in a large, crowded parking lot, and you’re talking to them on the phone.
It would be hard for them if you used words like „a white car“ or „a BMW.“ But if you say „white BMW M3 with a yellow sticker on the rear window,“ your friend knows exactly which car you’re talking about.
Be specific and descriptive.
Anchor Texts
Do you remember what we said earlier about internal links? That they help a lot with website navigation?
There's another aspect that needs to be mentioned – anchor texts.
Anchor text is the clickable text part of the link. It helps both Google and users understand what the linked website is about.
So, if you link to other pages on your website with the right keywords, it can be a signal for Google to rank them higher for those keywords.
Here are some best practices when it comes to internal anchor texts:
Try to avoid anchor texts like „this post“ or „click here“ if possible. Try to describe the linked page more accurately.
Do not use the same anchor text over and over again. Although you are a bit more lenient with internal links, it is good to have some variety in the anchor texts.
Some important notes…..
Let’s go back to what we discussed at the beginning of this chapter: SEO is not about finding a keyword and stuffing it everywhere.
Although Focus Keyword is a great tool to help you follow keyword optimization best practices, it can be a double-edged sword.
If you over-optimize your page, it can hurt your rankings.
Here are some tips to keep in mind:
Use common sense: If your focus keyword is „best content marketing strategy for small businesses“, it would be crazy to use it in all the on-page elements mentioned above.
Be natural: Google understands that „running shoes cheap“, „cheap running shoes“ and „cheap running shoes“ mean the same thing, so relax and don’t keep stuffing your page with the same phrase just because it’s your focus keyword.
Don’t overthink numbers: If you ask how often you should use the keyword, you are asking the wrong question. There is no concrete answer. When it comes to keyword optimization, there is a simple rule: Don’t force it.
If you create comprehensive, well-written content, you can even rank for phrases you haven’t even used in the text.
Look at the example below. If you search for „strongly brewed coffee“, none of the results contain the exact wording, but the content fulfills the search query.
Which brings us to the next point…..
Writing quality and readable content
No matter how well optimized your website is, you will not rank if your content does not meet quality criteria.
This is something you should always keep in mind: there is no SEO without high-quality content.
John Mueller of Google summed it up pretty well:
We have already mentioned that your content must have the right search intent and answer users‘ questions. Now it’s time for two more important on-page factors:
Content length
Content readability
Content length
Yes, well, "the longer your content, the better your rankings". A premise you've probably stumbled upon a few times.
There’s a reason: there are many studies suggesting a correlation between content length and ranking. The average length of a post ranking #1 is about 2000 words.
The truth is, it's not the word count that brings high quality.
Instead of word count, you should focus on providing the best answer.
Let’s say you have a fitness blog and your focus keyword for a new post is „chest workout“.
There’s a chance that someone searching for such a broad term expects a broad answer. With an 800-word post called „5 tips to make your chest bigger“, you probably won’t reach number one. (In fact, the first Google result for this keyword has 2,700 words.)
On the other hand, a product page in an online shop does not require thousands of words. The user is looking for the most important information about the product in a simple, scannable form.
Cover the topic as well as possible and think about the user. If you do that, the word count is fine.
Readability
Text readability is one of the most important factors influencing the overall UX of your website. Most internet users do not read the text on a page word for word. They only scan for the most important information.
Think about this when you write content for your website.
Let's take a look at the basic things that affect page readability.
Page architecture
Structure the page logically and use appropriate headings.
Remember that H1-H6 are semantic tags. They help search engines understand the hierarchy of content. They should not be used for styling purposes.
Here is an example of a correct heading architecture:
Typography
First, you should choose a suitable font.
Don’t experiment with your main font and stick to Open Sans, Montserrat, Lato, Roboto or similar commonly used fonts.
Which font is more readable?
Next, the font size. You should not use less than 16 pixels. (If you want to find out why, here's the reason).
There are too many websites that use a terrible 12-pixel font size and force their visitors to zoom in or (more likely) click the back button.
Is this text easy for you to read without leaning into the screen? I don’t think so.
No walls of text
Try to avoid long, boring paragraphs. Enrich the text with different formatting styles and different types of content to make it more entertaining.
Paragraph breaks
bold and italic
bullet points
images/graphics/infographics
embed videos
quotes
info boxes
All these elements prevent visitors from leaving the website too early and encourage them to continue reading your page.
How can you improve the overall UX of a page?
Use a clean, unobtrusive design.
Avoid aggressive advertising
make the page easy to navigate
Grammar and style
Do not underestimate the power of grammar and style.
If you are not 100% confident in this area, use online tools that can help you check grammar and correct the most basic stylistic errors.
One of the most popular tools on the market is Grammarly (we use it too). The free version corrects all grammar, spelling and punctuation errors. This is what it looks like:
A great free online tool for checking style and readability is Hemingway Editor:
It highlights all sentences that are too long, as well as the use of passive voice, adverbs, and phrases with simpler alternatives.
You can also try tools like Slick Write or Paper Rater.
CTR optimization
Have you covered the technical and content aspects? Great. But it doesn’t end here. Let’s see how to increase CTR through organic search.
CTR optimization
CTR or Click-Through Rate is a ratio of users who click on a snippet displayed in the SERP to the total number of users who see the link.
The better your pages look in search engines, the higher the possibility of generating high-quality organic traffic with the potential for conversions.
Let’s go through a few tips to make your snippets look excellent and increase CTR potential. But first, you should check how it looks now.
Use the Google operator: site:yourdomain.xy to see all your indexed pages or get the data from a specific URL with our free SERP simulator tool.
Get your URL to see your current SERP snippet in the right window.
You can customize the title tag and meta description in the left pane.
