19 step on-page SEO checklist

Want to get more results from your content? Optimising what’s ‘on the page’ is the place to start – and the place to keep looping back to!

Before you plough effort or budget into other aspects of SEO, like building links, take the time to make your content as good as it can. (This can even help with link building, as great quality content can earn some links naturally.)

But if only it was as simple as writing something awesome and sticking it online! On-page optimisation goes beyond just the text you see on the page – there are elements which affect usability, page speed and additional context that you can give to search engines, all of which can play a part in boosting your page’s performance.

This week we’re diving in to on-page optimisation, with a checklist and step-by-step guide to optimising your web pages.

When should on-page optimisation happen?

This guide can be used both for creating new content and optimising your existing content. Realistically, content will need to be regularly updated, tweaked and optimised in order for you to get better SEO results over time.

Once on-page optimisation has started, it will be an ongoing process to create and optimise content. Over time, this helps your site show up for more keywords, gain more traffic, develop more authority in your niche and meet a wider range of user needs for your target audience, among other benefits.

19 step on-page SEO checklist:

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1. Select your primary target keyword
2. Check the SERPs for your keyword
3. Optimise your title
4. Create an SEO-friendly URL
5. Optimise the meta description
6. Match the introduction with the intent
7. Meet the user intent
8. Include original content
9. Cover the topic in-depth
10. Use formatting well
11. Include relevant media
12. Optimise images
13. Create internal links
14. Include helpful external links
15. Link to a strong author page
16. Check the user experience
17. Use relevant structured data
18. Check the technical SEO basics
19. Submit to Google Search Console

A step-by-step guide to using the checklist

1. Select your primary target keyword

While most pages will rank for more than one keyword, it helps maintain focus if you choose a main target keyword for the page. Your keyword research will guide this, but as a general rule try to aim for a clear but concise topic.

There will naturally be other sub-topics within the topic you choose, so don’t worry that you’re limiting yourself. A clear keyword just makes it easier to understand the scope of your content. If you find that one sub-topic needs much more explanation, it’s probably a good candidate for a second piece of content.

Take a look for:

• Titles. Are there any patterns here – ‘listicles’, guides, checklists, comparisons etc?
• Rich results. Features like recipe cards, maps results, short-form video, ‘People Also Ask’ etc can be an additional opportunity to rank.
• What competitors’ results look like. Do they have rich features like star ratings, prices or multiple image previews that would make people more likely to click their page?
• The format of competitors’ pages. What sort of media are they using? How long and in-depth is their content? How does it match the user intent?

3. Optimise your title

Search engines will only show so many characters before the title cuts off, so it’s best to try and include your target keyword towards the start so that it shows up in search.

Ideally, we don’t want the page title to cut off – but sometimes this is challenging, especially if it has a long brand name appended to it!

You can use a SERP simulator, like this one from Merkle, to play around with the title and visualise how it will appear in the SERPs.

Make sure that the title shows what the page is about – then make sure your page meets the expectations of the title! This is one of the things that Google asks its’ Quality Raters to look for as an indication of a higher quality website.

4. Create an SEO-friendly URL

The days of shoving exact-match keywords into a URL are (thankfully) over. Here are a few key concepts for optimisation:

• Include the target keyword where it makes sense, but don’t be tempted to shove in additional keywords if they’re not necessary.
• If you’re intending to use the content longer term, avoid including anything that will date it. For example, adding a year, month, or particular event to the URL which wouldn’t make sense when you read the content a year or so down the line. Otherwise to avoid the content looking outdated, you’d have to add redirects at each update – which quickly gets messy and difficult to manage!

Keep in mind that if you’re optimising existing content and you change the URL, you should put in place a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one, and ideally also update any internal links. This is best practice in any case, but is especially important if you have any significant traffic or backlinks going to the original URL.

5. Optimise the meta description

Meta descriptions come with their own caveat. They’re not a ranking factor – and Google rewrites them around 70% of the time!

With that in mind, it might seem a waste of time to create them. But for the 30% of the time that they are used, they’re one of the best opportunities you have to get people to click on your page.

After all, there’s no point in ranking in a high position if no-one then clicks on the link. Ranking is just a precursor to getting (and converting!) traffic.

