On page SEO checklist

If a website exists but no one visits it, does it exist at all?

You don’t want your site to be the tree falling in the forest that nobody hears. To succeed as a business you need to attract as many visitors as possible, and you need those visitors to be as relevant as possible. On-page search engine optimisation (SEO) is one of the most effective ways to tick both of these boxes.

But SEO can be an intimidating prospect, full of strategies and terms that will be unfamiliar to the average business owner. This guide is designed to ease this confusion, explaining what you need to know about On-Page SEO in a language that you’ll understand.

Read on to find out what On-Page SEO is, why it’s important, and what it’s made of. To finish we’ll offer up a complete On-Page SEO checklist that you can use to ensure your site is doing all that it can to rank higher on the search engine results page (SERP).

What is On-Page SEO?

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of making your website as Google-friendly as possible, in order to rank as high as possible on the Google results page for relevant keywords. SEO strategies can be divided into three main categories:

1. On-Page SEO: SEO strategies that can be employed on your website and are under your direct control.
2. Off-Page SEO: SEO strategies that are employed beyond your site – things like link-building, guest blogging and social media marketing.
3. Technical SEO: Any SEO strategies that lay beyond the two categories listed above. Technical SEO is complicated, so must be tackled by SEO professionals.

In this guide we’ll be focusing on On-Page SEO, which is the most accessible and generally the most impactful group of SEO strategies at a business’s disposal. The reason it’s called ‘On-Page’ SEO is because the results of these strategies can be seen and felt by a visitor right there on the page, whereas your Off-Page and Technical SEO efforts often won’t often be seen by website visitors or affect them.

Why is On-Page SEO important?

In New Zealand Google holds a search engine market share of around 95% (as of mid-2023). With 68% of internet sessions beginning with a search, Google is in many ways the gatekeeper of the internet – the (hopefully benevolent) God that all websites must please if they are to succeed.

This is the premise of search engine optimisation: making your website Google-friendly. But what exactly does ‘Google friendly’ mean?

For starters, Google wants your website to be easy to navigate for its bots or crawlers – the things that are sent out to index everything on the internet. Your website needs to be built in a way that makes it simple for these bots to collect and organise all the relevant information, and to rank your website accurately when a user enters a search query.

Secondly, and more importantly, Google wants your website to provide value to the humans who visit. It wants it to be built well, to work well, and to offer up the sort of high-quality information that visitors will be looking for.

In short, On-Page SEO is a group of techniques, tactics and strategies that improve the experience your site offers to both types of visitor: humans and search engines. As a reward for this work, Google will push your website up the search engine rankings when a user types in a relevant search term.

When you’re armed with a site that offers an optimised on-page experience, you can expect more of these visitors to convert.

The 10 most important elements for On-Page SEO

Now that we know the basic whats and whys of On-Page SEO, it’s time to start digging into the detail. On-Page SEO is a collection of strategies, but in order to implement those strategies we’ll first need to understand the elements that they use.

On-Page SEO elements can be grouped into three categories: content, HTML and architecture. Let’s take a closer look at the 10 most important on-page elements, grouped into these three categories.

1. Keywords

The fuel that drives your search engine optimisation efforts, keywords are the most important element of any SEO strategy.

The aim of any website owner should be to attract as many visitors as possible. But these can’t just be any visitors – they need to be the right type. It is more about quality than it is about quantity, as 10 visitors who are interested in what you sell are far more valuable than 1000 uninterested visitors.

Keywords offer a way to target that right type of visitor. The idea is that you insert the most common search terms used by your target audience into the text that populates your website. When a user types these words into Google, the search engine will recognise that your site mentions those words, and will offer you up as an answer to the user’s query.

Keyword research is critical to understand how your target audience searches for the products and services that your company offers, as your customers will often use different words to the ones you use, or ask questions that you haven’t ever thought of answering.

2. Quality content

All content should be created with a purpose. A helpful technique is to ensure that every piece of new content you write or create helps to drive people toward a sale, by aligning with a stage in the buyer journey:

• Awareness: Homepage, About Us page, blog posts and videos that introduce key products and services.
• Consideration: Buying guides, comparison charts, case studies and customer testimonials.
• Transaction: Product and pricing pages, demo videos, Contact page, online checkout pages.

The keywords that we mentioned above are inserted into your content. It is important that this is done naturally, as Google is able to catch and punish any website looking to game the system through ‘keyword stuffing’.

