Prioritising on-page factors is the key to success for SEO in Toronto and other major cities around the world. On-page SEO ensures that your site is optimised for both users and search engines, which will help to boost your rankings.
Understand the User’s Intent
In the same way that Google has evolved to prioritise the intent of the user’s search, it is up to your website content to do the same. You want your content to not just include the keywords that users are searching for; you want it to provide them with answers to the questions that they are likely to ask.
You can explore user intent by doing a Google search of potential keywords for your website. Google updates its algorithm once a day to provide users with more accurate search results – so, it is a great guide. Take a look at the kinds of longtail keywords that Google suggests, which should give you an idea of the intent of most users when searching for a particular keyword. Then, take a look at some of the top-ranking sites and consider how they integrate these terms into their content.
Link Internally
While linking to other blogs will help you gain visibility and potentially help to link build, on-page SEO makes internal linking an important factor of your website. Linking to related content on another page of your site is a helpful navigation tool that helps users find that they are looking for easily. It also helps to ensure that your site is properly crawled, and that search engines can find all of your pages.
Another major benefit is that internal linking can increase the amount of time that the user is on your site. While reading your post, the user may click on the internal link to find out more on a particular subject from a different page on your site. As such, they’ll spend more time reading your content and visiting more pages, which is not only good for rankings but good for business.
Remember:
- Only add internal links when they are useful to the reader
- Do not stuff the text full of internal links; 8 should be the maximum per page, depending on the word count
- A ‘Related Posts’ section on your blog is an easy and automatic way to link internally
Speed Things Up
Bounce rates are high among mobile users, so speed is not only an important consideration for SEO purposes; it is also a crucial aspect of the user experience. Webpages that are faster are more likely to receive backlinks and to engage users. While it may not be a huge factor, speed has a direct relationship with rankings. As such, it is important that all pages, content and images on your site load quickly.