On Page Optimisation - How to Beat the Competition

We live in a very competitive market and therefore it can be hard to get ahead in the SERPs. This is especially true if the only part of SEO you can amend is the content on the page. Your client or your company may not have budget for outreach or Digital PR or for technical changes.  

We therefore wanted to find out from our experts their opinions and how they recommend SEOs get ahead in the SERPs when only focusing with on page seo.  Watch our experts, Azeem Ahmad, Justyna Pruszyńska and Kerstin Reichert on tea time video in this post. Alternatively read the presentation on slideshare and Kerstin Reichert’s key take aways here:  

How to beat your competitors with on page SEO

Given the broad nature of SEO it can be tricky to not lose oversight and focus on what is important. Sometimes going back to the basics can make a huge difference.

So take a look at the domain real estate you already have, analyse, prioritise and get started.

1. Back to the on page SEO basics

• Page title, meta description optimised for CTR (not guaranteed to be used!)
• Consistency across headlines, general copy, images, videos
• Schema markup if applicable
• Great UX and accessibility for visitors and bot
• Overall: relevant/unique content

Websites grow over time, new sections get added and every stakeholder requests some prominence across the domain. Re-evaluate your current set up and potentially restructure. Tools like Screaming Frog SEO Spider and Sitebulb come in incredibly handy when doing so.

2. Hierarchy highlights importance

• Analyse / (re-)structure your domain
• Have the right hierarchy in place
• Group topics/build topic cluster
• Provide a clear user journey from the main navigation to sub-topics and pages

To make your content accessible and visible for visitors and Googlebot alike your internal link structure is immensely important – across your domain as well as on page-level. Use the tools mentioned above to analyse and optimise your internal link structure. For general inspiration and on-page anchor-link best practice examples take a look at Wikipedia.

3. Lead the way with on page

• Guide visitors and bots to the right content
• Make things easy to find
• Keep click-paths short
• Use the right anchor text

Improving accessibility and visibility of your domain is great. And so is driving traffic to your site. But you should always have an objective in mind and set target KPIs for your pages. This can be a newsletter sign-up, ebook download, opening a test account or free trial registration. Whatever your offer is you should look to put in place “easier to reach” micro-conversions in addition to your main objective.  

4. Focus on conversions

• No content without a purpose
• Define your KPIs (big and small)
• Transform your readers into customers
• Make use of micro-conversions
• Keep testing

A lot of times it is not our lack of knowledge or absence of great ideas that hinder our SEO success. It is getting our strategy and campaigns implemented. We could assume that our competitors as well have great people working in their teams. If we really want to beat the competition we not only need to be more knowledgeable or more experienced and have better ideas (let’s be honest, a lot of what we do is quite similar), we ultimately need to get things done. Fast.  

5. Get SEO right by getting things done

• Champion SEO from the start
• Meet people and care about what they do
• Collaborate across teams
• Be faster + better connected = Getting things done = Smashing SEO 🎉

Thank you again for sharing your tips Kerstin about on page seo! Justyna has also given her insights into on page seo which you can read on the Authoritas blog.

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Image Credit: Photo by Arseniy Kapran on Unsplash