SEO Demystified: How to Optimize Your Website for Higher Rankings and More Conversions

Off-page

This is how to improve your website’s traffic by improving your search engine rank. With Off-page SEO, you don’t have as much control as On-page as you can only influence the off-page factors.

How can I improve my Off-page SEO?

One way for you to improve it is by getting clickable backlinks, it is important because it is one of Google’s top-ranking factors. So it is important to know what to and not to do when using backlinks. Depending on your business, there are multiple different ways that you can go about backlinking, including:

Competitor link building – observing what your competitors are doing and doing the same to get the links that they have
Guest posting – writing a post for another site in return for a link to your site
Resource page link building – pitching your pages to others that curate the industry.

Before going after a link, you should make sure that the site you are linking to is trustworthy and that they are relevant to your content/topic.

If you are a local business, then you should have a Google Business Profile, this will allow you to show up for Map Pack results. You should be as specific as possible when choosing a category, adding your business hours and any other important information such as your contact information. Reviews will also allow you to rank well in the Map Pack, which will help your business get more traffic.

Other ways that you could help your SEO are by getting featured in interviews, responding to journalist requests and even getting featured on podcasts!

Tips to improve Off-page SEO:

Social Media – including lions to your site while making engaging and entertaining posts will help you rank well
Local SEO – Using Trip Advisor, YELP etc.
Content Marketing – Surveys, Whitepapers, and videos are great for getting new people to your site.

On-page

This type of SEO is the thing that you can do on your website that will help to improve your rankings by letting the search engines better understand your content (this can be done by crawling). It’s important because it allows the search engine to decide whether your content is relevant to a search result.

How can Improve my On-page SEO?

Something that you should include on your pages when building up your content is by using the correct ‘H’ tags, such as H1 for titles H2 for subtitles and so on. These will also help your users better digest the information and scan your website for their desired content/answers. If you are not sure that you have used these correctly, you should crawl your site with Ahrefs’ Site audit and go to the Content report where you can see where you have ones missing.

Writing a compelling title tag will also help your On-page SEO and are often the main piece of information that decides whether or not a user will click on your website.

Tips to improve title tags:

Descriptive but short – they should ideally be 60 – 70 characters long while also being descriptive of your content
Don’t clickbait – your title tag should align with your page content, they should tell searchers you have what they’re searching for
Keywords – you should have the keyword or some sort of variation

The Ahrefs’ Site Audit will also help you to identify any title tags with issues, and you should also make sure that every indexable page has a title tag.

Setting up SEO-friendly URLs will help you with your On-page SEO, so you should have a descriptive slug for each of your pages and use relevant to your content and even a keyword.

You should also work on optimising all of your images. This will help people who use screen readers understand your content. You need to name your files so that they describe the subject matter, for example, ‘people-skydiving.jpg’. These titles should be simple and to the point rather than sentences or stuffing words in there. And use dashes rather than underscores. To help your site’s loading time, it would be beneficial to compress your images as well. The free software that I recommend is ‘Squoosh’, which allows you to compress your images without damaging the sight quality.

Tips to improve On-page SEO:

Use external links – (that are trustworthy) that will bring value to your users.
Using your expertise – you can do this by showing that you know a topic well and providing a clear source of information. And make sure that any information you have used has a link back to the author.
Featured snippets – provide the answer to a search with a concise answer. Google pulls these from the web listings and is usually from the first page of search results. You can get this snippet by already ranking in the top ten. Ahref’s site also has a filter so that you can search for these opportunities.
Rich Snippets and meta descriptions- are highlight structured data that is embedded on pages and they give the users a summary of what information is on that page. It may not be a ranking factor, but it will help Google understand your content better and make your content stand out in searches.
Consider the buyers/clients’ journey – The customer lifecycle: Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Retention, Advocacy. How does your page(s) help their journey?