3 Steps for Implementing Onsite SEO Best Practices

When people talk about search engine optimization (SEO), most are really talking about link building.

While building links is important to enhance the visibility and SEO for any given website, we’ve found that it’s crucital to implement on-site SEO with every new Google algorithm release.

For our clients, we’ve consistently increased their traffic, lead generation and e-commerce sales by 100-300% within the first 12 months by implementing these three onsite SEO best practices.

Step 1: Implement Keywords in Your Metadata

Keywords need to be incorporated throughout the structure, header and images of each page on your website, and read well (not just keyword stuffing).

Page Titles

  • 70 character maximum
  • 35 character minimum
  • First few words have more weighting than the rest
  • It's good to end each page title with your branding (i.e. company name, abbreviated if it's long)

Meta Description

  • 150 character maximum
  • 75 character minimum

URLs

  • What you name the page (the slug or permalink)
  • This also includes the folder name
  • For example, a blog on a B2B marketing website will do better as example.com/b2b-marketing-blog/keywords-in-your-slug-permalink vs. example.com/blog/keywords

Image ALT Text/Tags

  • You want to have at least one image per page
  • ALT text can be the same as your page title without the branding
  • ALT text is also good for ADA accessibility

Meta Keywords

  • Not indexable for at least a decade

Step 2: Utilize & Incorporate Keywords into Your Page Headings

Readers frequently scan headers first to see what part of the page is most relevant. In recognizing this, Google weighs keywords in headers more heavily than body text, starting with H1 headings and followed by H2:

H1 Headings

  • Only one per page
  • First few words have more weighting than the rest

H2 Headings

  • Not weighted as heavily as H1 for rankings
  • Can be several per page along with H3, H4, H5 headers

Step 3: Utilize Google Search Console & Google Analytics

While Google Analytics is widely used, it seems that the vast majority of websites out there do not effectively utilize Google Search Console. You will also want to upload an XML sitemap to both of them as well as monitor them weekly to resolve whatever crawl errors and HTML improvements are listed.

Monitoring Google Analytics also gives you some incredibly important information:

  • Unique Visitors: is this number going up or down?
  • Content: what are the most popular pages on the site and how does this compare with what you want people to see?
  • Traffic Sources: where are people coming from and where do you want them to come from

Also important:

  • Bounce Rate: should be <50% – you’ve got big problems if it’s above 70-75%
  • Average Engagement Time: ideally 1-2 minutes
  • Engaged Sessions per User: ideally 1-2

If your site has strong website traffic but weak bounce rate, time-on-site and page views, you’ve got a conversion problem…

Caution: Don’t Forget about Content 

Just remember that, while onsite SEO is critical to your website’s keyword rankings, you can only do so much with it if your content is limited. It’s going to be difficult for a starter site with 5- 25 pages to rank well for anything even with on-page SEO best practices implemented and monitored.

How is your website doing? Request a B2B marketing audit to find out.

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