On Page SEO
On-page SEO is the elements included on a page. These are elements you have direct control over, and in most cases, can be changed instantaneously. Giving on-page SEO the time it deserves helps Google assign relevance to your pages and ties up your content with search terms Google’s users are searching for.
Trusted by Local Business
Over the years, we have had the privilege to help some of Glasgow’s most beloved brands grow their search presence. Below is a selection of some of those brands.
How can On Page SEO help you dominate your niche?
By focusing on on-page SEO, you can give your page more relevant tailored towards a specific group of keywords. This increases your ranks in search engines. Moreover, better quality content leads to a more engaged audience and getting elements like your title and description tags right has a direct impact of the number of visitors that will click on your listing on search engine results page. A higher CTR has been associated with higher rankings over time in literally hundreds of industry reports.
Our On Page SEO Process
Our on page SEO process is proven to increase the rankability of your website. We’ve evolved this process over 6 years based on what works, and what dosen’t.
Meta Tags
The following meta tags are tags you can put on your website that are invisible to the user, but that summarise your website, allowing Google and other search engines to gauge the topics your web page covers. These meta tags are invisible to users on your website but specify what users see in Google’s search engine results pages most of the time. We write ‘most of the time’ because if these tags are badly written, Google will ignore them and show their own title and description in their search engine results pages.
Title Tags
Title tags display in Google above your description. Remember the importance of headings in any piece of communication. David Ogilvy, the father of modern advertising once famously said:
“On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”
Granted you are not spending money showing listings in Google for free, but the importance of headlines has not changed over the decades.
Description Tags
Description tags are the text that displays the below the heading. These should entice people to click on your listing using a strong call to action text. Including your keyword is kind of important here. If your keyword is in the description, Google will embolden the keyword making your listing stand out more effecting click-through rate and indirectly increasing rankings. However, having your keyword in the description tag has no direct impact on rankings. Our rule is as simple – if it is natural to, include it.
Headings
Google looks at headings to categorise information based on main headings or H1s and the subheadings underneath them.
Your First Heading
The first H1 on your website is extremely important as it categorises everything that comes after and is one of the most important aspects Google considers when reviewing your on-page SEO.
Page Hierarchy
Sub-heading help Google categories your pages by creating page hierarchy. Page hierarchy allows you to rank for a subject, rather than individual keywords. This is extremely important as out of every single search on the internet 15% of these have never been searched for. By completely covering a subject you can rank for keywords your competitors don’t even know about.
Images
Images turn solid lumps of text into readable pieces of information. This helps user experience, and Google is big on this. However, you need to make sure that Google can assign some form of relevancy to these images. You also need to make sure images are compressed – have a look at technical SEO to find out more.
Image Names
Images should have names. It helps if these are related to your keyword as Google reads these and some, all be it small, relevancy based on your image names.
Alt Tags
Alt-tags are the big one for search engines. Alt-tags/alt-texts are alternative texts that search engines can read. Google is advanced; however, they cannot fully recognize images. Providing alt-text provides something that Google can read and assign value to. As a bonus, web browser readers for the visually impaired read alt-text adding extra value for users.
Word count
Word count varies dramatically amongst search terms. You can rank well with shorter-form articles. Indeed, some direct question-based searches’ intent matches content that is shown.
However, for most informational searches, longer-form content tends to rank better. As a rule of thumb, content should be over 300 words long. Anything lower than this would be classed as thin content by our auditing systems.
Sense checking is always required to determine which pieces of content deserve to be thin. Based on our findings, we can recommend adding extra sections to a page or even do it ourselves.
For new pieces of heavy content, we use a tool called Surfer SEO. Surfer SEO aggregates several factors, including average word count of the top 10 (or 1-3) pages ranking for your chosen keyword.
Surfer SEO also lets us pull in other relevant keywords, questions to answer and a whole host of other SEO content goodies, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.
This approach takes out a lot of the guesswork when determining word count for a page as data backs it. We strongly believe that data, even content choices, should back everything in a good SEO campaign.
Internal Link Architecture
‘Internal Link Architecture’ is a fancy way of assessing how search engines can access other content on your site. Generally speaking, having an easy to use top-level navigation and using internal links efficiently can create a sufficient internal link architecture.
Google and other search engines follow internal links on your website, so it is important to link to important pages on your website.
Navigation
Navigation is an often overlooked aspect of SEO. It is important that users and search engines can navigate with ease to every important website on your website. A1 SEO Glasgow can guide you on creating universal navigation.
Internal Linking
Internal linking is a great way of increasing your crawl rate. Also, by using anchor text, you can give a page more weight for a specific keyword. For example, using the keyword anchor text “SEO Glasgow” and linking to the page on our website we want to rank for this keyword, we can push this keyword up in the ranking slightly.
On its own, the latter won’t do much. However, rolled out and scaled up naturally (read: not spamming duplicate keyword anchor text across your website) it can help boost an individual page’s ranking page rank.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is the bread and butter of any good SEO campaign. Can you rank a website without keyword research? Of course, you can! You can take the ‘write every piece of conceivable content within my niche possible until my fingers bleed’ and most likely get somewhere… eventually.
At A1 SEO Glasgow, we do not use or recommend this approach. Instead, we are in favour of researching the terms users are searching for in Google and crafting new content or tweaking existing content to cover these search terms.
Unlike most SEO agencies, A1 SEO Glasgow focuses on targeting a page towards a subject grouping of keywords, rather than an individual keyword where possible. This method of ‘keyword clustering’ allows for the same amount of results with less investment in new content.
Our weapon of choice for keyword research varies depending on the day of the week, weather, staff moods and hunger levels, but we’re usually using Ahrefs or SEMrush.
These tools give us estimations for the search volume of a specific keyword and how difficult this keyword will be to rank for. Keyword difficulty is assessed by aggregating the number of referring domains each of the top 10 pages ranking for a given keyword have pointed to them.
Keyword Density
Your page must mention your target keyword, however, trying to stuff your keywords in places they don’t belong affects user experience in a negative way that more than outweighs any small benefit this strategy rarely yields.
True Density
99% of SEOs will use a tool called Yoast to figure out keyword density. This tool has a flat percentage that it works across the board.
However, keyword density changes from SERP to SERP and can be swayed by each important word and phrase in the context of an analyzed keyword.
That’s where the idea of true density comes in. True Density is the saturation of each important word and phrase.
Relevant Secondary Keywords
By aggregating other pages ranking in the search engine results page, we discover common secondary keywords. This is a powerful strategy as search engines look for topical relevance on a webpage, meaning they are expecting to see certain words and phrases on pages ranking for certain keywords.
Trusted by Local Business
Over the years, we have had the privilege to help some of Glasgow’s most beloved brands grow their search presence. Below is a selection of some of those brands.
Testimonials
Why Choose Us
Hi, I’m Graham Grieve, the lead SEO consultant here at A1 SEO Glasgow. We are a highly efficient team of 11 search engine optimisation specialists based right here in Glasgow. We only offer SEO as a service. This means that, unlike most generic digital marketing agencies, 100% of your budget spent with A1 SEO Glasgow goes directly towards ranking your site higher in Google. We have over 7 years of experience ranking websites in some of the world’s most competitive niches and know exactly what works. Our campaigns are fully transparent meaning you are able to see exactly what work has been carried out on your website at any point. We also go to great lengths to educate our clients about SEO in a straight forward, no-nonsense way. It’s usually me on the other end of the phone so if you have any questions, please give me a call and together we can start ranking your website higher in search engines.
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