About 5.44 billion people worldwide currently use the Internet, and this number grows every year.
A high-quality website is crucial for modern businesses, and a lot goes into building one. Search engine optimisation is vital if you want people to find your site through search engines, and there are several components to this. On-page SEO can go a long way towards making your website more successful, but is it enough on its own?
In this guide, we'll explore its importance as well as what else you might need and how a Bristol SEO company can help you succeed. Keep reading for more.
On-page SEO is all about optimising individual pages on a website so that they rank higher on SERPs (search engine results pages). SEO makes it easier for search engines to understand a page so that it can tie it to search terms.
SEO can be quite complex, so it's not something many business owners can take care of themselves. An SEO company can provide expert skills to help you improve your site and start bringing in more traffic.
It's worth noting that local SEO can be beneficial for many companies, so you may find that working with an SEO company in Bristol will bring you the best results if that's where you conduct most of your business.
These days, when most people are looking for a product or a service, they head straight online. Search engines see a huge amount of traffic and are ideal for helping people find what they're looking for.
Google is the most popular search engine by far, and when using it, about 28.5% of people click the link that shows up at the top. This drops to just 15.7% for the second link and 11% for the third. It continues to decrease for each link down the page.
This means that you'll get a lot more traffic by ranking higher. In today's digital world, working with a reliable Bristol SEO company can have a huge impact on your ability to keep up with (or get ahead of) your competitors.
One thing that you need to remember is that on-page SEO is an ongoing process, not a one-time thing. If you want your SEO strategy to be truly successful, you need to regularly review it and determine ways you can make improvements.
There are various areas to cover when it comes to on-page SEO. Without a comprehensive strategy, you won't get great results, so it's important to understand the different areas. An experienced SEO freelancer in the UK should have an in-depth knowledge of these.
Content is the most important aspect, so it should be helpful, informative, accurate, and engaging. Making sure it's original is also essential.
You should research your target audience to determine what content will resonate with them, and build a strategy based around this. Keyword research will help improve search engine ranking.
Ensuring your content is well-structured will also help search engines understand what it's about. Things like your use of headings, paragraph structure, and use of bullet points can all help here. A Bristol SEO agency should be able to optimise all of your content to improve your ranking.
Title tags and meta tags are another vital element as they give search engines information about what's on a page. They also tell users what they can expect to find on your website.
The title tag should be clear and descriptive. Make sure it contains the primary keyword and is 50-60 characters long.
The meta description isn't actually a ranking factor, but it can have a huge impact on the CTR (click-through rate). It should be about 150-160 characters long and should entice users to visit your site.
Make all of your URLs as clear and descriptive as possible. They should contain keywords and reflect the page content while being concise. Separate words with hyphens to make them more readable and avoid any complex or unnecessary strings of letters/numbers.
Internal linking is vital and can make it much easier for search engines to understand how the different pages on your site connect to one another. Link to different pages throughout your website to guide users and help distribute page authority. On top of improving SEO, this will make it more likely that visitors stay longer and visit more pages.
You should review and update internal links regularly. This can help ensure you don't end up with links to pages that no longer exist. Broken links can negatively impact your SEO, so you want to avoid them.
You'll almost certainly use images on your site, and optimising them can be very beneficial. Alt text tells search engines what images are about improving SEO. This also improves accessibility for users with visual impairments, which is another SEO factor.
Similarly, images should have descriptive filenames. It's also a good idea to compress images so they take up less space, and don't use too many. If your images (and videos) take up a lot of space it can make your website slower, negatively impacting your SEO.
Time is a key part of on-page SEO. The more recent something is, the better it will typically rank. With that in mind, quality content can still rank highly for quite some time.
A blog post, for example, can easily rank highly for months, and possibly even years if it's relevant, accurate, and useful. If, however, two websites have very similar pages, and one was last updated five years ago, while the other was updated five weeks ago, the more recent one will have a better chance of ranking higher.
On-page SEO can have a huge impact on your SEO, but if you only focus on this, your rankings will only improve so much. Because of this, it's also vital that you concentrate on off-page SEO and technical SEO.
Off-page SEO covers SEO elements that aren't actually on your website. These are things you can do externally that will ultimately help drive more traffic to your site.
Link building is a typical example which involves working to get other sites to link back to yours. This way, users on other websites may follow a link to one of your pages when they may not have ended up on your site otherwise.
Social media can also be used to improve off-page SEO. You can create social media pages for your business to promote it and engage with your audience. It's best to research your audience to determine what social media platforms they're most active on, then you can prioritise your resources accordingly.
Guest posts are blog articles on other websites that can help lead people towards yours. Look at different sites you can get guest posts on and use ones that have audiences which are likely to be interested in your brand.
Local SEO helps make your brand more visible on search engines in local search results. For example, a company in Bristol will want to focus on local SEO for Bristol. This is most important for businesses that are primarily targeting local customers such as restaurants or mechanics as it will bring more nearby users to their websites.
Technical SEO covers ways in which you can optimise your site that aren't clearly visible. It's more about improving the architecture and back-end elements.
Site Speed has become a very important SEO factor for modern websites. People have high expectations, so they'll leave a site if it's taking too long to load. Limiting the use of images and videos and ensuring you have a suitable hosting plan with a reliable provider will help improve site speed.
About 59.7% of all web traffic comes from mobile devices, and this is on the rise. As such, mobile responsiveness has become a huge SEO factor. Make sure your website works well on different sized devices including smartphones and tablets to improve SEO and user experience.
Structured Data helps search engines understand your site using technical vocabulary. It translates the content of your site into code that search engines can read and process with ease so that it can help users find it through specific searches.
An XML Sitemap is a file that lists all of the pages on your website. Search engines can use these to understand the entire layout, so it's important to structure your site in a logical way. Using this, search engines can find and crawl all of your pages to make sure that they all show up in search engine results.
On-page SEO is incredibly important, but to get the best results, you need to focus on all areas of search engine optimisation. Those without SEO training won't be able to do this effectively, so it's best to work with a reliable SEO company or SEO freelancer in Bristol.
BrisTechTonic is a professional Bristol SEO agency that can help you achieve your website goals. We focus on helping small businesses and operate as a WIX and HubSpot Partner, and are Google Certified.
Contact us today to find out more about what we can do for you.