What is on-page SEO?
On-page SEO (also known as site SEO) is the practice of optimizing web pages to rank higher in search engines. It includes optimizations for visible content and HTML source code.
Why is on-page SEO important?
Google looks at your page content to determine if it's a relevant result for a search query. Part of this process involves finding keywords.
Screenshot from Google's " How Search Works " page.
But on-page SEO is much more than just including keywords in the content.
Google ends up looking for the most relevant search results, so their algorithms also look for other relevant content on the page. If your page is about dogs and you don't mention different breeds, Google knows there may be more related search results.
Relevance is an important part of on-page SEO, and unless you hack it, you're unlikely to get ranked.
Chapter 2
How to Create SEO Content
Before you think about technical optimizations like keyword placement, you need to create content that Google wants to rank for. For this, you need a main target keyword. If you don't know how, read our keyword research guide .
Beyond that, here are four things you need to master:
relevant
comprehensive
unique
with clarity
1. Be relevant
Relevance is arguably the most critical part of on-page SEO, which means aligning your content with search intent. Without giving searchers what they want, your chances of ranking are slim.
Since no one understands search intent better than Google, the best place to start is to analyze the search intent of the 3Cs of the current top search results:
content type
content form
content angle
We've briefly covered this concept in our keyword research guide . But we'll also dig a little deeper here, and it's critical to tailor your content and intent to combine.
1. Content Type
Content types generally fall into five categories: blog posts, products, categories, landing pages, or videos. For example, all of the top-ranking “long black dress” pages are country email list e-commerce classified pages from well-known stores.
U.S. ranking for " maxi dress" in Ahrefs' keyword analysis .
If you want to rank for this keyword, this is unlikely to happen on a blog post. Searchers are in buying mode, not learning mode.
However, for some keywords, the situation is less clear.
If we look at the ranking results for "plants", you'll see a mix of e-commerce pages and blog posts.
U.S. ranking for " plants" in Ahrefs' keyword analysis .
If this happens, do your best to judge. In this case, the top three were e-commerce pages, despite a roughly half-to-half ratio between blog posts and e-commerce pages in the results. This tells us that most searchers are shopping, not learning, so you may have the best chance of ranking for that keyword on your ecommerce page.
2. Content form
Content forms are mostly applied to blog posts as they are usually how-to, listicles, news articles, opinion pieces or reviews.
For example, every result of "Force Restart iPad" is a how-to guide, except for those on Apple's website.