SEO
How To Optimize Pages & Beat Competitors
This post was sponsored by SE Ranking. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.
Whether you run a large website or are launching a simple landing page, your goal is the same – you want it to hit the top spot on the SERP.
To make this happen, you need to ensure that your page quality is on par with its direct competitors – or better.
How Do I Rank Higher On Google?
To claim a top SERP position, the best technique is to offer more value than any other page optimized for the same keywords.
Also, you should make sure that your targeted page doesn’t suffer from critical SEO issues that can affect its performance.
These techniques fall under the realm of on-page SEO.
On-page SEO can be performed easier and faster by using an on-page SEO checker.
Tools like on-page SEO checkers are specifically designed to:
- Show where your page stands within the competitive landscape.
- Give you an action plan for bringing your content straight to the top of the SERP.
But for starters, let’s run through some basics.
What Is On-Page SEO?
On-page SEO is the process of optimizing page elements for specific keywords.
When we say “page elements,” we mean things like:
- Content quality.
- Keyword density.
- Title and description.
- URL structure.
- Page experience and usability.
- Media optimization.
- Internal and external links, etc.
Most of these elements can easily be improved, meaning that the page can be optimized for a particular search query.
While this type of optimization works for any page type, including home page, product page, blog post, or landing page, this post will focus on optimizing landing pages.
Why Is On-Page SEO Essential?
Page elements are the primary points of connection between you and your users.
Improving them helps improve their experience.
It also tells search engines more about your pages.
Well-optimized on-page SEO can help improve page rankings and thus increase traffic.
In addition to improving rankings, these page changes help you to hold a user’s attention and more accurately target their queries, making your traffic more meaningful.
How To Do On-Page SEO Tasks
On-page SEO can include a variety of tasks that you’ll need to perform on many different elements.
They can be easy to miss, so make sure you have a thorough checklist and documentation about how to update each element.
In this article, we will give you insights into what to check for in your on-page SEO strategy and how to better target your keywords.
We’ll also show you a great tool that can help.
Because there’s so much to check, an automated tool can be extremely helpful.
Task 1: Run An SEO Audit
The first step for performing on-page SEO is to run an audit.
There are almost 100 elements to check, and some are more important than others.
Step 1: Check Elements That Impact SEO
For landing pages, some of the most important factors are:
- Title.
- Descriptions.
- Keyword density of your primary keywords.
Other checks include:
- Heading structure.
- URL.
- Favicon.
- And so on.
Checking each element individually may take a long time, and it can be difficult to identify errors and fixes.
This is why automated tools are so helpful.
Step 2: Discover Errors & Choose Their Priority
After you uncover changes that will boost your optimization scores, it’s time to decide what to change first.
The weight of each parameter is defined by its effect on your page’s ability to rank on SERPs.
Some examples of important, on-page SEO errors that should be highly prioritized are:
- Missing elements.
- Elements that are optimized for an irrelevant keyword.
- Missing title tags on pages.
Low-priority changes would be minor items, such as a missing favicon, which is less urgent.
How Do I Identify High-Priority Changes?
Tools can be your friend here.
They can speed up the process and help you climb to the top of the SERPs faster.
You want to look for sophisticated tools that can provide flexible recommendations based on individual page types, instead of a standardized list.
The deep analytics that come with more modernized tools can compare target pages with similar search results and calculate the range of recommended metrics.
This way, the recommendations are based on direct competitors’ metrics and take into account niche specifics, instead of offering generalized SEO standards.
Such methodology makes them much more accurate and practical.
One of the more advanced AI-powered tools is SE Ranking.
This on-page SEO checker can help you check and optimize your pages.
How To Use SE Ranking To Run An Audit
To run an audit:
- Enter a URL.
- Select your target location.
- Enter keywords.
Then, let SE Ranking do its magic.
It will check 94 on-page SEO parameters.
Perk: You can choose the depth of analysis – your page can be compared against 3 or up to 50 SERP rivals.
With SE Ranking, it takes only a couple of minutes to run an audit.
Once the check has been completed, you will see the results – every priority change will be listed on one dashboard.
Check Your Quality Score
The tool calculates the page quality from 0 to 100.
The better the page is optimized for the target keyword, the higher the score is.
