When beginning to work on digital marketing for your business, you’ll want to make sure your strategy is as focused as possible. It’s important to cast a wide net to improve your website’s traffic from as many sources as possible, but it’s just as valuable to make sure you have a cohesive strategy that directs people to a single page or attracts visitors in a closer way. On-page SEO services are an excellent thing to look into if you need assistance with digital marketing.
They will help you build an SEO plan for your website that can help you attract as many people through online searches as possible, leading them directly to your website and your business.
If you wish to work with an on-page SEO service, these are just a few bits of knowledge that can help you be sure that a certain agency is right for you, and what exactly goes into improving your on-page SEO.
On-page SEO vs. Off-page SEO
If you’ve never heard these terms before, you should probably first learn what these two different types of search engine optimization are. Each SEO strategy is meant to use keywords and phrases that will be picked up by search engines in order to help them rank you higher when users search those certain terms. On-page and off-page SEO are determined by where each target keyword is.
Off-page SEO involves any type of SEO that doesn’t appear directly on your website, such as through backlinks, guest posts on other websites, social media posts and branded content on other sites. These may have links to your site, but they usually don’t actively improve your own website’s traffic in a direct way. On-page SEO does the opposite, as it involves optimizing the text in your website to help search engines lead users to you directly.
Both are certainly important, but on-page SEO is often more important for businesses thanks to how easy it is to control. Working with other platforms and companies can attract a wider audience, but it’s not as reliable of a way to attract new visitors through off-page SEO since they would need to do more searching. As a result, specific on-page SEO services can sometimes be far more beneficial for a business.
How To Improve On-page SEO
There’s a lot that an on-page SEO service can do for you, as optimizing your site in this way can have a lot of finer details that other types of digital marketing services and SEO agencies might not work as much with. Many of the strategies have quite similar goals, but there are far more details with on-page SEO than the best SEO services will usually provide.
These are just a few of the things they’re likely to modify on your site to improve its SEO. There are many other things they may do, and many will also help you with other digital marketing efforts, but these are the primary ways they’ll improve your SEO on a fundamental level.
Page Content
The best place for any target keyword is directly in the text of your webpage, which can include anything from descriptions on the landing pages to plan details in your About Us pages. It can often be great to attract visitors right to your homepage to explore your site themselves, so one of the first steps of any on-page SEO strategy will involve optimizing the first pieces of content they’ll encounter.
This is hardly the only way to accomplish page optimization, though, as you can also add additional text content through blog pages that feature more niche keywords that might not fit on your landing pages, or on many standard product and service descriptions. By having a full blog section, you simply have more opportunities to place keywords through your site in a relatively organic and natural way.
Headings (H1, H2, H3s)
On-page SEO also takes great importance in the headings on your page. These pieces of text often get much more priority among the algorithms of search engines since many users will use headings as flags for the information and services they’re looking for, so optimizing headings can often require even more attention and effort than the body text throughout the rest of your website.
Headings are also incredibly important for the readability of your pages, as it can make it far faster for visitors to understand your services and navigate your website. Regardless of how they find your website, visitors may be surfing on a mobile device where small text is harder to read and easy to ignore, while others might just be looking for incredibly specific services, and clear headings can help them find information faster and easier.
Image Descriptions & Alt Text
One of the more hidden ways that on-page SEO can be improved is in the metadata of certain pieces of information, specifically when it comes to pictures. Sometimes this can be done in a similar way to content body text, where images are given captions that help explain what’s happening in the images to help search engines suggest it in image searches, but not all the text in a description has to be visible.
Most sites will also include alt text on an image, essentially a hidden description that is primarily used for accessibility purposes. This can be an excellent way to put new keywords into a page on an image, something that will inherently lack visible text that search engines can pick up, and many great on-page SEO services will make sure what that alt-text looks like for every image on your website.
URL Strings
One extremely light area of on-page SEO also includes the actual URLs of your web pages. These usually don’t involve as much creativity or unique traits, but it can often lead to a wider net if alternate titles to pages or unique keywords that fit the page are placed inside the URL of a specific page.
That said, it can be just as effective for the URL strings of a web page to include the same words as the headings and titles of the pages themselves. This can help support the rest of the text instead of attempting to attract newer viewers, providing a different type of improvement in a site’s on-page SEO.
