SEO
A Comprehensive On-Page SEO Checklist for 2024
If you’ve invested time and effort writing an epic piece of content, don’t forget about on-page SEO. It helps google to understand what your page is about and show it to as many people as possible in the search results.
Even better, many on-page improvements are super quick and easy to do.
Follow this checklist for perfect on-page SEO every time:
If you’re looking for a reusable interactive checklist to use time and time again, here are a few other formats
Let’s run through everything real quick.
Google says it’s best to use words that are relevant to your content in page URLs, so you don’t want random gobbledygook urls like domain.com/734/834753956756
if you can avoid it. It’s better to use something short and descriptive like domain.com/mens/shirts
.
It only takes a few seconds to change this in most content management systems:
If you’re not sure what words or phrases to use, the main keyword you’re targeting is usually a good bet. That’s what we do on the Ahrefs blog 90% of the time.
For example, our target keyword for this post is “on page SEO checklist,” so that’s what the post’s URL is:
Few best practices to keep in mind:
- Avoid repeating words. If your page is about mens shirts and it’s nested in the /mens/ subfolder, you don’t need to repeat the word “mens.”
domain.com/mens/shirts/
is better thandomain.com/mens/mens-shirts/
- Avoid dates. If a searcher comes across
domain.com/blog/2020/fashion-tips/
in 2024, they’re going to assume it’s out-of-date even if you updated the content yesterday. Sodomain.com/blog/fashion-tips/
would be better. - Avoid being too specific. If your URL is
domain.com/blog/20-best-fashion-tips/
, it’s going to look weird if you add more tips to your post later on. Using the less specificdomain.com/blog/best-fashion-tips/
gives you more future freedom.
Google says that title tags are often the main piece of information searchers use to decide which result to click on. If yours is boring and dull, you’re probably not going to get as many clicks as you could—even if you rank.
It’s the same story for meta descriptions, which Google often uses for the descriptive snippet.
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach for title tags, but the ABC formula is a decent starting point for blog posts:
For your meta description, my best advice is to try to expand on your title tag to give searchers more detail and context.
If you’re struggling or just want a fast solution, give our free AI title tag generator and meta description generator a shot. Tell the tools what your page is about and your desired writing tone and they’ll generate a few options.
Remember to keep them both short and swee, too. If they’re too long, they’ll get cut-off in search. This looks odd and makes them less compelling. You can use a free tool like this one to check for truncation before publishing, or Ahrefs’ Site Audit to find all the issues on your site.
Google recommends using one H1 tag per page. It makes sense to use this for your page title as H1 is the highest level heading there is.
Most content management systems do this automatically, but you can double-check your title is indeed a H1 for free using Ahrefs SEO toolbar. Just click the Content tab:
If the copy you’d expect to be wrapped in a H1 tag isn’t, hit up your developer!
People want what you promised them in your title and meta description, so don’t kick things off with a load of fluff. Get straight to the point and give the reader what they came for in the first sentence.
There’s no one-size-fits-all way to do this. It all depends on what searchers are looking for.
For example, when people search for “toxic backlinks,” they’re overwhelmingly looking for a definition above all else. That’s why I made the very first paragraph of my article the definition:
But when people search for “best snow blower,” they just want a recommendation—so that’s what Wirecutter gives them in the first paragraph:
Sidenote.
I think Wirecutter’s opening paragraph could be even better because there’s no point in that first sentence. If you’re searching for “best snow blower,” you already know the benefits of the product. You just want to know which one is best!
Google’s John Mueller said that the search giant uses headings to help better understand the content on a page. This is why you need to make sure they’re clear and descriptive.
It’s easy to miss the mark here. We’ve even been guilty of it ourselves.
For example, look at these two subheadings from our list of blogging tips:
Do you have any idea what those mean at first glance?
Me neither. And many of the other subheadings in our post were also unclear.
If you suspect the same might be true for your subheadings, try this: ask ChatGPT to rewrite them for clarity.
This is exactly what Sam did for our post, and it made them much clearer in seconds.