Your quality score gives you a clear picture of your on-page SEO health, helping clarify if off-page factors are the issue and not poor on-page optimization.
Note that backlink-related parameters, which are also located on the dashboard, do not impact the page’s quality score.
Tackle Your High-Priority Issues
Your next step is to examine the list of issues found on your analyzed page.
SE Ranking’s report includes insight into the page’s content quality, keyword usage and density, page experience and usability, links used on the page, and the page’s backlink profile.
Screenshot from SERanking.com, June 2022To help with understanding priorities, your list of tasks is divided into several columns:
- All: Displays scores against all 94 parameters.
- Errors: Shows critical issues worth your immediate attention.
- Warnings: Points to areas worth paying attention to once you have fixed errors.
- Notices: Shares parameters that don’t necessarily affect SEO performance but are good to keep an eye on.
- Passed checks: Gives you something to feel good about.
Now, you can start building your workflow and prioritizing fixes.
Task 2: Competitor Research
Power up your on-page SEO repair tasks by doing some competitor research.
This step will help you clarify what keywords to target and new ways to improve your page further.
Assessing your competitors helps you understand what works and where your page needs improvement most.
Step 1: Look At The SERPs For The Keywords You’re Targeting
A great way to start is to put the keywords you rank for into Google and examine the top results.
What do you notice about them?
Take note of:
- The words they use in their URL, titles, and content.
- Their meta description on the SERP.
- The layout of their page and content.
- How your competitors approach answering the query.
- The CTAs and internal links they used on their page.
Think about the ideas they convey, their approach to the content, and what keywords they use and where.
Step 2: Uncover Competitor Flaws
You’re looking to learn how the most successful pages do it. But you’re also looking for flaws.
Are there any areas that you think you can improve?
Do you see any gaps or unaddressed elements of a query?
Try to identify any patterns you can about the most successful results and compare them to your page.
Make sure that you’re not only fixing things that are missing but also looking for opportunities to improve existing on-page elements.
If you want to get more granular, this is another place where a tool like SE Ranking can help.
How To Use SE Ranking For Competitor Research
A robust tool like SE Ranking can help you benchmark your results against your rivals to better understand how they got to the top of the SERP.
You can easily compare important on-page SEO parameters against your direct competitors without having to dig through the SERPs and evaluate each result, one at a time.
For example, on the screen below, you can check which keywords competitors used, study their titles and headings, and assess their technical metrics.
Screenshot from SERanking.com, June 2022All the critical data is at your disposal to ensure that you’re not missing opportunities for improvement.
Quickly See Competitor SERP & Traffic Stats
In the Terms tab, you will see the list of words that were found on your competitors’ pages, along with their search volume potential, count, density, and page elements.
From our experience, using proper keywords on a page while striking the density balance is crucial for landing pages.
The tool shows how many times and in which elements of the page a primary or secondary keyword is used: title, description, main copy, URL, etc.
This helps you identify keywords with real search potential and add them to your page.
You can also fix the keyword density of some search queries that are already on your page.
Leverage Competitor Keyword Flaws
Finally, you can add keywords to relevant page areas that need them.
You will probably notice that SE Ranking makes a distinction between primary and secondary content, just like Google does.
Tools that don’t may unintentionally lure you into keyword stuffing, making you add extra keywords to your main content.
Task 3: Start Updating Your On-Page SEO
By now, you’ve run an audit and performed competitor research.
You should have a good idea of:
- The errors in your on-page SEO that need fixing.
- Areas where your on-page SEO could be improved, compared to competitors.
You’ve made lots of discoveries!
What’s next?
Step 1: Organize Your Workflow
First, create your list of individual tasks.
Start by listing tasks out by priority.
You can either use your own task management system or an on-page SEO tool to organize your list of tasks.
As a rule of thumb, you should prioritize anything that’s missing.
If you haven’t specified things like title tags and meta descriptions, search engines will generate them for you.
You want to be in control of what users see about your page on the SERPs; be sure to add them yourself.
Next, focus on anything that has changed about your keyword priorities.
Did you find new opportunities during your research or discover adjustments you should make to keyword density? These are important too.
Step 2: Get Started
Go ahead and start fixing the issues!
