Ultimate SEO Guides - On-Page SEO

This means not only do you need to produce good quality content that answers users’ questions, but your on-page content needs to be in the right format (e.g. Some results return a Featured Video at the top of the page – more often than not set at the exact point in the video that answers your question) and structured in the right way to give it a chance to occupy some of these Universal SERP features and not just focus on the organic rankings.

So, what constitutes high, quality content? Surely, this could be somewhat subjective?

Well arguably it might be subjective. But ultimately, Google has to train its algorithms to rank the most useful pages higher and this means it looks for signals to help it determine that a particular page is more suitable an answer for a given query than another.

Google uses an army of people to help it fine tune its algorithms. They are freelancers working from home across the world in multiple languages and they have a specific set of guidelines (Google Search Quality Rater’s Guidelines) that they use as a reference to complete the tasks that are assigned to them. These tasks are designed to help them rate websites and pages on areas such as Page Quality and Needs Met for mobile users.

Needs Met rating tasks ask raters to focus on mobile user needs and determine how helpful and satisfying the result is for mobile users. If anything this shows the focus Google has on mobile and you should think mobile-first too.

Please note, these individuals are not training the algorithm as such, nor can a poor or good rating on your site affect your rankings. They are merely providing Google with some measurable feedback on the effectiveness of the experiments it is running that might relate to Google Search experiments in production or future ones that they are currently assessing.

Google has been pushing webmasters to produce good quality content for a long time and have introduced algorithmic changes that make old, popular SEO techniques like article spinning defunct. Google released a condensed version of their guidelines back in 2013 and then released the full version in 2015. The latest version runs to more than 160 pages and has many good and bad real-world examples of SERP results and how to rate ranking pages and its rationale behind this.

If ever there was an essential reading list for SEOs then this would be on it!

Tip #1.  Anyone working on the content on your site should have some training on this.

The guidelines are where we first heard about ‘Your Money or Your Life’ pages (YMYL). Google places great importance on these sites as they can impact someone’s life, e.g. They are about medical, health and financial topics, such as financial transaction pages within ecommerce sites.

These sites especially should have EAT – Expertise, Authority and Trust.

The site should show why those who are giving the recommendations on the YMYL pages have the expertise (i.e. Display their credentials), the authority (i.e. They are well known in the industry) and they can be trusted (i.e. Reviews, citations from other industry resources).

The complete Search Quality Guide covers assessing the quality of the website, but here we’re just focused on a specific page and these are the main factors that they consider when assessing the overall page quality.

1. The Purpose of the Page
2. Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness
3. Main Content (MC) Quality and Amount
4. Website Information/information about who is responsible for the MC
5. Website Reputation/reputation about who is responsible for the MC

Tip #2 – So why not do your own internal (or even external anonymised testing) to see how your key money pages compare to your competitors on the Page Quality and Needs Met scales.  Perhaps, this might give you some useful insights into discernable differences between your pages and higher ranking competitors and suggestions of changes you can make to your page to improve the user experience.

Tip #3 – If you really want to get a feel for what Google is looking for then sign-up to become a Google Search Quality Evaluator yourself.  Google has recruited in the past through companies like Appen and Lionbridge.  Alternatively, the low-cost online Search Quality Evaluator courses run by a former Search Quality Rater give you a good sense of what it is like to evaluate websites.

Tip #4 – Don’t just think about producing the content.  Do your keyword research – which keywords generate Featured Videos, which keywords generate Featured Snippets and are they in a table, list or paragraph format?  Professionally produced content that’s the right combination of content types or formats, in the layout Google favours (e.g. Articles or category pages) all combine to produce great content.

Ask yourself this question – is my site painful for its users?

Google wants to deliver the best experience for its users and that means serving them the most relevant, authoritative answers from trusted sources to the questions they need answering.

But what happens when it’s difficult to make a case for Page A or Page B to rank highest for a particular term?