For example, “Create a ‘Do 100’ project” became “Start a ‘write 100 blog posts’ project”:
Make sure your subheadings have proper hierarchy, too. It helps Google to understand the structure and makes it easier to skim for readers.
Search intent is the reason behind the search. Unless your page aligns with intent and gives searchers what they’re looking for, your chances of ranking high are slim to none.
To show just how important this is, look at this graph:
This shows our ranking position for the keyword “backlink checker” over time. You can see that in late 2018, we suddenly went from struggling to rank higher than position #5 to consistently ranking #1.
How? By optimizing our page for search intent.
Here’s what the page looked like before:
Here’s what it looks like now:
Minor design tweaks aside, there’s one important difference: there’s now a free backlink checker embedded. Before it just asked visitors to start a trial of our SEO software.
By catering to what searchers actually wanted, we improved the page’s rankings and its estimated search traffic from ~18K to ~215K monthly visits. That’s a 12X improvement!
But how did we know what searchers wanted?
Back then, we had to do a manual analysis of the top search results. While you can still do that, it’s much easier just to click the “Identify intents” button in Keywords Explorer:
This uses the power of AI to analyze the top search results and tell you what searchers are looking for.
Broadly aligning your content with search intent isn’t enough. It should also cover the topic in full to tell searchers everything they want to know. This can help it rank for more keywords and bring more traffic as a result, too.
To find what searchers are looking for, look for common subtopics among top-ranking pages.
There are a few ways you can do this.
Manually check the top-ranking pages
Search for your target keyword in Google, open a few top-ranking pages, and eyeball them for commonalities.
For example, many top results for “best running shoes for flat feet” give a budget option:
Check the keyword rankings of top-ranking pages
Pages often rank for keywords related to the subtopics they cover. If you see many top pages ranking for these keywords, it’s probably an important subtopic to cover.
Here’s how to find these keywords:
- Go to the Competitive Analysis tool in Ahrefs
- Enter your page’s URL in the “This target doesn’t rank for” field. (If you haven’t published your page yet, enter the URL you plan to use.)
- Enter the URLs of a few similar top-ranking pages in the “But these competitors do” fields
- Look for keywords that represent subtopics
For example, the top three results for “best running shoes for flat feet” also rank in the top 10 for many keywords related to men and women’s shoes:
This tells you that the best picks for men and women is an important subtopic to include.
Find subtopics with the help of AI
It’s currently in beta, but the new AI Content Grader in Ahrefs finds “missing” subtopics. It does this by comparing the content of the three top-ranking pages for your target keyword to your content.
To use it, just enter your target keyword and your page’s URL. (If you haven’t published your page yet, enter the URL you plan to use).
For example, here’s one of its suggestions for the keyword “best running shoes for flat feet”:
Information gain is a measure of how unique your content is. Google describes a mechanism for scoring this in a patent granted in June 2022.
Two months later, in August 2022, Google launched the helpful content update, which they described as “part of a broader effort to ensure people see more original, helpful content written by people, for people, in search results.”
Are these two things related? Nobody knows. But what we do know is that Google cares about the originality of your content, and almost certainly has mechanisms in place for identifying it.
This means that covering what other top-ranking pages cover isn’t enough for a well-optimized page. It also needs to bring something new and valuable to the table.
For example, my colleague Chris collected data on how folks deal with low-quality backlinks for his post on removing backlinks:
Ryan interviewed three B2B marketers for unique insights for his post on B2B content marketing:
And I worked with Patrick Stox to create an interactive workflow and template for my content audit guide:
None of these posts are completely unique. They contain plenty of information that you can probably find elsewhere—and that’s fine. What matters is that we’re bringing at least something new to the table.
Google’s algorithms are designed to surface content that demonstrates E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust.
If you’re an expert in your field or crafted your content from personal experience, your page already has E-E-A-T. But searchers aren’t going to know that without reading it, so you should try to showcase it as obviously as you can on the page. Let’s look at two ways to do this.
Flash your credentials
Healthline does this extremely well. The very first thing you see on their page about rheumatoid arthritis is that the content was reviewed by a rheumatologist:
Put your uniqueness front and center
If you’ve put time and effort into adding “information gain” to your content, don’t bury it. Make sure searchers see it right away so they know they can trust you.