We’re happy to say that most issues with on-page SEO can be fixed from within your CMS.
How To Prioritize SEO Tasks & Track Progress With SE Ranking
If you need help prioritizing and tracking your tasks, SE Ranking can do that all within one tool.
Switch to the SEO Tasks tab.
SE Ranking provides you with a step-by-step plan based on the issues found on your website during the audit.
Screenshot from SERanking.com, June 2022The tool groups tasks by priority, category, or status:
- In the By Priority tab, the tool labels all the tasks with high, medium, or low priority.
- In the By Category tab, all the tasks will be grouped according to the page element, to which they correspond.
- In the By Status tab, you will see which tasks should be done and which are already completed.
Start with the most urgent ones. This should give the most tangible result.
You can also add your own custom tasks and assign any priority to them.
For example, if you have been examining the competitor’s page and found something worth adding to your own page, just create a new task.
And vice versa, ignore tasks that you consider irrelevant to your landing page.
After fixing an issue, click on the completed checkbox. The tool will reassess the page quality, and you will instantly see the new score.
The more tasks are completed, the higher the score will be.
Make On-Page SEO Easier – Try An On-Page SEO Checker
There’s no doubt that keeping up with the competition and having your pages optimized is hard work.
But with the right tool in hand, it becomes much easier and faster.
With On-Page SEO Checker, you can measure overall page performance, identify and fix issues that could impact your rankings, enhance your content based on what works for the SERP leaders, and keep track of all the on-page tasks on your agenda.
This will help you move up the ranking ladder and beat your rivals.
Image Credits
Featured Image: Image by SE Ranking. Used with permission.
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SEO
WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation
A recent webinar featuring WordPress executives from Automattic and Elementor, along with developers and Joost de Valk, discussed the stagnation in WordPress growth, exploring the causes and potential solutions.
Stagnation Was The Webinar Topic
The webinar, “Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?” was a frank discussion about what can be done to increase the market share of new users that are choosing a web publishing platform.
Yet something that came up is that there are some areas that WordPress is doing exceptionally well so it’s not all doom and gloom. As will be seen later on, the fact that the WordPress core isn’t progressing in terms of specific technological adoption isn’t necessarily a sign that WordPress is falling behind, it’s actually a feature.
Yet there is a stagnation as mentioned at the 17:07 minute mark:
“…Basically you’re saying it’s not necessarily declining, but it’s not increasing and the energy is lagging. “
The response to the above statement acknowledged that while there are areas of growth like in the education and government sectors, the rest was “up for grabs.”
Joost de Valk spoke directly and unambiguously acknowledged the stagnation at the 18:09 minute mark:
“I agree with Noel. I think it’s stagnant.”
That said, Joost also saw opportunities with ecommerce, with the performance of WooCommerce. WooCommerce, by the way, outperformed WordPress as a whole with a 6.80% year over year growth rate, so there’s a good reason that Joost was optimistic of the ecommerce sector.
A general sense that WordPress was entering a stall however was not in dispute, as shown in remarks at the 31:45 minute mark:
“… the WordPress product market share is not decreasing, but it is stagnating…”
Facing Reality Is Productive
Humans have two ways to deal with a problem:
- Acknowledge the problem and seek solutions
- Pretend it’s not there and proceed as if everything is okay
WordPress is a publishing platform that’s loved around the world and has literally created countless jobs, careers, powered online commerce as well as helped establish new industries in developing applications that extend WordPress.
Many people have a stake in WordPress’ continued survival so any talk about WordPress entering a stall and descent phase like an airplane that reached the maximum altitude is frightening and some people would prefer to shout it down to make it go away.
Acknowledging facts and not brushing them aside is what this webinar achieved as a step toward identifying solutions. Everyone in the discussion has a stake in the continued growth of WordPress and their goal was to put it out there for the community to also get involved.
The live webinar featured:
- Miriam Schwab, Elementor’s Head of WP Relations
- Rich Tabor, Automattic Product Manager
- Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO
- Co-hosts Matt Cromwell and Amber Hinds, both members of the WordPress developer community moderated the discussion.
