Written by Mason Towne This tutorial will walk you through the steps you should take on each of your website pages to boost your search results ranking potential.
By structuring your content in a way that appeals to search engines like Google, you can ensure that more people see your webpages within the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). This means more site traffic!
This SEO tutorial is designed to help you optimize each page for a specific keyword phrase. You’ll want to make sure you’re targeting solid keyword phrases that will actually generate results for you.
If you’re unsure if you have good keywords selected, check out our resources on choosing good keywords here:
- How to Do Keyword Research for Local SEO with Carrot’s Keyword Explorer
- SEO Keyword Bible for Investors
- SEO Keyword Bible for Agents
Keep in mind that you don’t need ALL of your pages to rank in search results!
You only want to optimize the pages of your site that are set up to convert a visitor into a lead, which is when they submit their information through a form. These are pages like your Homepage, location pages, pages about the services you offer, and other landing pages that you may have created for campaigns you are pushing.
You don’t need to worry about optimizing pages like your privacy policy, FAQ page, etc… Optimizing these pages may actually cause them to compete with your more important pages, making it more difficult for the more important pages to rank well.
Without further ado, let’s get into it!
Step 1: Meta Title, Description, and Page URL
Each page of your website should have a unique meta title and meta description. This helps both search engines and visitors in understanding the page’s content, plus it makes sure that search engines can accurately index your site’s pages.
You can locate and edit your page’s meta title and meta description within the SEO Tool, which is found at the bottom of the editing area for each individual page of your Carrot website.
The meta title and meta description will typically appear within search results as depicted below:
- Meta Title Optimization: Include the chosen keyword phrase you would like to rank for in the front portion of your meta title. Meta titles should be short (ideally under 60 characters) and easy to read. They should help Google and real people quickly understand what your page is about. Include your company’s brand name if relevant.
- Meta Description Optimization: This is a short blurb (under 140 characters) that should make it clear to a user how your page’s content solves their search query or problem. Meta descriptions should be easy to read and include your primary keywords and/or keyword phrases (or at least a very similar variant). Good meta descriptions should make people want to click through from the search results to your page.
- URL: If possible, include your keyword phrase (or at least a very similar variant) in your URL for the page you’re trying to rank. This is applicable to any page that’s not your home page, as you can edit your URL slugs for any page you’d want to rank outside of your home page. To edit the URL of a page, click the permalink dropdown within the panel that’s on the right-hand side of your editing page, shown below:
Step 2: On-Page Content
Introduction: Make sure you include the keyword phrase in the first 100-ish words of your content on your page. This makes it clear what the content on your page is going to be about.
Keyword Density: We include this because it’s a commonly talked about optimization topic, but the jury appears to be out on keyword density (how often your keyword phrase shows up in your content). A good rule of thumb is to just write content that would be beneficial for the person searching the phrase you’re trying to rank for, and the keywords should show up enough. That said, it’s safe to be intentional about including the keyword a couple of times in your content. You absolutely want to avoid “keyword stuffing” however. Keyword stuffing is the practice of plugging the keyword phrase in your content for the express purpose of trying to fool Google into thinking your content is valuable to those searching said phrase.
Page Title/H1: You’ll want to include your keyword in your page title/H1 tag on your site. There’s a ton of power in including your keyword phrase in header tags (specifically your H1 tag, which also happens to be your page title). You should only have one H1 header tag per page.
Other Header Tags (H2 & H3): Also include your keyword in other header tags like your H2 and H3 tags. Header tags are used to organize information on your page and to designate sections and subsections of your content. They rank in order of importance, from H1 to H6, with H1s usually being the title. Don’t keyword stuff by plugging your keyword into every single header tag. Instead, use descriptive variations and synonyms of your primary keyword throughout your H2 and H3 tags to help users and search engines easily understand the content of your page.
Image Optimization: Your images on your Carrot site can also be optimized! Not only is optimizing your images good for SEO, it’s also a great way to make sure your site follows ADA online usage guidelines. You can optimize your images by ensuring your images have alt tags. These alt tags can be great places to include your keyword phrase if it’s relevant. Additionally, it’s a good idea to name the image’s filename as one that is descriptive of what the image is. Learn more about image optimization
Step 3: Linking
Links are an important part of SEO.
You wouldn’t build a new neighborhood or subdivision without making sure there were roads to link it to the rest of town, would you?
Links are like roads for your website: they help users and search engines discover the different pages of your site.
Internal Linking: Internal links between related pages and posts on your own website helps Google crawl your website more easily. Internal linking is a big part of our recommended blog content SEO strategy.
External Linking: When relevant, cite your sources by linking out to authoritative and trustworthy sites sites such as Wikipedia or a city/state government website.
As always, ensure you use descriptive anchor text like the above-referenced “ADA online usage guidelines” and “blog content SEO strategy” links instead of just plugging the link in.
Conclusion
Those are a few tips and tricks you can use to optimize your on-page SEO!
It’s worth noting that our SEO audit tool found at the bottom of your page editor will help guide you towards taking a lot of these steps!
After following these steps for on-page SEO, we also recommend checking out our blog content SEO strategy and getting started with off-site SEO by setting up your citations:
You can also join Carrot’s Official Evergreen Marketing Community to learn more about SEO and how to pull in more leads with your Carrot site!