For example, to curate our list of the best Facebook groups for SEOs, we asked the 12K+ members of our customer-only group to vote for their favorites. Instead of burying this fact deep in the post, we highlighted it in the very first paragraph.
For a page to earn backlinks (which are a strong ranking factor) and shares, people have to actually consume the content. This isn’t going to happen if the copy is hard to read.
You can use free tools like Hemingway and Grammarly to fix this.
For example, Hemingway gives my recent guide to toxic backlinks a reading grade level of 7:
Given that 54% of Americans lack literary proficiency (essentially reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level), this means we’re alienating at least 46% of readers. If we could bring the reading grade level down, more people would be able to read it.
Sidenote.
This isn’t absolutely necessary for every topic. It depends on who your audience is. If they’re technical folks, don’t worry about it. But if you’re publishing content for the masses, accessibility matters.
Here are a few more tips to improve readability:
- Use short sentences and paragraphs
- Use bulleted lists
- Use images
Featured snippets give searchers a short answer right in the search results.
But here’s the cool thing: Google pulls the snippet from one of the top-ranking pages. This means that if your page already ranks in the top 10 for keywords where Google shows a featured snippet, there might be an opportunity to steal it without much effort.
This is exactly what I managed to do a couple of months ago, which led to a ~38.9% jump in estimated search traffic to our page:
Here’s what happened:
In Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, I used the Organic Keywords report to find the page’s top 10 keyword rankings with featured snippets we didn’t own.
Right away, I noticed a trend: many of the keywords were people searching for the most searched thing in Google (singular) rather than a list of top searches (plural):
After searching for a few of these keywords in Google, I saw that the snippet was pretty much always pulled from this very short paragraph in a competing post:
So… I added a similar paragraph to our post (using our data instead):
This quick big of on-page SEO won our page 163 more featured snippets:
Images on your page can rank in Google Images and send you more traffic. There are three things you need to do to optimize them.
Filenames are descriptive
Google says that these give clues about the subject matter, so avoid random file names like IMG_5497.jpg in favor of something short and descriptive like brown-dog.jpg.
Alt text is present and descriptive
Google also says that image alt text helps them understand subject matter, so the same rules apply as filenames: keep them short and descriptive.
Most content management systems have a place to add alt text in the UI, so there’s no need to mess around with HTML:
Images are compressed
Compressed images are smaller and faster to load. Some platforms like Shopify claim to do this automatically, but the results aren’t always great. It’s generally better to employ the help of a plugin like TinyIMG or Shortpixel.
Internal links are links from one page on your site to another. They help Google understand what a page is about and boost its authority, which can lead to higher rankings.
For this reason, when you publish a new page, it pays to internally link from there to other relevant pages. This won’t help the new page’s rankings, but it might help the rankings of the pages you internally link to.
To find relevant opportuntities, use Ahrefs’ Site Audit:
- Go to the Internal Link Opportunities tool
- Enter the URL of your newly-published page in the search box
- Choose “Source page” from the dropdown
Sidenote.
Site Audit needs to have crawled your site since you published the new page, otherwise this won’t work.
Pay attention to these columns:
- Source page → your newly-published page, where you will add the link
- Keyword context → where on the page to add the link
- Target page → where to link to
For example, here the report is suggesting that I link from my post on toxic backlinks to our bad links guide:
Citing valuable resources is helpful for readers. Even Google says so.
Does that mean it’s a “ranking factor?” No. But it does improve your content’s credibility with readers, and that can impact things that do matter like links and shares.
This is something we regularly do on the Ahrefs blog:
If you’re trying to boost the rankings of the page you’re optimizing, you’ll want to add internal links to it from other pages on your site.
To find relevant opportunities, use Ahrefs’ Site Audit:
- Go to the Page Explorer tool
- Enter your target keyword (or part of it) in the search box
- Choose “Page text” from the dropdown
This will find pages on your site that mention your target keyword, which may be good places to add internal links.