But quality content is far more than a simple vehicle for keywords. It must be relevant and engaging to your target audience. It should recognise customer problems and frame your products and services as solutions. It should be of high enough quality that readers will share it and other websites will link to it.

3. Title tags

The title tag, or page title, is a succinct description of the information contained on a particular web page. It is there to tell both Google and visitors what they can expect to find on the page.

A good title tag:

• Features the most important keyword for that page, which will have been identified through keyword research. This keyword needs to be included as naturally as possible.
• Is never keyword stuffed. Google is smart enough to know when a website is trying to squeeze in more keywords than it should, so one instance of the main keyword is enough. If more keywords fit in organically, then you can go ahead and include them.
• Is less than 60 characters long. The title tag is featured on the SERP, and Google only grants 600 pixels of room to each title, which roughly equates to 60 characters.
• Includes your business name or brand, e.g. the “Traction Marketing” in the title tag of this page.

4. Meta descriptions

On the SERP, the title tag will be displayed above the meta description – a short sentence or two that gives a little more detail about the information that the searcher will find on your page. While Google says that the meta description isn’t an official ranking factor – i.e. it won’t help you rank higher in the search results – it does help you to attract more visitors by enticing them to click on your result.

A good meta description:

• Explains what the audience will find on the web page in a simple, succinct and enticing way – aim for one or two sentences.
• Is less than 160 characters long, in order for the entire meta description to be displayed on the SERP (rather than ending abruptly with a […])
• Includes the main keyword or keyphrase for the web page.

5. Body tags

Also known as headers, body tags are the on-page equivalent of title tags. The page that you’re on right now, for example, features four levels of body tags:

• H1: The title of the guide (On-Page SEO Checklist [2023 Updated])
• H2: A subheading within the guide (e.g. The 10 most important elements for On-Page SEO)
• H3: A subheading within a H2 section (e.g. HTML elements)
• H4: A subheading within a H3 section (e.g. Body tags)

Body tags are designed to make a piece of content easier to read and navigate for your website visitors. They also help Google to understand how different pieces of information relate to each other, and which are the most important.

6. Alt text

Search engines need an easy way to recognise any images that might be displayed on your website. Alt-text helps Google gain quick information and context about each image, and helps your images rank higher in Google image search. It is a short description of the image that a visitor will only ever see if the image is unable to load. Alt text is different to title text, which are the words that you see when you hover over an image.

Good alt text:

• Is short and punchy – never longer than 125 characters.
• Is very descriptive, describing the specifics of an image in (brief) detail.
• Offers context as to why the image is relevant to the broader page.
• Features keywords only if they can be inserted organically.

7. URLs

The page URL is what you see in the address bar of your browser when you visit a specific web page. These URLs should be simple and make perfect sense, telling the human or bot where the page sits within the site’s architecture.

Take the URL of this page: https://tractionmarketing.nz/ai-for-digital-marketing/

It tells you that you are on the Traction Marketing website (which is a secure domain, as represented by the ‘https’ at the start), that you’re in the Blog section, and that you’re reading a guide to On-Page SEO.

Page URLs should be made as short as possible while still telling the audience what they need to know – a condensed version of the title tag is a good place to start, and one or two keywords is more than enough. You should also ensure that your domain has HTTPS (a secure version of HTTP with encryption and verification), as Google now treats this as an SEO ranking factor.

8. Internal links

Once you get a visitor to your site, you want to keep them there as long as possible. Not only does this increase the chances of the visitor becoming a customer, it also tells Google that the audience found your site valuable, which can help push you up the rankings.

Internal links are critical to this SEO effort (<– that’s one right there!). They are an invitation for a visitor to check out another part of your site – something that is relevant to a point you’re making, that adds extra context to a web page, or that forms a potential next step in the customer’s journey.

9. Mobile optimisation

Google is well aware that over half of all internet traffic comes from mobile devices, and that this number is only growing, as it has done since the birth of the smartphone. As such the search engine prefers sites that are built to be faster, more responsive and provide a better user experience when visited on phones.

You need to ensure that your website is mobile optimised – that whenever a visitor is looking at your site on a mobile device, they are delivered a mobile-specific version. Generally speaking this version is pared back and more minimalist. You can learn more about exactly what makes a website mobile-friendly, and whether yours is, by using this Google tool.

