On Page SEO Optimization

Creating content that provides insane value and improving your site’s authority by building quality links will always deliver the best results. But if you’re stuck for time or have no resources to dedicate to a long-term SEO strategy, nothing’s lost. In this post, I’ll show you 4 quick on-page SEO fixes that, although might not boost your site straight to the top of search results right away, will help improve its visibility nonetheless. Ready? Let’s not waste any more time then.

1. Update your content with new insights and visuals

You only have two options if you’re looking to increase your organic traffic: Keep publishing new content, optimized for new keywords to increase online visibility _or _update the existing content that has a potential to rank even higher. In my experience, most people only focus on creating new content, missing out on a great traffic opportunity. Imagine you have a post that’s ranking close to the 1st page of search results but it’s not there yet. You could wait and hope that it will eventually amass enough links and authority to get there. Or, you could update it to increase your chances of Google boosting it higher in rankings. And often, doing the latter is actually simpler and quicker.

What does it mean to update content?

Most people would consider an update simply as adding more words to the page. However, that’s not exactly true. For one, you don’t want to make the content longer for the sake of it. Sure, content length affects rankings.

Content length affects rankings (Source)

But that’s only if it delivers insane value for the user. Personally, I define updating content as increasing the value it delivers to your audience. And doing so could mean:

Adding more text that goes deeper into the topic, covering its new aspects or expanding the existing information
Adding multimedia, infographics, stats, graphs, videos or any other visuals that could enrich the user experience.

Here’s an example of content I updated recently. I clearly marked new sections in the copy so you will have no trouble comparing the old vs. updated version.

2. Test and improve your site’s speed

The impact of page speed on conversions is irrefutable. In 2012, Amazon calculated that a one second delay in page load would cost it $1.6bn per year. A couple of years earlier, the online retail giant discovered that a 1/10th slowdown costs it 1% of their sales. Recognizing that slow websites deliver poor user experience and basically push people away from using them, Google began to consider the load time as a ranking factor. What this means is that if your site is slow, it lowers your chances to rank high for the keywords you position it for. But how do you know if your site is slow? Use the Google’s Page Speed tool to test how fast (or slow) your site really is and receive suggestions as to how to improve it. Page speed example When assessing your site speed, remember to test both desktop and mobile versions. You may find significant differences between the two and various factors affecting their performance.

3. Fix duplicate content

Duplicate content happens. And often it may not even be a result of your direct action. Your CMS platform, for example, might be creating multiple URLs pointing to the same page. Take filters on online retail category pages. An e-commerce platform might create separate URLs for the same page, depending on the variable a visitor uses to sort products, i.e.

Mystore.com/category/products?=sort-size
Mystore.com/category/products?=sort-color

Even though both of these point to the same page, the search engine might index them as separate URLs…and duplicate content. Separate URLs for the same page example Or if your website assigns session IDs for users, and passes them in the URL, it might be creating individual web addresses for each visit. However, it’s important that you eliminate any potential duplicate content issues from the site. Duplicate content might confuse the search engine as to which URL is more relevant to the user’s search query and in turn, which one to display in search results. To eliminate duplicate content:

Crawl your site with SEO crawler and identify potential duplicate content issues.
Add a canonical tag to the site that will tell the search engine which one is the original version of the content.
Set preferred domain in Google Search Console to avoid potential problems with having both domain (domain.com) and subdomain (www.domain.com) indexed as separate URLs.
Exclude duplicate pages from search. You may have to keep duplicate content on the site for legal purposes. However, the chances are that you don’t have to include it in the search engine’s index. Therefore, use the noindex tag to tell the search engine to ignore it.

4. Run a crawler to identify and eliminate the most pressing on-page SEO issues

As your site grows, you might make mistakes that mess up its optimization without even knowing it. Things like:

Adding a new page and forget to specify a meta description tag
Uploading a great featured image to a blog post but forget to set its alt tag
Or accidentally publishing almost identical content to one you’ve used on another page

On their own, none of these errors matter that much. But if your site starts having too many of them, they could negatively affect your rankings. That’s why you should regularly run an SEO crawler to identify what on-page SEO factors require your attention.

What’s an SEO crawler?

If you’re not familiar with the term SEO crawler, let me go over that really quickly. An SEO crawler is a nifty tool that scans your site to fetch various data about its on-page optimization. It basically travels through every page on your site, collecting information about the key on-page SEO elements. Among other things, a crawler can help you identify inactive pages, broken links, bad redirects or even find out if Google can properly index all pages on your site. The idea of using a crawler might seem intimidating at first. In reality, though, crawlers are relatively simple tools, delivering easy to understand reports. Here’s a screenshot of a crawl result. Note the right sidebar that shows results of fetching onsite data (arrows point to notifications of potential errors with meta descriptions). SEO crawler results example Although SEO crawlers deliver a breadth of information about your site, you don’t need to pay attention to it all, at least not right away. However, at minimum, you should notice if crawl results indicate any of the following errors:

Missing or duplicate meta title and description tags
Missing or duplicate H1 and H2 headings
Missing image ALT tags
Duplicate content
Inaccessible pages and broken links

Fixing those mistakes alone could help improve how the affected pages rank in Google.

Conclusion

For the most part, SEO requires time, effort, and resources to bear fruit. However, there are ways to improve your rankings with considerably less effort. Granted, they won’t replace a long full-blown SEO strategy. But they could help you improve the site’s visibility when you’re pressed for time.