For example, it tells us that our guide to removing backlinks mentions the word “toxic”:
If we search that page, this is the mention:
That looks like the perfect place to internally link to our guide to toxic backlinks.
Schema markup is code that helps search engines understand the information on a page. It also powers many rich snippets you see in Google, which can lead to more clicks.
If you’re not sure whether schema markup is worth prioritizing for your page, search for your main target keyword in Google and look at the top results. If all or many are rich results, it’s probably worth adding it.
If you use WordPress, you can easily add schema with a plugin like Yoast or RankMath. Alternatively, use a tool like Merkle’s Schema Markup Generator to generate the JSON-LD code yourself and add it manually.
Keep learning
Check out even more of our on-page SEO resources:
SEO
Why Building a Brand is Key to SEO
For better or worse, brands dominate Google search results. As more results are generated by AI and machines start to understand the offline and online world, big brands are only going to get more powerful.
Watch on-demand as we tackle the challenge of competing with dominant brands in Google search results. We explained why big brands lead the rankings and how to measure your own brand’s impact against these competitors.
We even shared actionable strategies for improving your visibility by weaving your brand into your SEO.
You’ll learn:
- Why brands dominate Google (and will continue to do so).
- How to measure your brand’s impact on search, and what you should focus on.
- Ways to weave your brand’s identity into your content.
With Dr. Pete Meyers, we explored why brand marketing is vital to search marketing, and how to incorporate your brand into your everyday content and SEO efforts.
If you’re looking to have your brand stand out in a sea of competition, you won’t want to miss this.
View the slides below, or check out the full presentation for all the details.
Join Us For Our Next Webinar!
Optimizing For Google’s New Landscape And The Future Of Search
Join us as we dive deep into the evolution reshaping Google’s search rankings in 2024 and beyond. We’ll show you actionable insights to help you navigate the disruption and emerge with a winning SEO strategy.
SEO
How SEO Can Capture Demand You Create Elsewhere
Generating demand is about making people want stuff they had no desire to buy before encountering your marketing.
Sometimes, it’s a short-term play, like an ecommerce store creating buzz before launching a new product. Other times, like with B2B marketing, it’s a long-term play to engage out-of-market audiences.
In either situation, demand generation can quickly become an expensive marketing activity.
Here are some ways SEO can help you capture and retain the demand you’re generating so your marketing budget goes further.
There’s no right or wrong way to generate demand. Any marketing activity that generates a desire to buy something (where there wasn’t such a desire before) can be considered demand generation.
Common examples include using:
- Paid ads
- Word of mouth
- Social media
- Video marketing
- Email newsletters
- Content marketing
- Community marketing
For example, Pryshan is a small local brand in Australia that has created a new type of exfoliating stone from clay. They’ve been selling it offline since 2018, if not earlier.
It’s not a groundbreaking innovation, but it’s also not been done before.
To launch their product online, they started running a bunch of Facebook ads:
Because of their ads, this company is in the early stages of generating demand for its product. Sure, it’s not the type of marketing that will go viral, but it’s still a great example of demand gen.
Looking at search volume data, there are 40 searches per month for the keyword “clay stone exfoliator” in Australia and a handful of other related searches:
However, these same keywords get hardly any searches in the US:
This never happens.
Australia has a much smaller population than the US. For non-localized searches, Australian search volume is usually about 6-10% of US search volume for the same keywords.
Take a look at the most popular searches as an example:
Pryshan’s advertising efforts on other platforms directly create the search demand for exfoliating clay stones.
It doesn’t matter where or how you educate people about the product you sell. What matters is shifting their perceptions from cognitive awareness to emotional desire.
Emotions trigger actions, and usually, the first action people take once they become aware of a cool new thing is to Google it.
If you’re not including SEO as part of your marketing efforts, here are three things you can do to:
- minimize budget wastage
- capture interest when people search
- convert the audiences you’re already reaching
If you’re working hard to create demand for your product, make sure it’s easy for people to discover it when they search Google.
- Give it a simple name that’s easy to remember
- Label it according to how people naturally search
- Avoid any terms that create ambiguities with an existing thing
For example, the concept of a clay exfoliating stone is easy for people to remember.
