Why is on page SEO important to an SEO strategy?

On page SEO is a topic that one inevitably comes across on the journey to wanting to connect with audiences through search engines so today we attempt to answer the question: why is on page SEO important to an SEO strategy? 

We can think about on page SEO as representing one third of the larger SEO equation which is:

SEO = Keyword research, on page SEO efforts & off page SEO efforts

Provided we have done adequate research for relevant commercial and informational keywords, the next step in the process to ranking for those keywords is to get your on page SEO process down - whilst keeping in mind that these are changes we will implement both on a page-to-page basis but also across an entire domain.

Learning how to do on page SEO

When learning how to do on page SEO there seemed to be quite a scatter of advices but it seems to reduce down to a few main things: keyword positioning, efforts to get pages indexed & in the featured snippets section of search engines and other minor technical SEO aspects.

What are the on page SEO components

There are various on page SEO components and we will describe them here The first component is making sure that you are positioning your keywords correctly, that means the priority keywords are in the title, URL slug, header and succeeding body of text and the secondary keywords are in the header and succeeding body of text.

Efforts to get pages index include things such as making sure Google can access your robots.txt file, doesn’t have too large of a page load time and also doesn’t see more than 5 redirects when crawling your pages before it finds the page in question. Sitemaps are important here and good & logical web architecture may help out too. 

A mention should be made here for meta descriptions which are visible on Google - these should be treated as you would treat ad copy, they are what your audience will read and efforts here may benefit click-through rates. 

Getting featured in featured snippets is the result of meticulous data highlighting work and a little bit of fortune. Going that extra mile to help Google understand the keywords your targeting may serve you well at times. 

The other minor technical aspects can include the number of page requests being tightened up, the websites responsivity to mobile device, font sizes and button sizes & spacings.

What is on page SEO checker benefit

We also wondered what is on page SEO checker and its benefits. On page SEO checkers are tools such as SEMrush’s on page SEO checker that takes a look at your website and compares it to other competitors’ websites and provides page by page advices which can be implemented, in the pursuit of ranking better for a particular set of keywords. 

This type of tool may help shorten the timeframe of defining page-by-page optimisations however it should be mentioned that, until your keyword research is completed properly and your website architecture has been designed logically, it can’t be of much of much help. 

It should also be mentioned that these tools don’t always work the way that you want them to. We opt therefore for an on page checklist that we use and manually go page by page for small websites, this way we can prioritise the things we feel are more important to an SEO strategy - such as keyword positioning. 

pomegranate’s on page SEO process

With our on page SEO process we tend to first focus on domain-wide mobile responsiveness, font and button sizing (& button spacing).

Then on a page-level, for all existing and all new pages in question, we prioritise keyword positioning, meta descriptions, keeping image sizes in check. Here is also the point where data highlighting may be useful. 

After all of these things are taken care of we wait for our sitemap to update (we use Squarespace), for others a manual update of the sitemap may need to take place. After this we upload the sitemap to Google search console and after this we test the URL and request it to be indexed.

Bonus question - how will it affect SEO to have multiple h1 tags on a page

Will it or won’t it… How will it affect SEO to have multiple h1 tags on a page - is a question that some of you may be asking. The honest answer is that we don’t know and Google’s SEO starter guide doesn’t specify anything in particular. 

What we’ve seen in our research however is that it’s similar targeting whether it is a keyword present in the first h1 or the fifth h6 header, ultimately it is another on page position that Google’s bots can read a particular keyword and associate you with the audience searching for that keyword. 

We have seen that having a keyword in your domain is regularly associated with ranking well for that particular keyword. The other places you can mention a keyword is in the URL of a page, headers and body text. Whether it is one h1 or 6 h1s present on your page, these may all still be read as headers, so don’t worry. We’ve not seen anything to the contrary just yet.

Where to get an on page SEO audit

If you’re thinking about getting an on page SEO audit, please feel free to hit the ‘free website review’ button above and we will include all of our findings in a full report.

This report will detail all of the things which we think have been done well, and the things which may be improved in time, across keyword research and both on and off page SEO.