Insert your focus keyword to compare your snippet with other pages (and get inspired by them).
Now let's look at some tips for improving CTR.
Writing an irresistible title
The first thing that plays a big role is the length of the title. If it’s too long, Google will cut it off.
Take a look at these two SERP snippets that appear for the search „best camping in Wisconsin“:
The first one is well-structured and has an optimal length, while the second one is cut off and doesn’t even contain the keyword „Wisconsin“.
Which one would you rather click on?
The title tag should be less than 600 pixels long to display fully.
Here are some ways to improve the CTR of your title tag:
Emotional words – people respond to emotions (whether positive or negative), if possible, use words like "fantastic", "unexpected", "strange",… but be careful, as people may be tired of some overused power words, as this study suggests.
Questions – use words like Why, What, Who, When, How – people are looking for answers, show them that you are asking the same question.
Brackets – break the classic pattern with symbols like [brackets].
Numbers – numbers in titles usually attract more attention.
Call to action – action words improve CTR
Top 11 mistakes when creating title tags
Improve your meta description
Should you pay attention to meta descriptions?
Absolutely yes.
Meta descriptions can increase the click-through rate. It has been proven that pages with meta descriptions receive 5.8% more clicks than those without a description.
If you don’t write your own meta description, Google can extract text from your page and use it as a meta description. And of course, this will most likely not look as good as a well-optimized, manually written description. This can also be the case if your meta description is not relevant to the search term.
Write a unique description for all your main page, homepage, posts, and categories.
Tip: When it comes to product pages, you will most likely get by with automatically generated descriptions. It would be overkill to write unique descriptions for hundreds of products.
What about the length?
The meta description is trimmed to ~960 pixels on desktop and ~680 pixels on mobile. Use our SERP snippet tool to fit into these dimensions.
Use structured data where appropriate
You have certainly seen structured data in the search results. It is a format to mark up information about the web page so that search engines can understand it better. In SERPs, structured data visually improves usability and click-through rate.
Look at this snippet. Isn't it absolutely clickable?
There are dozens of different rich snippets that can be displayed in Google. Some of them are added by Google and you cannot influence them. But there are many that can be achieved by using structured data.
You can mark up the product page, book, event, article, recipe, breadcrumbs, images, videos, star rating, carousel (especially for mobile results), and much more.
Although not every page is suitable for using structured data, you should definitely implement it if your website contains some of the information mentioned above.
Learn more about how to implement structured data.
Don't forget the favicon.
Since Google started showing favicons in mobile SERPs, they have become an element that can influence CTR.
It’s hard to estimate the impact of favicons, but the least you can do is have one. Not to mention that favicon helps navigate between multiple tabs in a browser on desktop devices.
Monitoring and
Analytics
It is important to monitor your SEO results long-term. In this chapter, we will show the most basic ways to do this.
Monitor your results
To further improve your website’s on-page optimization, you should monitor the results.
Track keyword rankings
One of the greatest ways to see the impact of your on-page SEO activities is to track rankings for key keywords.
You can check your average positions in Google Search Console, but a rank tracking tool (like SERPWatcher) has some additional advantages:
You only track the keywords you are interested in, not hundreds of unimportant long-tail keywords.
it allows you to see the current rankings for a specific location.
It provides further valuable insights such as overall progress, top rankings/outrankings, etc.
You can set up alerts and detect sudden drops in rankings.
When you make specific changes to on-page SEO, make a note in the tracking to see if it affects the rankings.
In the following example, we changed the title of a post, so we made a note in the tracking to see if there would be a change in the rankings:
Analyze your traffic
One of the most common ways to measure the impact of your on-page optimization (and your traffic and audience in general) is to use Google Analytics.
Tip: New to Google Analytics? Check out our Google Analytics basics in the SEOpedia.
By focusing on the right metrics, you can see how readers react to your content.
You can compare how much time visitors spent on each page before and after optimization, you will see which internal links they clicked on, and how they behaved on your website in general. All this data will be a great help for your further efforts in page optimization.
Organic traffic
Getting more organic traffic is one of the main goals of SEO. So tracking traffic coming from search engines is something you should do all the time to see the overall progress of your SEO activities.
To see your best-performing pages, go to Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages and select the Organic Traffic segment.
You can create an annotation every time you make a significant change to on-page SEO:
Bounce rate
This metric indicates the percentage of users who leave the page without engaging with your page in any way.
The bounce rate can vary from page to page and is not always a bad sign.
A high bounce rate for an article does not have to be a bad thing – it can mean that the visitor was satisfied with your content and does not need to browse further. On the other hand, engagement with a landing page of an online shop is what you want to achieve, so a high bounce rate is almost always a bad thing.
Here is an overview of benchmark bounce rates by website types from ConversionXL.
To analyze the data, you can compare:
the bounce rate of different pages (to make the analysis relevant, compare similar page types (blog posts, product pages, etc.).
the bounce rate of a page before and after optimization
Tip: One of the advanced ways to analyze website user behavior is to use a heatmap tool. It allows you to see exactly where visitors click, how they interact with the page, whether they are confused by certain elements, etc.
Pages per session
This metric tells you how effective the website’s content is at keeping visitors on your website. It shows the average number of pages your users visited in a session.
In general, the higher it is, the better. You can increase the average pages per session by using relevant internal links (e.g., to related posts/products), compelling copy that engages the reader, and overall UX.
There can be many reasons for poor results. For example, the page loads too slowly, it does not match the search intent, or there are no relevant links that would send the reader to another page.
You can compare the results between different pages and look for reasons why some pages perform worse than others.
And of course, don’t forget the overall pages/session benchmarks – they range between 1.8 and 4.7, with an average of 3.0 according to this study.
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