The Ultimate On-Page SEO Checklist For 2025 + Cheat Sheet

This means you have to ensure your content is up to snuff to beat the competition. Showing Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (or EAT), optimizing your title tags, and writing good copy are all elements of good on-page SEO. You have to strategize about how all those elements work together– and how to make sure they work for people as well as search engines. It may also be useful to check your content against other pages ranking for your chosen keyword. For example, if competitor content has a compelling and friendly tone, you can mirror this to meet the expectations of your audience. For example, it’ll make sense for many people to start with their homepage.

Both of these factors are important for your SEO campaign, which is why most SEO service packages include both on-page and off-page SEO. You can use various types of visual elements to engage your audience. These are all great for catching your audience’s interest and giving them relief from all the text on your page. Keywords that are placed closer to the beginning of the title hold more weight. It’s the first thing Google reads, so it will immediately know the context of your page. This also immediately tells your audience about the subject of your page.

A good rule of thumb is to aim for 60 characters or less for titles and 160 or less for meta descriptions. A URL slug is the text that comes after the main domain and slash in a web address, like squarespace.com/blog. Write a slug that incorporates your keyword and identifies your website structure when possible.

In our guide, we’ll explain the importance of an SEO strategy and outline its main elements. We’ll review each stage of the planning process, highlighting the most important things to consider. When people bounce from your site, it tells search engines that your site is not relevant to the search results.

Scan Your Keyword

An example of a keyword-stuffed paragraph, bolding all the target keywords. This practice created tons SEO Anomaly of thin, low-quality content across the web, which Google addressed specifically with its 2011 update known as Panda. This algorithm update penalized low-quality pages, which resulted in more quality pages taking the top spots of the SERPs. Google continues to iterate on this process of demoting low-quality content and promoting high-quality content today.

Page Speed Optimization

We’re a full-service digital marketing agency with 25+ years of experience. Our award-winning team of SEO professionals is pumped to learn about your business, industry, and goals to deliver the results you need and grow your bottom line. Additionally, despite the shift with AI search getting more popular, traditional search still reigns supreme. You still need to optimize your on-page SEO to ensure you continue to perform well in traditional searches, while expanding your presence in alternative search platforms. Another on-page SEO factor to consider is the optimization for the featured snippet, also known as position 0.

• Google recommends focusing on “people-first content,” which means creating valuable content that aligns with user intent is more important than ever.
• You can do this by making guest posts on high-authority sites or paying someone to do this for you.
• Transcriptions and alt text are another great place to include your target keywords, and incorporating them can help make your site ADA-compliant.
• This includes elements that affect the optimization and proper operation of the website, such as site speed, mobile-friendliness, crawlability, and more.
• This URL is effective because it features a keyword that shoppers might be looking for (“blue crop top”) and clearly describes what product is sold on the page.

The Top 5 On-Page SEO Factors

In other words, say goodbye to random letters and numbers, and say hello to URLs that make sense. Internal links act as a roadmap of your website — they create a web of related pages that your readers, and more importantly, search engines, can follow. Backlinks are one of the most important ranking factors (more on this later). The goal of on-page SEO is to optimize a page’s content, formatting, and design to rank highly within the SERPs. Most people rely on search results to find businesses to purchase from or content to consume.

Internal links are hyperlinks that point to other pages on the same site. For example, a link might say “my favorite area to stay in” and send users to another page on your site. High-volume keywords can be attractive, but also check keyword difficulty (KD %). But it can be a great way to get them to share your content with their audience. As you can see, we got a backlink (and a handful of targeted visitors).