As experienced SEOs, we’ve all seen rankings jump around from time to time outside of a widespread algorithm update and we know for sure that Google runs experiments and analyses vast amounts of anonymised user data to help it make the best decisions. These experiments or click-thru rates in either position might sway the top ranking in favour of Page A over Page B or vice-versa.

But when all other things are equal then the User Experience and Page Experience offered by Page A over Page B could prove to be telling.

Google has given us fair warning that this is important – announcing that page speed was a ranking factor back in Spring 2010. It went on to announce that it was introducing mobile first indexing back in March 2018 and recently announced that all sites were moving to mobile first indexing in September 2020.

So we know Google uses the mobile version of a site’s content for indexing and ranking and places tremendous importance on ensuring users get a good experience.

For SEOs this means you have to test your mobile site’s usability and fix any issues that might impact mobile users enjoyment of your content. Typical problems include; huge image file sizes, content too wide for the screen, clickable elements too close together so buttons are hard to click, and text so small it’s illegible.

You can see some of these errors reported in Google Search Console. Fix them!

But don’t wait for Google to report these issues – especially as validating you’ve fixed some of these issues can take as long as 28 days. Use the following tools to help:

Google’s free mobile friendly test – https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly

Smart Bear – Cross platform browser testing – https://smartbear.com/ – to make sure your site loads nicely in all modern browsers.

And do your own usability testing to discover other issues that may not necessarily be reported on today, but are likely to turn real-users away (and one day search engines when they build a test for this too) such as sub-menus not being clickable, no search functionality, no contact details and so on.

But don’t wait for Google to report these issues – especially as validating you’ve fixed some of these issues can take as long as 28 days. Use the following tools to help:

Google’s free mobile friendly test – https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly

Smart Bear – Cross platform browser testing – https://smartbear.com/ – to make sure your site loads nicely in all modern browsers.

And do your own usability testing to discover other issues that may not necessarily be reported on today, but are likely to turn real-users away (and one day search engines when they build a test for this too) such as sub-menus not being clickable, no search functionality, no contact details and so on.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
First Input Delay (FID)
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Core Web Vitals, also called Web Vitals are the performance metrics that affect User Experience including how fast the page loads, the visual stability (if the page jumps) and the interactivity. Google has introduced this as many sites are still loading incredibly slowly. The speed of a site affects bounce rates, time on site and conversions. So no more slow sites! If your site is still performing poorly by then, it will be harder for it to appear higher in the SERPs.

Take a few examples of some of the key pages on your site and check their performance using Lighthouse, GT Metrix or Google Page Speed Insights.

Tip 1 – Test your key Page Templates

Ideally you should select a number of page templates that cover a large proportion of your overall site pages. This way by fixing the obvious issues with a few templates you can have a positive impact on many pages. This is important as Google will use average Web Vitals data for your site if it doesn’t have data from enough real users for a specific page.

Tip 2 – Don’t focus on the overall headline score for mobile and desktop! It fluctuates!

Google recommends taking a couple of readings every time you make a change to get a more consistent view of progress. Honestly, if you focus on the overall score it will drive you mad, as you will make a change that you think improves the overall score and it will go backwards – or it will improve the Desktop score and make the Mobile score worse.

Instead focus on the key metrics for the Core Web Vitals:

1. First Contentful Paint (FCP) is an important, user-centric metric for measuring perceived load speed because it marks the first point in the page load timeline where the user can see anything on the screen—a fast FCP helps reassure the user that something is happening
2. Speed Index measures how quickly content is visually displayed during page load.
3. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is a Core Web Vitals metric and measures when the largest content element in the viewport becomes visible. It can be used to determine when the main content of the page has finished rendering on the screen. The most common causes of a poor LCP are: Slow server response times
4. Time to Interactive measures how long it takes a page to become fully interactive. A page is considered fully interactive when:
   1. The page displays useful content, which is measured by the First Contentful Paint,
   2. Event handlers are registered for most visible page elements, and
   3. The page responds to user interactions within 50 milliseconds.
5. Total Blocking Time (TBT) metric measures the total amount of time between First Contentful Paint (FCP) and Time to Interactive (TTI) where the main thread was blocked for long enough to prevent input responsiveness.
6. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures the instability of content by summing shift scores across layout shifts that don’t occur within 500ms of user input. It looks at how much visible content shifted in the viewport as well as the distance the elements impacted were shifted.