Even if they don’t remember what Pryshan calls their product, they’ll remember the videos and images they saw of the product being used to exfoliate people’s skin. They’ll remember it’s made from clay instead of a more common material like pumice.
It makes sense for Pryshan to call its product something similar to what people will be inclined to search for.
In this example, however, the context of exfoliation is important.
If Pryshan chooses to call its product “clay stones,” it will have a harder time disambiguating itself from gardening products in search results. It’s already the odd one out in SERPs for such keywords:
When you go through your branding exercises to decide what to call your product or innovation, it helps to search your ideas on Google.
This way, you’ll easily see what phrases to avoid so that your product isn’t being grouped with unrelated things.
Imagine being part of a company that invested a lot of money in re-branding itself. New logo, new slogan, new marketing materials… the lot.
On the back of their new business cards, the designers thought inviting people to search for the new slogan on Google would be clever.
The only problem was that this company didn’t rank for the slogan.
They weren’t showing up at all! (Yes, it’s a true story, no I can’t share the brand’s name).
This tactic isn’t new. Many businesses leverage the fact that people will Google things to convert offline audiences into online audiences through their printed, radio, and TV ads.
Don’t do this if you don’t already own the search results page.
It’s not only a very expensive mistake to make, but it gives the conversions you’ve worked hard for directly to your competitors.
Instead, use SEO to become the only brand people see when they search for your brand, product, or something that you’ve created.
Let’s use Pryshan as an example.
They’re the first brand to create exfoliating clay stones. Their audience has created a few new keywords to find Pryshan’s products on Google, with “clay stone exfoliator” being the most popular variation.
Yet even though it’s a product they’ve brought to market, competitors and retailers are already encroaching on their SERP real estate for this keyword:
Sure, Pryshan holds four of the organic spots, but it’s not enough.
Many competitors are showing up in the paid product carousel before Pryshan’s website can be seen by searchers:
They’re already paying for Facebook ads, why not consider some paid Google placements too?
Not to mention, stockists and competitors are ranking for three of the other organic positions.
Having stockists show up for your product may not seem so bad, but if you’re not careful, they may undercut your prices or completely edge you out of the SERPs.
This is also a common tactic used by affiliate marketers to earn commissions from brands that are not SEO-savvy.
In short, SEO can help you protect your brand presence on Google.
If you’re working hard to generate demand for a cool new thing that’s never been done before, it can be hard to know if it’s working.
Sure, you can measure sales. But a lot of the time, demand generation doesn’t turn into immediate sales.
B2B marketing is a prominent example. Educating and converting out-of-market audiences into in-market prospects can take a long time.
That’s where SEO data can help close the gap and give you data to get more buy-in from decision-makers.
Measure increases in branded searches
A natural byproduct of demand generation activities is that people search more for your brand (or they should if you’re doing it right).
Tracking if your branded keywords improve over time can help you gauge how your demand generation efforts are going.
In Ahrefs, you can use Rank Tracker to monitor how many people discover your website from your branded searches and whether these are trending up:
If your brand is big enough and gets hundreds of searches a month, you can also check out this nifty graph that forecasts search potential in Keywords Explorer:
Discover and track new keywords about your products, services or innovations
If, as part of your demand generation strategy, you’re encouraging people to search for new keywords relating to your product, service, or innovation, set up alerts to monitor your presence for those terms.
This method will also help you uncover the keywords your audience naturally uses anyway.
Start by going to Ahrefs Alerts and setting up a new keyword alert.
Add your website.
Leave the volume setting untouched (you want to include low search volume keywords so you discover the new searches people make).
Set your preferred email frequency, and voila, you’re done.
Monitor visibility against competitors
If you’re worried other brands may steal your spotlight in Google’s search results, you can also use Ahrefs to monitor your share of the traffic compared to them.
I like to use the Share of Voice graph in Site Explorer to do this. It looks like this:
This graph is a great bird’s eye view of how you stack up against competitors and if you’re at risk of losing visibility to any of them.