10. Loading speed

Speaking of performance, your site should load quickly no matter when and where it is viewed. ‘Page speed’ is a key factor in SEO, firstly because Google knows that a slow-loading page will offer a subpar experience to users, and secondly because slow load times can significantly increase your ‘bounce rate’ – the number of people who visit your site only to leave within a few seconds – a stat that Google keeps track of.

Choosing a quality website hosting service, designing your website correctly and compressing content are a few of the things that play a part in page speed. You can check your load times using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.

Both of these last two elements – site speed and mobile optimisation – are as much Technical SEO as they are On-Page SEO. This means that the average business may need outside help from an SEO specialist to maximise the performance of these elements.

Your ultimate On-Page SEO checklist

Right then. Now that we have an understanding of what On-Page SEO is made of, how exactly do you use it to ensure your website ranks as high on Google as possible?

In order to answer that question in the simplest possible manner, we’ve created an On-Page SEO best practice checklist for you to work through – a set of 11 steps that form the foundation of a solid On-Page SEO plan.

1. Keyword identification

The first and most important step for any On-Page SEO effort, or any SEO effort full stop, is to identify the keywords you’ll be targeting. The importance of keywords should be obvious – these are the search terms that your potential customers are typing in when searching for the products and services that you offer. By ensuring your website is full of these keywords, you increase your chances of being presented by Google as a possible answer to those queries.

What keywords are most important to your business? A tool like Google Keyword Planner is a great place to start, giving you a good idea of the most relevant, most popular and, where appropriate, most niche keywords that you should be featuring on your site.

Consider three main factors when choosing your target keywords:

• Intent: Consider why a customer might be searching for a product or service you offer – their motivation for typing a particular keyword in. Think about where they might be in the sales funnel – awareness, consideration, transaction – and feature keywords within content (web page copy, blogs, etc.) to speak to that person.
• Volume: How many times was a particular keyword searched?
• Difficulty: How hard is it to rank on the first page of Google for a given keyword?

To these last two points: while high volume keywords offer the greatest potential audience, they also force you to compete against more websites for attention. Lower volume, more niche keywords, meanwhile, can form an efficient and effective way to target a more precise type of audience, as these are easier to get to the top of Google for.

2. Title tag optimisation

We’ve already defined what a good title tag is (see ‘HTML Elements’ section above), so now it’s a simple matter of ensuring that every one of your web pages has one that ticks all of those boxes. Make sure that it is the correct length and features the primary keyword for that page in an organic way.

3. Meta-description creation

A short page description that is displayed alongside the title tag on the SERP, the meta-description plays a critical role in bringing visitors to your site. After the headline has caught the searcher’s attention, it’s up to the meta-description to lure them in, explaining exactly why they should click on your result.

SEO or generative AI tools can be hugely helpful when you need to write a lot of compelling meta-descriptions. Do so for every one of your pages, following the guidelines that we set out in the ‘HTML elements’ section above.

4. Headline (H1) creation

The H1 is the most important of the ‘body tags’ that we mentioned earlier. Unlike your title tag, which doesn’t actually feature on the web page (only on the SERP), your H1 will be the headline that every visitor sees at the top of a given page.

While keywords – particularly the primary keyword – remain important to insert, there isn’t a specific character limit, although the best H1s will be compelling and concise.

5. SEO-friendly URL Slug formation

The URL Slug is the final part of a URL, found after the final forward slash (“/”), that makes a page’s URL unique. Usually a super condensed version of the heading, the URL Slug is yet another opportunity to get in Google’s good books by using the page’s primary keyword.

Once again, this On-Page SEO element must be relevant and clear, but the added challenge is to be particularly concise. A good strategy is to begin with the H1, then take out as many words as possible until you’re left with a handful that get to the core of what the page is about – the URL Slug doesn’t have to make sense grammatically, it just needs to convey an idea as efficiently as possible, ideally while using the primary keyword of the page.

Words chosen, you replace the spaces with hyphens and add the slug to the end of your URL, the rest of which will reflect where the page sits within the site’s architecture. Take this page’s URL Slug as an example: “[on-page-seo-checklist]”

6. Content optimisation

Now to the meat of the dish. In terms of On-Page SEO, nothing is more ‘on-page’ than the content that fills the screen when a visitor arrives on your site. Every one of your web pages should feature content optimised for target keywords, which simply means sprinkling relevant search terms throughout the page.

In step one we identified the target keywords for each web page. It’s now time to write content that features those keywords – though not too many keywords, as Google knows that ‘keyword stuffing’ doesn’t add value to a web page, so marks down any page that it feels has keywords jammed in for no good reason.