Then focus on solving the issues raised by your page speed reporting tool. I recommend using at least two tools.

Once you have found a friendly web developer and fixed all the obvious issues, then finally, think about what changes you could make that would create a better user experience – and by better, I mean making your page templates load faster and be ready for a user to interact with sooner.

Striving for 100/100 is not completely unrealistic, I have seen a few examples of sites with home pages that score this well, but it may not even be necessary to go to the nth degree.
Eventually the law of diminishing returns applies.

Google itself says that going from a score in the 90s to 100 can take a huge amount of effort and even Google’s own search page does not score top marks!

Tip 3 – Benchmark against your competitors page templates or key landing pages and just focus on ensuring you out score your competitors!

Tip 4 – Use Google’s Lighthouse calculator to see the weighting of each of the Core Web Vitals and to work out how great an improvement you need to make to get everything in the green zone, scoring 90 – 100.

Set yourself a realistic goal of beating your competitors’ pages. Run a report first and then click on the ‘See calculator’ link below the Core Web Vitals in the Lab Section, as then the calculator will show your performance levels and it’s easier to drag and drop the sliders to see what you need to do to reach your goals.

Tip 5 – Implement AMP to accelerate your mobile pages.

Tip 6 – Prepare for your performance to drop in the future!

I’m afraid you cannot just fix and forget this. You will do all this work and then someone will change something on your website and your performance levels and scores will drop again.

After all your website should be regularly updated with fresh content and features; so it’s highly likely someone will inadvertently undo your good work on improving the page experience for your users.

So either set yourself some alerts that automatically check your scores and performance levels against your attained benchmarks and/or use Lighthouse’s CI tool (or some cloud based tools that do the same) to set a Page Experience budget that is integrated as part of the cContinuous Integration and testing framework built into your development process. For larger sites, this should ensure that any future site changes do not cause a regression in your page experience performance levels.

This is a big topic – if you would like a simple primer then try this article by one of our Tea Time SEO speakers Dave Davies of Beanstalk Internet Marketing. Bill Slawski has also analysed related Google patents to shed light on how Google may be using its understanding of entities in its ranking models.

As it relates to on-page SEO what relevant advice can we give you?

Tip 1 – Reference relevant entities in your content and consider linking to them.

Tip 2 – Mark-up your content to show how you relate to these entities. This goes beyond basic schema markup to create a vocabulary of relevant entities that relate to your content that you can mark-up using linked data publishing mark-up to reference.

There are some great tools like WordLift.io that can do the heavy lifting for you. (Editor’s Note: We’ve just implemented this and will update this guide when we have more results).

Quality backlinks from relevant sources are the lifeblood of your SEO campaign. Once you’ve established solid technical foundations and have invested in producing quality content then what else can you do other than promote your content organically via PR, social and ads, and/or if you want to risk it then via paid link campaigns.

It’s worth noting at this juncture, in Google’s Search Quality guidelines the reputation of the website itself has a bearing on the PQ rating;

“You must also look for reputation information about the website. We need to find out what outside, independent sources say about the website. When there is disagreement between what the website says about itself and what reputable independent sources say about the website, we’ll trust the independent sources.”

So tackle link building in a couple of stages:

Hopefully, you won’t have disgruntled customers denigrating your company on any of the platforms in Stage 1 or worse still creating dedicated [yourwebsite]sucks.com types of sites to try and spite you. If you have, then you need some professional help beyond the scope of this guide.

However, many of the sites mentioned in Stage 1 are important in helping create a positive image of your business. So manage your reputation on these sites.