WordPress Market Share Stagnation
The webinar acknowledged that WordPress market share, the percentage of websites online that use WordPress, was stagnating. Stagnation is a state at which something is neither moving forward nor backwards, it is simply stuck at an in between point. And that’s what was openly acknowledged and the main point of the discussion was understanding the reasons why and what could be done about it.
Statistics gathered by the HTTPArchive and published on Joost de Valk’s blog show that WordPress experienced a year over year growth of 1.85%, having spent the year growing and contracting its market share. For example, over the latest month over month period the market share dropped by -0.28%.
Crowing about the WordPress 1.85% growth rate as evidence that everything is fine is to ignore that a large percentage of new businesses and websites coming online are increasingly going to other platforms, with year over year growth rates of other platforms outpacing the rate of growth of WordPress.
Out of the top 10 Content Management Systems, only six experienced year over year (YoY) growth.
CMS YoY Growth
- Webflow: 25.00%
- Shopify: 15.61%
- Wix: 10.71%
- Squarespace: 9.04%
- Duda: 8.89%
- WordPress: 1.85%
Why Stagnation Is A Problem
An important point made in the webinar is that stagnation can have a negative trickle-down effect on the business ecosystem by reducing growth opportunities and customer acquisition. If fewer of the new businesses coming online are opting in for WordPress are clients that will never come looking for a theme, plugin, development or SEO service.
It was noted at the 4:18 minute mark by Joost de Valk:
“…when you’re investing and when you’re building a product in the WordPress space, the market share or whether WordPress is growing or not has a deep impact on how easy it is to well to get people to, to buy the software that you want to sell them.”
Perception Of Innovation
One of the potential reasons for the struggle to achieve significant growth is the perception of a lack of innovation, pointed out at the 16:51 minute mark that there’s still no integration with popular technologies like Next JS, an open-source web development platform that is optimized for fast rollout of scalable and search-friendly websites.
It was observed at the 16:51 minute mark:
“…and still today we have no integration with next JS or anything like that…”
Someone else agreed but also expressed at the 41:52 minute mark, that the lack of innovation in the WordPress core can also be seen as a deliberate effort to make WordPress extensible so that if users find a gap a developer can step in and make a plugin to make WordPress be whatever users and developers want it to be.
“It’s not trying to be everything for everyone because it’s extensible. So if WordPress has a… let’s say a weakness for a particular segment or could be doing better in some way. Then you can come along and develop a plug in for it and that is one of the beautiful things about WordPress.”
Is Improved Marketing A Solution
One of the things that was identified as an area of improvement is marketing. They didn’t say it would solve all problems. It was simply noted that competitors are actively advertising and promoting but WordPress is by comparison not really proactively there. I think to extend that idea, which wasn’t expressed in the webinar, is to consider that if WordPress isn’t out there putting out a positive marketing message then the only thing consumers might be exposed to is the daily news of another vulnerability.
Someone commented in the 16:21 minute mark:
“I’m missing the excitement of WordPress and I’m not feeling that in the market. …I think a lot of that is around the product marketing and how we repackage WordPress for certain verticals because this one-size-fits-all means that in every single vertical we’re being displaced by campaigns that have paid or, you know, have received a a certain amount of funding and can go after us, right?”
This idea of marketing being a shortcoming of WordPress was raised earlier in the webinar at the 18:27 minute mark where it was acknowledged that growth was in some respects driven by the WordPress ecosystem with associated products like Elementor driving the growth in adoption of WordPress by new businesses.
They said:
“…the only logical conclusion is that the fact that marketing of WordPress itself is has actually always been a pain point, is now starting to actually hurt us.”
Future Of WordPress
This webinar is important because it features the voices of people who are actively involved at every level of WordPress, from development, marketing, accessibility, WordPress security, to plugin development. These are insiders with a deep interest in the continued evolution of WordPress as a viable platform for getting online.
The fact that they’re talking about the stagnation of WordPress should be of concern to everybody and that they are talking about solutions shows that the WordPress community is not in denial but is directly confronting situations, which is how a thriving ecosystem should be responding.
Watch the webinar:
Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Krakenimages.com
SEO
Google’s New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO
Google announced that images in the AVIF file format will now be eligible to be shown in Google Search and Google Images, including all platforms that surface Google Search data. AVIF will dramatically lower image sizes and improve Core Web Vitals scores, particularly Largest Contentful Paint.
