What is an on-page content strategy?
Taimoor Khan
Search Engine Supremo for Ads-Restricted Industries Such as Cannabis, Gambling, Weapons, Kratom, Sea Moss | Expert in Keyword Optimization & Research | Content Creation | ⚠️ 404 Errors | Sitemap | 🤖 Crawler & Indexing
What is an on-page content strategy?
Content strategy focuses on the planning, creation, delivery, and governance of content. Content not only includes the words on the page but also the images and multimedia that are used. Ensuring that you have useful and usable content, that is well structured, and easily found is vital to improving the user experience of a website. On-page refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized,
Strategy List:
1: Make a list of topics.
Keywords are at the heart of SEO, but they're no longer the first step to achieving organic growth. Instead, the first step is to make a list of topics you’d like your content to address.
To start, compile a list of about 10 words and terms associated with your product or service. Use an SEO tool ( Google's Keyword Tool, Ahrefs, SEMRush, or GrowthBar just to name a few) to research these words, identify their search volume, and come up with variations that make sense for your business.
By doing this, you are associating these topics with popular short-tail keywords, but you’re not dedicating individual blog posts to these keywords. Let’s go over an example of this process using the image below. Using search volume and competition as your measurement, you can create a list of 10-15 short-tail keywords that are relevant to your business and are being searched for by your target audiences. Then, rank this list based on monthly search volume.
Each of the keywords that you’ve identified is called pillars, and they serve as the primary support for a larger cluster of long-tail keywords, which we’ll discuss below.
2. Make a list of long-tail keywords based on these topics.
During this step, you’ll begin optimizing your pages for specific keywords. For each pillar you've identified, use your keyword tool to identify five to 10 long-tail keywords that dig deeper into the original topic keyword.
For example, we regularly create content about SEO, but it's difficult to rank well on Google for such a popular topic with this acronym alone. We also risk competing with our own content by creating multiple pages that are all targeting the exact same keyword — and potentially the same SERPs. Therefore, we also create content on conducting keyword research, optimizing images for search engines, creating an SEO strategy (which you're reading right now), and other subtopics within the SEO umbrella. Think of it this way: the more specific your content, the more specific the needs of your audience can be, and the more likely you'll convert this traffic into leads. This is how Google finds value in the websites it crawls — the pages that dig into the inner workings of a general topic are seen as the best answer to a person's query, and will rank higher.
3. Build pages for each topic.
When it comes to websites and ranking in search engines, trying to get one page to rank for a handful of keywords can be next to impossible. But, here's where the rubber meets the road.
Use the pillar topics you came up with to create a page or post that gives a high-level overview of the topic using the long-tail keywords you came up with for each cluster in step two. These pillar pages can essentially be a table of contents, where you’re giving a description of the main topic, and briefing readers on subtopics you’ll elaborate on in other posts.
Ultimately, the number of topics for which you create pillar pages should coincide with your business needs, like the number of products and offerings you have. This will make it much easier for your prospects and customers to find you in search engines no matter what keywords they use.
4. Set up a blog.
Blogging can be an incredible way to rank for keywords and engage your website's users. After all, every blog post is a new web page and an additional opportunity to rank in SERPs. If your business does not already have a blog, consider creating one.
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As you write each blog post and expand on your clusters, you should do three things:
1. Don't include your long-tail keyword more than three or four times throughout the page as Google doesn't consider exact keyword matches as often as it used to. In fact, too many instances of your keyword can be a red flag to search engines that you're keyword stuffing to gain rankings, and they’ll penalize you for this.
2. Second, always link to the pillar page you created for your topics. You can do this in the form of tags in your content management system (CMS), or as basic anchor text in the body of the article.
3. Once you publish each blog post, link to it within the parent pillar page that supports the subtopic. By connecting both the pillar and the cluster in this way, you're telling Google that there's a relationship between the long-tail keyword and the overarching topic you're trying to rank for.
5. Create a consistent blogging schedule.
Every blog post or web page you create doesn’t necessarily need to belong to a topic cluster. There's also value in writing about tangential topics your customers care about to build authority with the Google algorithms.
With that in mind, make it a point to blog at least once a week. Remember, you are blogging primarily for your audience, not search engines, so study your target market and write about things that they are interested in.
It may be helpful to create a content strategy to remain consistent and focused on your goals.
6. Create a link-building plan.
The topic cluster model is your way forward in SEO, but it's not the only way to get your website content to rank higher once it's been created.
While our first five steps were dedicated to on-page SEO, link-building is the primary objective of off-page SEO. Link-building is the process of attracting inbound links (also called backlinks) to your website from other sources on the internet. As a general rule, sites with more authority that link back to your content have a more significant impact on your rankings.
Dedicate some time to brainstorming all the various ways you can attract inbound links. Maybe you’ll start by sharing links with local businesses in exchange for links to their own sites, or you’ll write a few blog posts and share them on different social media platforms. You can also approach other blogs for guest blogging opportunities through which you can link back to your website.
7. Compress media files before uploading them to your site.
This is a small but important step in the SEO process, especially for mobile optimization.
As your blog or website grows, you'll undoubtedly have more images, videos, and related media to support your content. These visual assets help retain your visitors' attention, but it's easy to forget that these files can be very large. Since page speed is a crucial ranking factor, it’s important to monitor the size of the media files you upload to your site.
The bigger the file size, the more difficult it is for an internet browser to render your website. It’s also harder for mobile browsers to load these images, as the bandwidth on their devices is significantly smaller. So, the smaller the file size, the faster your website will load. But, how do you compress images and still retain quality?
It’s worth considering the use of a compression tool to reduce file sizes before uploading images, videos, and gifs. Sites like TinyPNG compress images in bulk, while Google's Squoosh can shrink image files to microscopic sizes. However, if You choose to compress your media, keeping files in the kilobytes (KB) range is a good rule of thumb.