There are plenty of ways to provide in-depth value without using tactics like this. User experience is an ever-more important element in ranking, so the aim should always be to make the experience positive (and hopefully over time, we’ll see an end to the recipe content formula!)

Getting the introduction right means understanding both the intent of your user – use your research from step 2 for this – as well as who your target audience is and what they’ll already know.

Do they need context to make best use of the main body of the blog? If so, what exactly do they need to understand?

For example, my target audience for the Get to Know SEO blogs (hey, you!) is people working in small marketing teams. If that’s you, you don’t need every blog post to start off with a lengthy ‘what is SEO?’.

But beyond that, the level of understanding can vary greatly, from a new apprentice to the marketing director. Because of that, I usually include a bit of context about the specific area of SEO in each blog, along with using subheadings so that people can quickly skip past what’s not relevant for them.

Don’t get too carried away with subheadings though – they’re great for quick navigation, but no-one wants to be scrolling past a dozen of them before you answer their query! Aim to meet the initial search intent as early on as you can.

7. Meet the user intent

We’ve talked lots about user intent already, and it’s something I’ll happily keep banging on about – because getting this right is one of the most important parts of getting your content to rank well.

Make sure you understand as much as you can about what the user intent is. Is someone looking for a definition? Step-by-step instructions? To download something? To buy something? Comparison information for a product?

Once you understand this, think through the steps they need to go through to meet that intent, then create the content that will enable them to do this.

8. Include original content

In the AI-age we’re living through, original content is valued even more than before. It’s easy to regurgitate what’s already out there – the bit that sets content apart is its originality.

Original content is a way to stand out, develop trust and give people a reason to visit your site over one which only offers a mash-up of existing content. Because of this, it also gives Google a reason to rank your site higher.

9. Cover the topic in-depth

Meeting the search intent early doesn’t mean the content can’t be in-depth.

It’s true, some people will come on to your site, find the answer they need, and then disappear again.

But a lot of people don’t just want one answer – they’ll have follow up questions. These might help them compare products, understand how to follow a process or find out what facilities are available at a place they’re visiting.

If you can guess – and answer – these related intents within your blog, you’re more likely to keep someone on you site, and gain more trust from the effort you’ve put into helping them.

Think through what the user could need when they land on your page. If you’ve created a round-up of local restaurants, they probably want to choose somewhere for a meal. Does your page help them to get in touch with the restaurant? Can you help them find a menu, reviews and a booking link?

For a product page, is there information to help them compare similar products? Does it tell them about the materials, how to get it delivered (and what the charges are), is there a demo of how to use it? Are there FAQs which answer their barriers to purchase?

The secondary intents obviously vary for each page, but spend a bit of time thinking about what a user is looking for when they visit your site and work out how to provide as much of that value as you can.

10. Use formatting well

No-one likes to be hit by a wall of text when they open a web page. And a wall of text looks even more dramatic when you visit a page from a mobile device, and get hit with a never-ending scroll of doom through a solid block of words.

Our attention is often different online than in ‘real life’ – and for anything other than the shortest of pages, formatting is required to make a page easier to read.

The aim is to make your page as easy as possible for someone to read, navigate through and understand. Formatting options can include:

• Subheadings – making it clear what’s in each section, so that people can jump past content that’s irrelevant to them
• Bullet points or numbered lists – these make it easier to understand key information quickly
• Shorter paragraphs prevent the ‘wall of text’ problem and are easier to read online
• Anchor or jump links can be used to help people quickly navigate through a page

11. Include relevant media

Another way you can break up text – and help visitors take in information – is by using a variety of media.

Depending on the topic and purpose of your page, this could include:

• Photos – of a product, location, user-generated content in reviews, or to illustrate a concept or your brand
• Screenshots or screenshare videos to help someone follow instructions
• Custom graphics including infographics to illustrate or explain a concept
• A relevant video explaining the topic or demonstrating a product
• Audio, such as a podcast or interview, demonstrating a pronunciation

12. Optimise images

There are two sides to optimising images:

1. Making sure they don’t slow down your page
2. Making the most of the text associated with them

Click here for a step-by-step guide to optimising images for search.

You’ll need to create links both ways:

• In your new content, link out to relevant pages where it makes sense. For example, in this blog you’ll find links to other pages which explain concepts in more detail.
• Find relevant ways to link from existing content to a new page, which can help to establish the newer content.

