Written by: Ryan Walsh

The number of people buying goods and services every second of the day is mind-blowing.

The gatekeepers to getting your business onto page one are the search engine giants. Of course, you could pay for Google AdWords, which is a great way of almost instantly getting your business onto page one of Google.

Yet, for the purposes of this article, we are concentrating on discussing organic search engine optimisation (SEO). We are going to talk about one of the main components of SEO, and that is how to improve your on-page SEO.

We will then move on to discuss whether improving a business’s on-page SEO alone is possible and whether this is enough to get a business onto page one of Google.

 

 

What exactly is on-page SEO?

So, on-page SEO is simply the work that an SEO agency does to optimise individual pages and blog posts. Now there are many different ways to do this; for example, you could improve the following:

– Page titles
– Alt text
– Meta title and meta description
– Anchor text
– The use of internal links
– Content marketing
– Evergreen content marketing
– Page Speed
– And much more

 

SEO is complex, so hire an expert

Businesses might be wondering whether they can work on improving a business’s search engine optimisation themselves.
Well, it’s a bit like somebody who wants to watch a YouTube video and then carry out a car repair themselves.

It’s possible, but do you have the time and energy to do this?

Many businesses don’t, and your leading global brands have in-house teams and external SEO agencies. Businesses, such as PLC companies, often heavily invest in SEO teams because the industry could lose a competitive advantage without such expertise, work, and drive.

So, can you do SEO yourself, sure- but the question is, do you want to?

Why Is On-Page SEO Important?

Optimise your website for Google.

So, when new clients in Cardiff approach us to help improve their business’s search engine optimisation, they often want us to concentrate on optimising the company website for Google.

This stands to reason, as we all know Google is the most popular search engine by a country mile, and it’s been said that 28.5% of people will click on the link at the top.

So, you can see why it’s so fiercely competitive for businesses to get themselves into the top position. Then you have the second organic link, and it’s said that 15.7% of shoppers will click that link, and then this reduces to 11% for the third link—so as you can see, this is why it’s so competitive.

The good SEO agencies, in any major city, are always in super strong demand. We are an established business based in Cardiff and one of the best, most knowledgeable SEO agencies in this area.

So what are some of the key elements of on-page SEO?

Content is king

Out of all the on-page SEO signals, content marketing is at the top of the tree and king.

The reason is that it’s like the bricks in a wall: It’s critical; without it, nothing else can be built.

Yet there’s content marketing and then there’s content marketing.
Which you might be thinking, well what do we mean by that?

Well, to be clear, there content marketing that really and truly cuts the mustard- that can do the following:

– Have a low bounce rate
– High time on site, also referred to as dwell time
– Can attract quality links

Then there’s your low-quality content marketing, which is poorly written and doesn’t offer helpful and useful advice. This can result in the business getting a penalty, such as an algorithmic penalty, which can massively set back your company’s search engine optimisation.

So how do you go about improving a businesses on-page SEO?

Title Tag and Meta Tag Optimisation

So, a well-written meta title and description is not a ranking factor, yet they can massively improve your company’s CTR.
So, what do we mean by this?

Well, let’s say you’re shopping for an item, say a new blender for your kitchen. Then, one meta description in Google’s results stands out because it offers next-day delivery.

So, writing a really good meta title and meta description that catches the eye of a shopper can improve the CTR.

For those who do not know, CTR simply stands for click-through rate, and obviously, you will want as many visitors as possible to your website. Just as a restaurant or, let’s say, a retail business on the high street wants as many shoppers through the door as they can get.

So, a well-written meta title and meta description are important if your business wants to improve the CTR of that page.

Now, if you want to push the boat out a bit further, you can work with your SEO company to add structured language, such as Schema markup, to that page. Googlebot can pick up on this, and it may use that schema to create a featured snippet. Now, as any good SEO agency worth their salt will tell you, a featured snippet can increase the CTR substantially because it helps your company or business listing stand out in the SERPs.

 

URL’s

So, don’t change the URL structure or names if you have had your website for a while.

