The SEO is one of the best investments you can make in digital marketing. Getting to the top of Google is not easy, but the organic traffic and visibility you get in return make up for all your efforts.
There are many aspects that contribute to improving on-page SEO. Once you’re done with the basics, like optimizing keywords, titles, and URLs, you’ve got a whole world of advanced SEO techniques to give you the final push, so let’s see how you can start taking your SEO on-page! to the next level!
7 advanced on-page SEO techniques
1) Audit your on-page SEO
To be able to do advanced on-page SEO, the first thing is to detect which are the aspects to improve. Therefore, my first recommendation is that you do a monthly SEO audit to see how everything is and detect possible gaps.
An SEO audit consists of examining the performance of your site, setting improvement goals based on the results and designing a plan to help you achieve those goals. For this, my recommendation is that you start by applying this checklist:
- Have an up-to-date keyword list? User search trends can change over time, so it is convenient to review the research and see if new opportunities have arisen or if there are keywords in which we are not interested in continuing to invest time and resources. With the SEMrush tracking tool, you can control the most important keywords for your brand and its evolution, in its free version it lets you have an active project.
- Do all the pages on your site have a meta title and a meta description? Analyze it with the Screaming Frog tool.
- Are the images on your website optimized with name, description, ALT and caption? Also use Screaming Frog to find out, in its free version it allows you to review 500 pages.
- Is the URL structure of your website optimized for search engines?
- Are the texts on your website optimized for SEO? (Use of keywords, headings, bold …)
- Does your website include internal and external links?
2) Do an audit of the competition
The other side of the coin is to see what your competitors are doing with their on-page SEO, in order to get more ideas for improving your website and detect possible gaps.
To do this audit, I recommend two complementary SEO techniques:
- Make a list of the 10 TOP keywordsfor which you want to position and analyze the results that appear on the first page of Google: type of content, level of detail, how they use images and video, the general design of the page, etc.
- Make a list of the main competitor brands and analyze their websitesusing an SEO tool such as MoZ, Screaming Frog or SEMrush. This way you can get an idea of what their strengths and weaknesses are and propose strategies to overcome them.
3) Search the zero position of Google
The zero position Google (also called “featured snippet”) is a novelty introduced by this search engine to answer questions from users as quickly as possible.
When a user makes a query, Google shows them a highlight with an extract of the information searched, the title of the page, a URL and sometimes an image. The information can appear in the form of a paragraph, a list, or a table.
Optimizing your on-page SEO specifically for position zero increases the chances of reaching it, so sign up these tips:
- Look for opportunities to answer frequently asked questionsfrom users, as this is the type of query where the most featured snippets are shown.
- Research keywords by focusing on question types.
- Write a concise introductionthat answers the user’s question as quickly as possible.
- You then expand the information with long content.
4) Organize the content in pillar pages
The catch pages and topic clusters are a way to organize information that focuses on broad themes rather than specific keywords. It is giving very good results because SEO is evolving towards a more semantic approach, that is, focusing on the general intention of the user and not on the specific terms they use.
To use this structure, you need to organize your content as follows:
- A pillar pagethat collects all the key aspects of the subject in a summarized way.
- A collection of pages (” topic cluster“) that delve into each of these key aspects.
- A link structure that directs from the pillar page to the topic cluster and vice versa.
5) Check the internal links of your website
The internal links are a very important component of on-page SEO, and that tell Google that the content is valuable and is related to the main theme of the web.
As your website grows, it can be difficult to keep track of all the internal links. For this reason, I recommend that you periodically review them with a tool such as Screaming Frog, which indicates the number of incoming and outgoing links on each of your site’s pages and the number of clicks necessary to reach it.
It is also highly recommended to frequently search and repair broken links, such as 404 errors, or also check the number of redirected links you have and change them to the final link.
6) Optimize loading times
For users, a website is a resource to find what they are looking for in the shortest possible time. The excessive load times despair and make them leave the site, besides harming your SEO positioning.
According to children’s book illustration pricing To improve your on-page SEO, therefore, it is essential to analyze the loading time of your website with a tool such as Google’s Page Speed Insights, which gives you a score based on the agility of your website and offers you advice on how to improve it.
7) Update and improve your content
Do you think these SEO techniques are too much work? Well, we are going to finish with one that will save you time and effort: review and improve your old content instead of creating it from scratch.
Recently updated content rank better in Google, and helps you make the initial effort you have invested in creating the content profitable. Thus, you can republish it and get new visits in much less time than it would take to create it from scratch, all while improving the on-page SEO of your website.