Final thoughts
As SEO professionals, it’s easy to forget how hard some businesses work to generate demand for their products or services.
Demand always comes first, and it’s our job to capture it.
It’s not a chicken or egg scenario. The savviest marketers use this to their advantage by creating their own SEO opportunities long before competitors figure out what they’re doing.
If you’ve seen other great examples of how SEO and demand generation work together, share them with me on LinkedIn anytime.
SEO
Google Explains How Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) Is Measured
Google’s Web Performance Developer Advocate, Barry Pollard, has clarified how Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is measured.
CLS quantifies how much unexpected layout shift occurs when a person browses your site.
This metric matters to SEO as it’s one of Google’s Core Web Vitals. Pages with low CLS scores provide a more stable experience, potentially leading to better search visibility.
How is it measured? Pollard addressed this question in a thread on X.
For Core Web Vitals what is CLS measured in? Why is 0.1 considered not good and 0.25 bad, and what do those numbers represent?
I’ve had 3 separate conversations on this with various people in last 24 hours so figured it’s time for another deep dive thread to explain…
🧵 1/12 pic.twitter.com/zZoTur6Ad4
— Barry Pollard (@tunetheweb) October 10, 2024
Understanding CLS Measurement
Pollard began by explaining the nature of CLS measurement:
“CLS is ‘unitless’ unlike LCP and INP which are measured in seconds/milliseconds.”
He further clarified:
“Each layout shift is calculated by multipyling two percentages or fractions together: What moved (impact fraction) How much it moved (distance fraction).”
This calculation method helps quantify the severity of layout shifts.
As Pollard explained:
“The whole viewport moves all the way down – that’s worse than just half the view port moving all the way down. The whole viewport moving down a little? That’s not as bad as the whole viewport moving down a lot.”
Worse Case Scenario
Pollard described the worst-case scenario for a single layout shift:
“The maximum layout shift is if 100% of the viewport (impact fraction = 1.0) is moved one full viewport down (distance fraction = 1.0).
This gives a layout shift score of 1.0 and is basically the worst type of shift.”
However, he reminds us of the cumulative nature of CLS:
“CLS is Cumulative Layout Shift, and that first word (cumulative) matters. We take all the individual shifts that happen within a short space of time (max 5 seconds) and sum them up to get the CLS score.”
Pollard explained the reasoning behind the 5-second measurement window:
“Originally we cumulated ALL the shifts, but that didn’t really measure the UX—especially for pages opened for a long time (think SPAs or email). Measuring all shifts meant, given enough, time even the best pages would fail!”
He also noted the theoretical maximum CLS score:
“Since each element can only shift when a frame is drawn and we have a 5 second cap and most devices run at 60fps, that gives a theoretical cap on CLS of 5 secs * 60 fps * 1.0 max shift = 300.”
Interpreting CLS Scores
Pollard addressed how to interpret CLS scores:
“… it helps to think of CLS as a percentage of movement. The good threshold of 0.1 means about the page moved 10%—which could mean the whole page moved 10%, or half the page moved 20%, or lots of little movements were equivalent to either of those.”
Regarding the specific threshold values, Pollard explained:
“So why is 0.1 ‘good’ and 0.25 ‘poor’? That’s explained here as was a combination of what we’d want (CLS = 0!) and what is achievable … 0.05 was actually achievable at the median, but for many sites it wouldn’t be, so went slightly higher.”
See also: How You Can Measure Core Web Vitals
Why This Matters
Pollard’s insights provide web developers and SEO professionals with a clearer understanding of measuring and optimizing for CLS.
As you work with CLS, keep these points in mind:
- CLS is unitless and calculated from impact and distance fractions.
- It’s cumulative, measuring shifts over a 5-second window.
- The “good” threshold of 0.1 roughly equates to 10% of viewport movement.
- CLS scores can exceed 1.0 due to multiple shifts adding up.
- The thresholds (0.1 for “good”, 0.25 for “poor”) balance ideal performance with achievable goals.
With this insight, you can make adjustments to achieve Google’s threshold.
Featured Image: Piscine26/Shutterstock
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