Get your customer support people to ask happy clients for a review on one of these sites and rotate this until you get good coverage and a solid rating and reputation across all of them.

If you are not sure which sites are the most important for your niche, then you can research them for free in the Authoritas SEO Visibility Tool. Discover which sites are ranking well in the SERPs for your related keywords and target them.

Here’s an example of software review sites that we analysed for our own internal marketing.

This shows us that G2.com is the most visible website in the UK for software reviews in general.

You can then filter this view to only look at their Visibility for relevant keywords and in our example we found that leading review sites like Capterra and G2 ranked in the top few places for very relevant keywords.

It then becomes essential to manage (and even consider advertising) on these software comparison review sites as they may help your overall SEO visibility but more importantly they can bring you relevant buyers.

Many tools such as Authoritas allow you to analyse your backlink profile at a domain level.

However, this can be far more useful and informative if you look at your individual key landing pages and compare the relevance and Authority of your landing pages to your competition.

At Authoritas we have always recommended Majestic link data – but whichever link data you use, try and assess topical relevance as well as domain or page authority metrics (whether you prefer Majestic or Moz or your own in-house metris).

Figure 1 – Quality and Relevancy Matrix

With the Authoritas platform you can define a list of relevant terms and when we re-crawl the backlinks we get from Majestic to your site we add an additional layer of value helping you to see whether the links are from relevant or influential sites.

If you also add competing pages to the link analysis section then you should be able to download the data and produce a simple scatter graph in a platform of your choice (Excel, Google Data Studio, Tableau, PowerBI, etc) which will give you a good indication of how you fare against the competition.

Figure 2 – Comparative Link Velocity

It’s also important to monitor the rate at which you are comparing links to your competitors.

You can do this automatically in the Authoritas dashboard.

Now that you have identified the gaps between you and your competitors and the velocity at which your competitors are gaining or losing links, all you need to do is build more quality links than your competitors.

How to do exactly this will be the subject of another complete ultimate guide in the series.

In this chapter, we dive a little deeper into on-page optimisation for eCommerce sites. The same principles outlined in Chapters 1 to 5 of course apply, but there’s some additional considerations if you are an SEO in eCommerce looking to grow organic traffic that will convert.

Marketplaces not only dominate the eCommerce industry, but even the search engine results pages (SERPs). Whenever you search for a product, more often than not the top rankings are dominated by marketplaces’ listings followed by the branded, small-scale and niche sites.

This is one reason why small-scale/niche eCommerce sites first invest in social media marketing, influencer marketing, and paid advertising to grab early success. They believe SEO can either be neglected or postponed as they cannot see results quickly.

But this is not the case. Being a small-scale/niche eCommerce site, here is how you can move forward with SEO.

Here are the three major differences between marketplaces vs small-scale/niche eCommerce sites and their SEO practices:

1. Product Search – People love marketplaces. Many of your customers will first open Amazon, and then search for a product. 54% of product searches happen on Amazon. While in the case of small-scale/niche eCommerce sites, people either buy from you through other channels or resellers, or search for your brand name in the search engines and then buy from you. These customers could be either repeat buyers or referral buyers.
2. Number of sellers and their marketing – The major differences between marketplaces and small-scale sites are the number of sellers and products. They have millions of sellers and billions of product SKUs. Most sellers invest in creating powerful product descriptions, optimising their product detail pages and advertising their products within key marketplaces. So, marketplaces, as well as sellers are investing heavily in SEO. This is not the case with the small-scale sites. Here in many instances there are a limited set of SKUs and limited budgets to spend on SEO.
3. SEO team – Marketplaces invest heavily in SEO, and that’s the reason they hire many in-house SEO professionals. A small-sized company does not have the resources to hire many SEOs to manage a site. Sometimes, a consultant with some SEO experience will do. Therefore they need to work smarter with the time they have to optimise their site(s).

How to begin SEO for small-scale/niche eCommerce sites?
Learn the step-by-step SEO process for small-sized eCommerce sites.