Internal Links
Similar to headings, improving any internal links on your website can be a great way to both improve the SEO of your website as well as make it easier to navigate. These are essentially hyperlinks throughout a web page that lead to other links within your website, keeping them looking at other content that’s similar to the text they’re reading and organically preventing them from leaving your webpage easily.
Since these internal links can sometimes have their own metadata to be modified, they also can contribute to your SEO even further. They can’t be too numerous, and they have to be balanced carefully with external links to websites that offer their own services, but they’re a great thing to include throughout a website to help keep new visitors in a sort of reading loop.
On-page SEO Services
The types of SEO text listed above might be the main ways to improve your on-page SEO, but this is slightly different from what on-page SEO services will offer to do for you. Improving your SEO is much more complex than just doing keyword research or adding relevant keywords across your website, and the best on-page SEO services will usually have a more complicated strategy to ensure page optimization.
These are just a few of the things they’ll usually do to help improve your on-page SEO in a full and effective way. They may also offer many things outside of on-page SEO services if they offer other digital marketing services, but these are the specific tasks they’ll spend their most time on if their focus is specifically on your on-page SEO.
Content Optimization
Unsurprisingly, one of the first things that an on-page SEO service will do is begin optimizing and editing the general content of your site. This will primarily affect the landing pages and headings throughout the content that’s already there, as this is one of the easiest things to control and modify for guaranteed SEO success.
At the same time, they likely will want to add more content in the form of blog pieces and more detailed service descriptions, in order to ensure more places for keywords are possible. They’ll do a lot within the constraints of your website in its early forms, but expanding it is one of the easiest ways to ensure there’s enough content to optimize for greater success.
Metadata Optimization
The other form of content that an on-page SEO service will work on is the metadata, which is essentially the more invisible information mentioned earlier when discussing alt text and URL strings. There are all kinds of information pieces like this where certain keywords can be placed, and there are even some spaces within the coding of a website where more can be placed.
That said, this area has to involve much more caution, as having too many keywords on a page will cause search engines to treat the site as if it’s trying to trick people into accessing it. On-page SEO is not just about adding keywords, but ensuring they’re spread in as many places as possible without appearing too dense. Try to be honest when you’re doing this activity. Getting rankings for a keyword like “Justin Beiber tickets” might get you lots of traffic, but it won’t get you more sales. Optimize for the products and services you actually offer – it’s our opinion that Google eventually rewards honesty and integrity above all else – even though there might be a quicker way to get rankings.
Link Structuring
One of the most important parts of the internal links mentioned earlier is that there’s a clear plan on where these links go. Some businesses will want every internal link to go straight toward products or contact information pages, but that’s hardly the only way that internal links can be structured.
On-page SEO services will often create plans for where links will lead, in order to help visitors access as many different pages as possible. They may even create link maps to help illustrate how visitors can access each page, making visitors able to access any page solely through the body of the text.
Mobile Optimization
When working with any SEO agency or service, something that will often come up will include the overall design of your website. This will make it easier for images and headings to be placed around the page for keyword distribution, but there’s increasing importance on also ensuring your website is friendly to those visiting through mobile devices.
Many consumers looking for goods and services now use their phones for their online searches, and since most of a website’s construction is done through full computers and laptops, mobile interfaces can often be forgotten by business owners. No matter how impressive your SEO rating is, visitors won’t spend much time on your site if it’s difficult to navigate through their chosen device.
Analytics Tracking
Besides working to build your website in a way that’s built toward on-page SEO, something more important that comes with an SEO service or an SEO specialist comes with how they track success. They often will use certain tools available through your website provider or host, as well as their own software or programs, in order to gauge whether their optimization is succeeding.
If it’s unsuccessful, they’ll likely contact you and work on a new plan. However, they still can find new ways to improve your on-page SEO further by capitalizing on what appears to be working. Once again, improving SEO is about more than just putting in keywords – it’s about using a cohesive strategy to get the most out of SEO keywords without sacrificing the quality of your website.
Do You Need an On-page SEO Service?
If you feel that your business’s website is in need of an SEO upgrade, you’ll be extremely satisfied with an on-page SEO service. If the SEO company presents itself in this way, it often means it has excellent specialized experience in this field and is sure to give you a high degree of quality and efficiency when it comes to upgrading your on-page SEO.
However, it should be mentioned that on-page SEO is still only one type of SEO, and only one form of digital marketing as well. Companies like Canopy Media will offer all kinds of other services to help improve your online presence, and while on-page SEO is an excellent method of raising your site’s traffic, it certainly doesn’t have to be the only way.