That’s because you could sever backlinks and lose all of the SEO benefits you have accrued to that URL.

We are talking about a brand-new website that is currently being created.

Then, you can create URL extensions that describe what that page is about. This gives Googlebot a much clearer understanding of what products or services are being sold on that page.

So, for example, if you are a family lawyer and the page we are talking about promotes your company’s collaborative law, add the URL extension “/Collaborative-law” to the main domain name.

This will then be indexed by Googlebot. You can speed up how fast Googlebot indexes that page by submitting the link via Google Search Console. It will be indexed because you have written keywords that relate to the products or services being sold on that page in the URL extension. You will be helping to improve the on-page SEO, but make sure that you do this in a white-hat way.

 

Internal Linking

Make sure that you use internal links

So, internal links used correctly on your company website, can offer many SEO advantages.

They can be used to send link juice to different pages and to improve dwell time.

For example, businesses often write hundreds of different blog posts over time. Often, the topics the company is talking about overlap, so you could add an internal link to one blog post to another. This can help to improve dwell time, reduce bounce rate, and keep the shopper on the website for longer so they are looking at more products or services that your business offers.

Now, this is good for your company’s SEO because the dwell time is increasing, and the bounce rate is lowering. The Google algorithm will pick up on this and rank your business higher the more you can keep shoppers engaged. You can monitor these metrics using Google Analytics.

We would recommend that, using Google Analytics, you monitor the following SEO metrics:

– Dwell time
– Bounce rate
– Number of pages visited

 

Alt text

So, make sure that you also add alt text to all the pictures that you add to your company website.
For those who don’t know what alt text means, it’s simply a short description of what that picture is about.

So, if it’s a headshot of Bob Jones from accounts, well, label it as such. Someone might be running a Google search to find where Bob now works and which accountancy practice.

Therefore, as part of the on-page SEO, if you have Bob’s name added to the alt text, you have a link to his LinkedIn account, plus his name in the main body of the text, the title, and the meta description. This makes it much easier to find Bob.

You also need to consider technical SEO

So okay, its technical SEO is very different from on-page SEO, that’s for sure, yet they work hand in glove.
What we mean by this is that there’s no point in writing and working hard on creating a truly mammoth blog post—which we call “evergreen content marketing”—if the page is so slow to load that the bounce is going to be through the roof.

Therefore, All that effort exerted into creating that evergreen content marketing would be wasted.
So, you do have to consider technical SEO and off-page SEO.

Off-page SEO involves building backlinks and citations and optimising your business’s Google Business page. But we will save describing that work for another blog post.
But, we thought we would quickly explain how you can improve your company’s technical SEO.

 

Site speed

These days, people don’t like to wait too long for anything, whether that’s in a queue, in traffic, or waiting for a parcel to arrive.
Therefore your website needs to be fast, road runner fast.

You should use GT Metrix to see how fast your website loads. And work with a web developer to improve the page speed, which can help reduce the bounce rate. Perhaps your web designer has added hi-res photos of products you sell to the page; maybe these could be edited so that the whole page is faster, which will be better for the shopper and, therefore, U.X.

Mobile design

So, a top tip from us would be to hire a top web designer to design a perfect mobile version of your company website.
The reason is that around 59.7% of shoppers are thought to now be buying items off their mobile phones. So, if the mobile version of your website does not offer a good U.X, then this could mean that you will have a high bounce rate.

Do add an XML sitemap

You should most definitely ask your web design company to add an XML site map to your company website. This should provide an up-to-date list of pages on your website so that Googlebot can work through them and index them.

Therefore, it acts a bit like a GPS system, but for Googlebot, allowing Googlebot to crawl and index throughout your website and, therefore, index and notice changes you have made to a page.

 

Run a business in Cardiff?

Need help to improve your SEO?

Why not call us,

We work with your business to improve your SEO.

How can a business improve its on-page SEO?

We offer our top tips for improving a business’s on-page SEO and explain whether improving it alone is enough to get the company onto page one of Google.