SEO · 25 Sep 2021 · 3 min read

What are the best on-page SEO techniques?

Google updates its ranking algorithm multiple times a year, which makes keeping up with every on-page SEO technique that matters a moving target. Most searchers never go past the first page of results, so staying there is worth the effort.

What is on-page SEO?

On-page SEO, also called on-site SEO, is the practice of optimising individual web pages to rank higher in search engines — covering both the HTML source and the visible content itself.

Why it matters

Google checks a page’s content against a search query to judge relevance, and its algorithms are built to surface the most relevant match. A page about watches that never mentions specific models or types gives Google less to match against a specific search — and it’s that relevance, more than any single trick, that decides whether a page ranks.

Techniques worth prioritising

Study your competitors’ best-performing pages

Look at where competitors’ organic traffic is actually coming from: the pages, the keywords, the backlinks feeding them. That analysis points you toward keyword gaps, link gaps, and specific opportunities to improve your own content, rather than guessing at what to publish next.

Improve organic click-through rate

Title tags and meta descriptions have an outsized effect on click-through rate, and both are fully within your control. Testing changes to them over time shows what earns more clicks, and running paid search campaigns alongside organic listings can speed up that testing, since you get data on which titles and descriptions perform faster than waiting on organic results alone.

Run a keyword gap analysis

Rather than creating new content blindly, look at what your competitors rank for that you don’t. A proper keyword gap analysis shows exactly which terms are worth targeting to fill real gaps in your own content, giving each new page a clear purpose.

Check competitors’ broken backlinks

Finding broken (404) pages on a competitor’s site, pages that used to attract backlinks, gives you a ready-made opportunity: build similar content, then reach out to whoever linked to the dead page and offer your working version instead.

Optimise images properly

Alt tags are only part of image optimisation. Resizing images, naming files descriptively, compressing file size, serving them from a CDN, and including them in an image sitemap all affect how well they perform in image search, and skipping these steps means leaving some of that traffic on the table.

Conclusion

None of these techniques work in isolation. Together, relevance-focused content, competitor analysis, and properly optimised images give a page a real shot at climbing, and staying on, the first page of results.