Working on SEO for your website can feel a bit like whack-a-mole: There are always tweaks and fixes to be made. In this article, we share five on-page SEO tips that are the lowest-hanging fruit to help you get started.
Search Engine Optimization is a big umbrella term that covers a wide swath of ways you can improve your website to increase your organic traffic on Google (and other search engines, but let’s face it, Google is all you care about).
That umbrella can be broken down into three main categories.
- On-Page SEO: Everything you can control on your website that improves your search engine results page (or SERP for short) rankings. Think content, headers, metadata and links.
- Off-Page SEO: Everything that impacts your site’s rankings that happens outside of your website. Think backlinks and domain authority.
- Technical SEO: Everything that impacts how Google crawls your site. Think site speed and sitemaps.
In this blog, we’re going to focus on the things you can change right now – the on-page SEO factors that could be holding your site back.
This is low-hanging fruit. If you feel like your site isn’t covering some of these SEO basics, make sure to grab your basket and get to work.
5 Beginner On-Page SEO Tips for B2B Companies
These tips are designed to give you a starting point to improving your site’s rankings, but they aren’t the be-all-end-all. The rabbit hole of SEO is deep and filled with a ton of branching paths.
If you’re already down that rabbit hole, check out our checklist to create perfectly optimized pages. But if you’re just starting out on the SEO path, then just focus on these tips for a few months. You’ll be surprised at the results.
#1. Update Focus Keyword, Title Tags & Meta Descriptions
Start with gathering some topline keyword data on each of your pages.
Make sure each page is targeting a unique keyword. That keyword and its synonyms should be sufficiently present in your headers and in the body copy of your page or blog post.
Now, don’t fall into the trap of placing this focus keyword indiscriminately all over the page. That’s keyword stuffing. It doesn’t serve the reader. Google cracked down on that over a decade ago.
So, don’t force it. Pepper in your keywords and synonyms where it makes sense and adds value and context useful to the reader.
Next, take a look at meta titles and descriptions – the things that appear on a SERP.
While this doesn’t directly affect your SERP rankings, it is an opportunity for you to entice people to click once they find your result in Google. Think of this as an ad.
Make sure every page has a unique meta title and description. Ideally, your titles should be 50 – 60 characters.
Descriptions should be long enough to provide a summary for the page but no longer than around 160 characters. That’s usually the length Google starts truncating them.
If your website is in WordPress and looking for an easy tool to keep track of all of this, we recommend using Yoast.
With Yoast, you can easily fill in the blanks to make sure each page is squared away with these essential pieces of data. You can read more about the Yoast plugin here.
#2. Add Internal & External Links
You may have noticed the highlighted blue text throughout this post. Those are links to related articles, and they’re important. Internal links are links directing to other pages or content on your own website. External links direct to other websites.
Adding internal and external links to your pages where it makes sense helps in two ways:
- They give your readers a direct link to dive deeper into the subject they’re reading about.
- They help Google make sense of your website by showing it which pages are closely related.
When linking text in a post, keep it descriptive but not too wordy. Make it enticing – especially when linking to your own content.
Internal links can open in the same tab. But for external links, make sure you click the option in your WordPress builder to open that link in a new tab so users don’t navigate away from your website. When you click on a link in the WordPress editor, you should see the “open in new tab” option.
Take some time to review all your existing pages for link opportunities. It’s a relatively small step, but it can pay big dividends (hence why it’s on this list).
#3. Optimize & Republish Old Content
Now that you’ve taken on the task of improving your SEO performance, you’re probably wondering, “What should I do with all my existing content?”
The simple answer: Make it better!
Optimizing and republishing your old content is a great way to win back search traffic that your pages may have lost as other sites posted better or more relevant content.
To start, find pages that have seen a drop in traffic over the past few months, or start with older posts with out-of-date information.
Then update headers, metadata and content like we talked about in tip #1.
From there, you should think about adding images where it makes sense.
Lastly, make sure your updated content is readable. Readability score plays a huge role in the quality of your content. Use active voice, and keep sentences short. White space is your friend.
#4. Create New Content
No matter how “SEO-ready” your site is, creating new content should always be a top priority.
If your blog looks like an empty bookshelf, it’s time to start filling it.
Writing SEO-friendly blogs is a great way to start going after new longtail keywords. Plus, you signal to both your prospects and Google that the lights are on, and you’re that much more worthy of a click.
You can start blogging simply by answering some of the more searched questions about your company or subject matter.
But content creation is more than just writing blogs (although consistent and targeted blogging is important). Content can come in a variety of useful formats like videos, infographics, eBooks, guides, case studies, webinars and interactive tools. The more accessible your website is with a variety of content, the better.
#5. Improve Page Experience
Lastly, page experience is a critical piece to on-page SEO improvements – perhaps even the most critical piece.
In Google’s eyes, page experience is a combination of five factors that play a direct role in a user’s experience on a page.
- Core Web Vitals
- Mobile usability
- Security issues
- HTTPS
- Ad experience
We saved this tip for last for a reason because, of these 5 “beginner” on-page SEO tips, fixing page experience issues is the most technical.
To start, figure out how your site is currently performing in these areas. To do this, you can go to the Page Experience report from Google Search Console.
Run the report. If you only have a few pages coming back with a bad report, you’re good to go. If not, then you’ll want to start talking to a developer to solve those issues.
tl;dr: Start Building Your SEO Foundation
Frankly, good SEO takes time and a lot of hard work – but you need to start somewhere. If you’re looking to get your B2B website ranking on page one more often, then start tackling your on-page SEO with these tips.
