Having a business website and digital presence is necessary in today’s world to keep up with competitors; effective SEO can give you the edge you need to make your content stand out among them. The ongoing improvements you make on your website are known as “on-page SEO”. Here are eight “must haves” when it comes to achieving and maintaining rankings and the never-ending refinement of your business website.
If you want search engines and website visitors to take notice and stay interested, you need relevant content for them to consume. Start with the basic, necessary information. An About Us page explaining the core products or services of the business is good, but to more effectively turn website visitors into clients you also need to tell them about you.
People are more likely to connect with people – not an entity. This is especially true for attorneys, chiropractors, and other professionals. If you provide a very personal service, then having a personal About Us page is crucial for getting prospects to emotionally connect with (and actually contact) you.
The most important consideration of the year for on-site SEO is whether or not your website is mobile-friendly. If it’s not, all your other on page SEO efforts go to waste when searches are conducted from a mobile device.
Search engines do not want to inconvenience users, so if you cannot give them the information they are seeking in an easy-to-read format, they won’t recommend your website for search queries made from a mobile device. Consumers are increasingly using their mobile devices to conduct pre-purchase research and other types of queries, so if you don’t hop on board soon, it might be too late.
Make sure you have a separate page for each service you wish to market. Each page should be approximately 300 words long – and they should not sound like a sales pitch. Use these pages to convey a message of competency, trust, experience and a solution to their need(s).
Furthermore, these pages should link to other content that goes into more detail about your services or goods. Blogs are great for this. Not only do they give you the opportunity to keep adding more relevant content, they give you search engine-friendly internal links.
Contact information (as well as areas served, if applicable) should be easily visible on each page. Convenient links to the very important Contact Form are also a good idea. Or better yet – have a contact form on nearly every page.
Every page needs a unique title tag that describes the page in no more than 60 characters. Include the keyword phrase for that page, as well as cities for local on-page SEO.
Reflecting the title tag and page content, create a meta description (also containing the keyword phrase) that will show up in search engine results. People should want to click over to your site when they read this short (156 characters ) burst of text, so be inspiring and energetic in your word choice.
Though great written content is necessary, people who visit your site will not be impressed if words are all they see. Do not be boring. Too much text is unappealing and overwhelming.
Pictures do more than create an attractive appearance; they are also important for on-page SEO. Each image should have a file name that is a search phrase, and an equally appropriate alt tag with the keyword phrase and cities included – just as you did with the page title tags.
Videos are also a great option. Geo-tagging for local SEO is important for both videos and photos.
The Hummingbird algorithm is designed to know the intent of the question a searcher asks. Users on mobile devices are not apt to type in keywords. They talk into their smart devices like they are talking to a person. Thus, they ask questions and speak conversationally. This is where Q&A pages or blog posts can work wonders for SEO. Questions are important but also think about phrases people may typically use in conversation concerning your business type.
If you want prospects to know your business exists and have faith that you can provide what they need, then you cannot afford to let SEO be an afterthought. Use these pointers as a checklist to continually reevaluate the quality of your on-page SEO efforts and rise up in the rankings.