How AVIF Can Improve SEO
Getting pages crawled and indexed are the first step of effective SEO. Anything that lowers file size and speeds up web page rendering will help search crawlers get to the content faster and improve the amount of pages crawled.
Google’s crawl budget documentation recommends increasing the speeds of page loading and rendering as a way to avoid receiving “Hostload exceeded” warnings.
It also says that faster loading times enables Googlebot to crawl more pages:
Improve your site’s crawl efficiency
Increase your page loading speed
Google’s crawling is limited by bandwidth, time, and availability of Googlebot instances. If your server responds to requests quicker, we might be able to crawl more pages on your site.
What Is AVIF?
AVIF (AVI Image File Format) is a next generation open source image file format that combines the best of JPEG, PNG, and GIF image file formats but in a more compressed format for smaller image files (by 50% for JPEG format).
AVIF supports transparency like PNG and photographic images like JPEG does but does but with a higher level of dynamic range, deeper blacks, and better compression (meaning smaller file sizes). AVIF even supports animation like GIF does.
AVIF Versus WebP
AVIF is generally a better file format than WebP in terms of smaller files size (compression) and image quality. WebP is better for lossless images, where maintaining high quality regardless of file size is more important. But for everyday web usage, AVIF is the better choice.
See also: 12 Important Image SEO Tips You Need To Know
Is AVIF Supported?
AVIF is currently supported by Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, and Safari browsers. Not all content management systems support AVIF. However, both WordPress and Joomla support AVIF. In terms of CDN, Cloudflare also already supports AVIF.
I couldn’t at this time ascertain whether Bing supports AVIF files and will update this article once I find out.
Current website usage of AVIF stands at 0.2% but now that it’s available to surfaced in Google Search, expect that percentage to grow. AVIF images will probably become a standard image format because of its high compression will help sites perform far better than they currently do with JPEG and PNG formats.
Research conducted in July 2024 by Joost de Valk (founder of Yoast, ) discovered that social media platforms don’t all support AVIF files. He found that LinkedIn, Mastodon, Slack, and Twitter/X do not currently support AVIF but that Facebook, Pinterest, Threads and WhatsApp do support it.
AVIF Images Are Automatically Indexable By Google
According to Google’s announcement there is nothing special that needs to be done to make AVIF image files indexable.
“Over the recent years, AVIF has become one of the most commonly used image formats on the web. We’re happy to announce that AVIF is now a supported file type in Google Search, for Google Images as well as any place that uses images in Google Search. You don’t need to do anything special to have your AVIF files indexed by Google.”
Read Google’s announcement:
Supporting AVIF in Google Search
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands
SEO
CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO
Eli Schwartz, Author of Product-Led SEO, started a discussion on LinkedIn about there being too many CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) who believe that AI written content is an SEO strategy. He predicted that there will be reckoning on the way after their strategies end in failure.
This is what Eli had to say:
“Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO.
This mistake is going to lead to an explosion in demand for SEO strategists to help them fix their traffic when they find out they might have been wrong.”
Everyone in the discussion, which received 54 comments, strongly agreed with Eli, except for one guy.
What Is Google’s Policy On AI Generated Content?
Google’s policy hasn’t changed although they did update their guidance and spam policies on March 5, 2024 at the same time as the rollout of the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update. Many publishers who used AI to create content subsequently reported losing rankings.
Yet it’s not said that using AI is enough to merit poor rankings, it’s content that is created for ranking purposes.
Google wrote these guidelines specifically for autogenerated content, including AI generated content (Wayback machine copy dated March 6, 2024)
“Our long-standing spam policy has been that use of automation, including generative AI, is spam if the primary purpose is manipulating ranking in Search results. The updated policy is in the same spirit of our previous policy and based on the same principle. It’s been expanded to account for more sophisticated scaled content creation methods where it isn’t always clear whether low quality content was created purely through automation.
Our new policy is meant to help people focus more clearly on the idea that producing content at scale is abusive if done for the purpose of manipulating search rankings and that this applies whether automation or humans are involved.”
Many in Eli’s discussion were in agreement that reliance on AI by some organizations may come to haunt them, except for that one guy in the discussion
Read the discussion on LinkedIn:
Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands
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