7. Does your page satisfy search intent?
If you’ve been following my work or you’re a member of Gotch SEO Academy, then I know you’re sick of me talking about this. But the truth is, it’s so incredibly important and it’s something that a lot of websites get wrong.
There are 4 primary categories of search intent:
Informational – “how to get backlinks”
Transactional – “buy backlinks”
Comparison – “Moz vs. Ahrefs”
Navigational – “Gotch SEO”
8. Is your primary keyword in the title?
While SEOs don’t agree on everything, most would have a tough time disputing that your primary keyword should be in your page’s title tag. If you are doing anything on this checklist, confirm your target keyword is within the title.
But if on-page SEO was as simple as placing your keyword within the title, then there would be tons more successful SEOs.
Here’s the truth:
That’s a bare minimum on-page SEO action.
To take your title tag optimization up another notch, you would like to enhance its clickability.
9. Is your title click worthy?
Google uses the words in your title tag to know what your page is about. But there’s another side of title tags you would like to understand:
Click Through Rate (CTR).
You can find your website’s SERP CTR performance in Google Search Console once you click on “Performance”
10. Can you add modifiers to your title?
Title modifiers like “best”, “top”, or the year (“2019”) can assist you to capture more long-tail organic search traffic.
11. Have you used all your title tags for example – real estate?
Titles are often as long as 65 characters before being truncated in Google’s SERPs. You should take full advantage of this character in real estate.
Make sure your keyword is towards the front of the title, but then, you ought to use all the copywriting techniques you’ll to entice searchers to click on your result.
You can use Screaming Frog to seek out all titles under or over 65 characters once you click “Page Titles” and click on the “Filter” dropdown.
12. Is your page title wrapped in an H1 tag?
Every page on your website should have an H1 tag. You can use Screaming Frog SEO Spider to seek out what pages don’t currently have H1s.
Just click the “H1” tab and choose “Missing H1s” from the “Filter” dropdown.
13. Is your primary keyword within the meta description?
Google often rewrites meta descriptions, but it’s a still good idea to write a descriptive one that includes your primary keyword.
14. Is your meta description click worthy?
Like your title, you should try to make your meta description as click worthy as possible.
15. Is your primary keyword in the URL?
In my experience, pages that have the first keyword within the URL tend to perform better. Google also claims that having your keyword in the URL is a very small ranking factor.
16. Is your URL structure lean?
The main reason for shortening your URLs is for UX. That’s because long URLs are hard to recollect and difficult to share.
With that said, there are no benefits of having long URLs.
17. Is your primary keyword within the first sentence?
It’s extremely challenging to check micro on-page SEO factors like placing your keyword phrase within the first sentence, but it’s something I’ve always personally done.
18. Compare keyword density aggressiveness with competitors?
Many argue that you shouldn’t pay attention to keyword density. I agree for the most part. You should write your content within the most natural way possible and therefore the density should work its answer.
However, it doesn’t hurt to see the competition to spot the typical keyword density for your target keyword phrase.
19. Have you ever added variations of your primary keyword into the copy?
Try structuring pages around one primary keyword. However, you ought to also attempt to rank that page for all the closely-related variations also.
20. have you ever added synonyms (LSI keywords) of your primary keyword into the copy?
Google’s Hummingbird algorithm is meant to rank pages supported themes, not just keywords. While it’s important to structure your page around your primary keyword, you also need to interweave other relevant synonyms and topics around it.
If you examine my “backlinks” guide, you’ll see this in action. Every single section on that page was deliberate.
Content
21. Is your page different & better than your competitors?
Unique is better than long. Every page on your website (that you want to rank) needs to bring something new and fresh to the table.
While writing always think “How should page look different than what it is currently (will it add more value)?”
This is much easier when you’re competing for Informational queries.
22. Have you used keyword variations, LSIs, or synonyms in your headings? Your H1 tag is often almost like your title tag, but your other headings should include variations of your primary keyword, LSIs, and synonyms.
23. Is your copy using bullet points and numbered lists?
Use bullet points and numbered lists as frequently as you can.
24. Is your copy written well?
Some SEOs forget that not all writing is made equally. Just because you wrote 2,000 words doesn’t mean it’s good. Writing is a skill and some people are further along than others.
Images
25. Are your images unique to your website?
Like writing, not all images are created equally. Always strive to possess UNIQUE images and graphics on your page.
This may require hiring a graphic designer or photographer, but it’s a worthwhile investment because it will improve the quality/appeal of your page.
Plus, it’ll improve your brand’s perception if you put in that extra effort.
26. Are the videos relevant to page/primary keyword?
Like your images and replica, the video must be hyper relevant to the page’s content.
27. Are the videos hosted on the right platform?
Deciding where to host your videos is important from both an SEO and a business perspective. From an SEO perspective, YouTube is king because it’s the biggest video search engine by far. That’s why hosting your videos on YouTube and then embedding them on your keyword-targeted page can have a duel effect.
Meaning, you’ll rank in both Google and YouTube to drive maximum visibility. But if you have no interest in building a YouTube channel, then you can host your videos anywhere and still get all the benefits.
Links
28. Are your internal links using descriptive anchor text?
Your internal links SHOULD use keyword-rich anchor text.
29. Does the page have breadcrumbs?
Breadcrumbs are useful for large or e-com websites. You just need to keep in mind the first link priority principle.
30. Are all affiliate, sponsored, or paid links using a “NoFollow” tag?
Google states in its webmaster guidelines that each one paid links should have the NoFollow tag. A NoFollow tag is supposed to prevent PageRank from flowing through the link.
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