How you use On-page SEO is just as important as what you know about the subject. When it comes to driving organic traffic, you have several methods available to use.
Reduce Your Site’s Bounce Rate
First, you want to make sure you keep traffic on your site or lower the bounce rate. This can be more easily done if your page loads faster. People will leave a site if a page does not load automatically and quickly. Therefore, speeding up the load rate for your web pages should be a priority. For each second you add to the load rate, you can lose as many as 36% of your visitors.
What to Use to Assess Site Speed Performance
About 10 years ago, Google realized that site speed was an important component to a user’s website experience, and therefore added it as a ranking factor for SEO. Site speed can make or break you online, especially in the SERPs. That is why it pays—literally—to use several SEO tools to improve site speed and performance. The tools include the following:
- PageSpeed insights (PSI) – This tool helps developers assess and enhance website performance.
- The Accelerated Mobile Pages Project boosts the speed on mobile sites.
- Test My Site is a great tool to use to check for responsiveness or mobile-friendliness as well as to gauge the speed of a site.
How Fast Should a Site Load? | On-page SEO
A faster load time is better, based on the following facts:
- You should strive for 3 seconds or faster, as over 50% of mobile sites are abandoned when the load time is slower.
- A very slow site can be a negative factor toward ranking a site for SEO.
- Slow load times trigger users to abandon the checkout process.
- Google will also crawl a site more slowly if the load time is slow.
How to Boost the Website Speed
On-page SEO: To boost the speed, here is what you can do:
- Get rid of unnecessary code on your web page.
- Defer the loading of JavaScript
- Lessen server response time
- Enable browser caching
- Choose a hosting option that enables better load speeds
- Enable compression
- Compress images to cut down the page size by about 35%
Optimize Your Site for Voice Search
The number of users owning a smart speaker is expected to climb to 55% in 2022, so now is the time to optimize your website for voice search. This is an especially important strategy when you look at the current statistics.
- Just over 70% of people who own voice-activated devices state that they use voice search as part of their daily routine.
- Most of the people who own voice-activated speakers cannot imagine not using them.
Use Long-tailed Keywords to Optimize for Voice Searches | On-page SEO
If you optimize for voice search, you will want to use long-tailed keywords, as people tend to use these phrases when they talk. Long-tailed keywords consist of words that number three or more. To rank for these types of phrases, you need to do the following:
- Identify the long-tailed keyword first. For example, “how to wash your dog.”
- Next, find semantically related keywords, such as “dog washing guide” or “best shampoo for washing a dog.”
- Create a long-form blog post so you can place the semantically related keywords in the content. Aim to write content that is much better than the content that is currently used to rank for your target keyword.
- Format the content so it is more readable – for example, use questions in subheadings where it is appropriate.
On-page SEO: Focus on Mobile First
Because most searches and half of all store purchases happen on mobile devices, you should focus on mobile before desktop use for on-page SEO. Let’s break down some statistics:
- About 77% of the people in the U.S. own a smartphone.
- Almost 80% of smartphone users have purchased something with their mobile device within the last 6 months.
- Around 80% of shoppers use their mobile phone inside a physical store for comparing prices, checking customer reviews, or locating other stores in the chain.
The site you build or rebuild should focus on mobile but it still is important to check your site’s performance on a desktop as well. You just need to pay more attention to mobile use.
Concentrate on Subject Clusters, Not Keywords
Because Google continues to evolve, you need to gain some insight into customer expectations and what people are searching online. Learn what search results will best answer your customers’ queries.
Know Your Target Audience
To learn more about how your customers search, you need to learn more about your target audience. Knowing this information will help you create more valuable content. Find out specifics, such as your readers’ average age, interests, and location. Narrowing down your audience is better for SEO and for growing your business and its reputation.
Create Great Content and Format It for Readability
To create great content, you need to format it correctly and direct it to your target audience. Therefore, you need the services of an experienced writer – someone who will take the time to research long-tail keywords and adapt them to the content. Make sure you make the content easy to read by using bullet points, headings with questions, where appropriate, and bucket brigade phrases. These phrases keep the reader motivated to continue reading the material.
Outlining Your SEO Goals
With the above information, you can enhance your on-page SEO and increase interest in your blogs, articles, and related media. Therefore, make it your goal to do the following:
- Increase your load speed if it is lagging
- Create content that keeps people returning to your website
- Focus on optimizing your site for mobile first
- Know more about your customers, or target audience
- Use long-tailed keywords in your content
What have you done to drive organic traffic to your site? What works and doesn’t work? Answering some basic questions can help you develop an on-page SEO strategy that will attract visitors and substantially boost sales. If you have not done so already, now is the time to outline your SEO goals so you can drive more website traffic.