Stuck with where to add the links? Use the site: search operator in Google to find pages you’ve already written on a topic. For example, searching for “site:https://www.apple.com music” would show up pages on Apple’s website where music is mentioned.

14. Include helpful external links

Sometimes people worry about including external links to other sites. There are two reasons for this:

1. You could lose visitors when they follow a link to another site.
2. You might lose some of your page authority by directing it to another site

The first is at least partially rectified by using the target=”_blank” attribute (or ‘open link in new tab’ option), which opens the link in a separate tab whilst keeping your website open on the original tab.

The second is an outdated concept which you don’t need to worry about.

Think about it from a user perspective. If someone mentions a great resource or tool elsewhere, wouldn’t you want to have quick access to find out more about that? If you see a hotel, restaurant or activity listed that you want to try out – you’d want a way to quickly get in touch with the provider to find out more and book.

External links are can be helpful, and when used well they can improve the user experience and make your page a more valuable resource.

When you’re including internal links:

• Aim to only link to reputable sources. External links to high-quality pages and websites are seen as a positive by search engines, links to spam sites are seen as a red flag. You can use tools like Norton’s Safe Web or Sucuri SiteCheck which should flag up any particularly dangerous sites.
• Only link when it’s relevant. A page with a very high number of external links can be seen as spammy. As a general rule of thumb, links within text are probably useful – if you’re ending up with a big list of links, it’s too much!

15. Link to a strong author page

In the era of Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T), knowing who’s written – or reviewed – your content is important.

This applies even more if your content falls into the ‘Your Money or Your Life’ (YMYL) category, which includes topics such as safety, finance, medicine and health.

Many blogs include an author bio, often with a link to the author page. This is your opportunity to demonstrate the credentials of the person who’s written that piece of content, and show why they can be trusted.

For medical, legal and similar fields, the author page will need information on qualifications and experience. Other information can include certifications, links to other places the author has been published, awards and more.

16. Check the user experience

User experience is constantly getting more and more important. If you’re struggling to get traction on a page, try to experience it as a visitor – and get others involved to test it out too.

17. Use relevant structured data

Schema is a type of structured data which can be used to give additional context about the page to search engines.

Some common schema types include:

• Products
• Reviews and aggregate ratings
• Article schema
• Organisation
• Recipe
• Restaurant

While there are a huge number of options available, not all of them are supported by Google. Google’s documentation highlights the types of schema that it supports.

JSON-LD is the easiest form of schema to work with, and can usually be added to your content by editing it as html. You can use tools like Merkle’s Schema Generator to help create the code, and Google’s Rich Results Test to validate it.

Take a look at our guide on using schema for SEO.

18. Check the technical SEO basics

For most newer or smaller websites, a full-on technical SEO audit is unnecessary – but it’s always worth checking that the basics are in place. If you’ve suddenly lost traffic to a page, or are struggling to get it to rank, check the following:

• Is there anything stopping the page being indexed? This could be an unintended noindex tag, or a directive in robots.txt that’s blocking that area of the website from being indexed. You can check this by inspecting the page in Google Search Console, or using a tool like Screaming Frog to crawl a wider section of the website.
• Are there issues with page speed? Slower-to-load pages will generally have a harder time ranking well, although this does depend on the competition for a given keyword. There are a whole heap of tools out there to check this, including Google’s Page Speed Insights, Lighthouse, GTMetrix and Pingdom tools.
• Is the page mobile friendly? Google’s now running on mobile-first indexing, so this can have a big impact on whether a page gets indexed or ranked. You can test using Google Lighthouse, or Bing’s Mobile Friendliness Test Tool.
• Are there any broken links that could damage the user experience? Screaming Frog is an easy way to check for these.

19. Submit to Google Search Console

A nice easy one to finish with! Once you’ve created (or updated) your page, submit it to Google Search Console using the inspect URL tool. This helps Google to find your pages quicker, and will also run a quick scan and check that the page can be indexed.

Ongoing on-page optimisation

Over time, you’ll return to pages again and again to make further improvements and get them to perform a bit better each time.When you do this, it’s helpful to make a note of what optimisations you make – and when. This is useful for pinning down which changes helped to improve (or decrease) your traffic or rankings – making it easier to double-down on what’s working, and reverse any negative changes.