Striking the right balance with keyword volume is made far easier when you use an SEO writing tool like SEMrush or Ahrefs. These tools can also help you to identify more keyword opportunities that you may have missed during the keyword research phase.

7. Content quality evaluation

Your web page features keyword-optimised content, and you’ve nailed the tags and descriptions. Google should be very happy. But none of this guarantees that the content itself is any good for a human, which is why you should review its quality.

Once again, there are a number of tools, such as SEMrush and Ahrefs, that can help guide you on content quality, but in basic terms, quality web page content is:

• Accurate: All your content must be up-to-date and error-free, both in terms of facts and grammar.
• Unique: Ensure you don’t plagiarise content from other sites, and where possible avoid duplicating content across web pages.
• Concise yet comprehensive: Write in a concise way, but ensure you give your audience all the information they might need at whatever stage of the customer journey they’re at.
• Accessible: Try to use short and simple words over long and complex words. While the complexity of the language will depend on your target audience, the easier to digest, the better, as it will appeal to more people.
• Correctly toned: As important as what you say is how you say it. Before writing your website content, spend time refining your brand voice. Develop a voice that resonates with your target audience.
• Well formatted: Break up big blocks of text. Make frequent use of bullet-pointed lists. Draw the eye to important areas of the page with bold or italic highlights.

8. Body tag application

Speaking of formatting, subheadings can make web page content far simpler to navigate for both humans and bots. While H1 denotes the on-page heading, H2, H3, H6 and beyond are subheadings that give the content structure and make the hierarchy of the page clear. These are the ‘body tags’ we mentioned in the Elements section earlier.

While some of your simpler web pages, such as ‘Contact’, might only have a H1 and perhaps a H2, those that address more complicated subjects, such as the one you’re reading right now, can have four subheading levels or more.

9. Internal linking

The clue is in the name: your ‘web’ pages should be connected to one another wherever possible, as this helps you to deliver maximum informational value to your visitors, and keeps them on your site for longer.

Internal links can be found on your website menu, as buttons throughout a web page, or embedded in the content itself as anchor text. The greatest untapped opportunity for internal linking will be within your content, so review every page and add internal links (including descriptive anchor text, as this is great for SEO) wherever another web page can add extra context, or wherever an opportunity to lead a visitor further down the sales funnel might present itself.

10. Rich content

Written content isn’t the only type of content you should consider when optimising your website. While visual elements aren’t as keyword-focused, they are still important in terms of SEO, and can offer a lot of value to your readers: a picture is worth 1000 words, after all. According to SEMrush, articles that featured an embedded video attracted 70% more traffic than articles without a video.

When you include a photo, infographic, illustration or graph on a web page, include alt text (see ‘Elements’ section above) and compress or resize them to reduce page loading time. For videos it’s wise to upload to YouTube then embed in your web page. This makes Google happy for two reasons: you’re minimising page load times and you’re using their video streaming service (which just happens to be the world’s second most popular search engine!)

11. Schema markup

It’s here, with schema markup, that we begin to stray into the slightly more challenging waters of technical SEO, which makes it an appropriate place to finish our On-Page SEO journey. Schema markup, AKA structured data markup, is a technique that allows you to offer up carefully structured information to Google for display on the SERP, such as when your address and opening hours are displayed when your business is served up as a rich result.

There are 32 different forms of schema that you can capitalise upon, and you can consult Google’s handy breakdown to identify which might apply to you, and how to complete a markup for each type of schema.

On-Page SEO is easier with Traction

Search engine optimisation represents an incredible opportunity to put your business up in lights. But the need to audit and optimise every page on your website, to add new pages where necessary, to use niche SEO tools and consider endless SEO factors, to know what you want to rank for and how to do it, can all feel a little too much.

That’s because for the amateur, it is. SEO is a discipline that takes years to learn, and that can never truly be mastered, as Google is always changing the playing field. This is why a lot of Christchurch businesses have chosen to partner with the expert SEO team at Traction, and have maximised their chances of Google success in the process.

At Traction we help Kiwi businesses build their online presence.  Over the years we have built up a deep knowledge of On-Page SEO, and are ready to optimise your site in a way that is as pleasing to visitors as it is to Google.

From On and Off Page SEO, technical SEO and SEO audits, to wider efforts like social media marketing, web development, Google Ads and remarketing, at Traction we offer the expertise you need to get ahead. Get in touch with our ‘slightly’ nerdy team today.