How to optimize a page for SEO

Once you know how your customers are looking for you, you can follow this on-page SEO tutorial.

Why is on-page optimization important for search engine optimization?

For a moment, let’s forget that we want to optimize a page for the search engines. Let’s think about basic marketing. When you’re writing marketing copy for anything (even if it’s not on the internet) good content should:

• Use words and phrases that customers expect. This re-assures them that they’ve found what they’re looking for.
• Avoid technical jargon and industry slang. Speak plainly. They shouldn’t have to be specialists in what you offer to be able to understand how you can help them.
• Speak in terms of solutions to their problems. How does your company’s services help them? Why would they want to use you? What makes you different than others who offer similar services? Hint: the answer isn’t, “we do it better.”
• Include a call-to-action so your customers can do something with what they’ve learned.

On-page optimization for SEO is just good marketing with an advantage: thanks to our keyword research, we know the phrases our customers are using to find what we have to offer. Before you do this process, I’m assuming you’ve done your keyword research overview and in-depth keyword research for this specific page. It will do you no good to optimize a page without knowing the phrase for which you’re optimizing it!

Write for your customers. Don’t write for Google. Yes, there are elements we need on a page to “rank” well but these might not be as important as you think. You might find your website does better in Google if it does a better job helping your customers find the solutions you offer.

What should you expect from this on-page SEO tutorial?

When you optimize a page, you should see a growth in traffic from organic search. If you’ve chosen to focus on the right keywords, this growth in traffic should produce more customers.

Sometimes people get caught in the details, when it comes to on-page optimization. They spend time focusing on one tiny detail (“OMG! I need to bold my keywords on the page!”) and get lost in the forest for the trees. I think you’ll find tiny tweaks like this don’t have as big of an impact as you might think. Don’t lose site of the big picture when doing on-page SEO.

Of course, if you’re measuring your results, you’ll see what tweaks to your content are helping, and what are not.

The on-page SEO checklist