Search Engine Optimisation is a collection of different strategies and methods that are all designed to help improve your visibility and ranking on relevant search queries. There are, however, different types of SEO. Technical, on-page, off-page SEO all work towards improving your visibility on search engines, but the specific focus is different. Technical and on-page SEO focuses on the methods that will improve your website, while off-page SEO works to improve your local SEOLocal SEO is the process of optimizing your website to rank on the 1st page of Google for a search term and geographic location that is relevant to your business., link-building strategy, and overall digital presence of your website.
You can’t think of it as technical SEO vs on-page SEO vs off-page SEO. They are not in competition with one another. Rather they are different focuses that all require time and investment.
Though there is a big difference between off-page and on-page SEO, both are critical to improving your search engine optimisation efforts, and both work to increase user experience and overall. SEO on page, off page, technical (and even content) are all important, though when it comes to improving your SEO, you are best off improving the technical elements of your website, then the rest of your on-page efforts, then focus on your off-page SEO strategy.
Everything You Need to Know About Technical SEO
Technical on page SEO is often the best place to start, as you will need to work with your web developer or IT team to improve your website’s technical elements.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO works to optimise the technical elements of your website. These technical elements include site speed, mobile friendliness, site structure, and so on.
Why is Technical SEO Important?
Technical SEO is the best place to start with your SEO efforts, as it works to ensure that your website is suitable for search engines to crawl and index. Having search engines crawl and index your website is what makes it possible for search engines to rank your site in the first place, and therefore without these improvements, any other SEO investment won’t show results.
What are the Technical SEO Elements?
There are multiple SEO elements to check for, with a few of the most important including:
· Site Speed
Site speed is one of the top-ranking factors that Google considers. You want your website to be fast to load with minimal hiccups.
· Site Security
Security is very important online, and not just for Google. Ensure that your website is secure and encrypted to rank more highly and better protect your brand online.
· Mobile Friendliness
Google and other search engines put a mobile-first emphasis, which means your website needs to be fully responsive and optimised to be viewed and engaged on phones, tablets, and on desktops.
· Site Structure
Your site needs to be clearly structured and functional. Not only does this mean you need clear parent, child, and grandchild pages, you also need to check and remove any 404 pages or 301 redirectsA redirect is a web page that loads in place of another web page.. If you have multiple versions of the same website (for example, multiple languages), you will need to use the right hreflang tags.
· Unique, Enriched Content
Unique content that is not duplicated anywhere and is fully enriched is where your technical SEO efforts start to bleed towards your on-page SEO efforts. What this means is that your site only features well-written, fully in-depth content that does not appear anywhere else online.
How Do We Discover Technical Issues with Your Website?
To discover the technical issues with your website you will need a technical SEO audit. This audit will help understand the issues that are holding your website back. SEO experts will always create a working strategy that will immediately improve your visibility on search engines. Tools like Screaming Frog, among others, will be used to find issues and make improvements.
Other additional improvements may be made, such as implementing an XML sitemap, improving internal linking, and even using schema markups throughout your site to improve its structure and help users and search engines better understand your website and content.
Everything You Need to Know About On-Page SEO
Though on-page SEO is in a different section, it is incorrect to think of it as an on-page SEO vs technical SEO situation. They both occur on your website, and on-page SEO can encompass technical SEO as well. The only reason why there is an on-page vs off-page SEO section here is for clarity.
What is On-Page SEO?
On-page SEO also focuses on the optimisation efforts available on your website. Rather than thinking of on-page as technical SEO vs on page SEO, think of technical SEO as a subset of on-page SEO. On-page SEO should start with technical improvements and then move on to content and other SEO strategies to improve your E-A-T (expertise, authority, trustworthiness) characteristics.
Why is On-Page SEO Important?
On-page SEO is one of the best investments you can make for the quality of your website. On-page SEO works to improve your domain authority and, as a result, your ranking on relevant search queries. It also works to improve the quality of your website for real users by improving the content, the experience, and even the accessibility.
You will want to have a fully optimised website before moving on to your off-site SEO efforts, as a poor-quality website can sabotage even the best off-page SEO strategy. By focussing on on-page first, you can improve your visibility and the quality of your site, and also further all future SEO and digital marketing efforts in the future.
What Is Included with On-Page SEO?
There are many different characteristics that are focussed on and improved with your on-page SEO strategy. These include:
- Content
- Meta Titles and Descriptions
- Canonical Tags
- Alt Text
- URL Structure
- Unique Content
- Image Optimisation
- Technical SEO
How to Improve Your On-Page SEO
Improving your on-page SEO often starts with an audit. That technical audit from before can go beyond looking at technical issues and delve into content, keywordKeywords are the words and phrases that potential customers might search for to find your business., and linking concerns. Overall, to improve your on-page search engine optimisation efforts, you will need to follow these four key steps:
1. Improve Your Technical SEO
Improving the technical elements of your website is a great way to give your website a clean, solid canvas from which to work. Not only that, but it can help highlight content and other issues later on, which you will then need to fix in the next step.
2. Create Amazing, Enriched Content
All content needs to be optimised, enriched with information, linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages., and media, and of course, must appeal to real users. Everything, from your homepage, blog articles, and even your meta descriptions, can all work to improve traffic to your site and encourage more click-through traffic from one page to another. Content needs to be unique, in-depth, formatted correctly, and written well for real audiences in mind.
3. Use a Smart Keyword Strategy
A smart keyword strategy can help improve your link building efforts, PPC campaigns, and social media marketing. It is wise to start your content improvement efforts with a winning keyword strategy. Not only do your keywords need to be relevant, but they also need to have the right user intent, and they need to be placed in the right places. Keywords need to be in your content, titles, meta descriptions, and even in your alt tags. There is a fine line, however, between optimising your content with keywords and stuffing those keywords. One works to improve your SEO efforts, the other can penalise your site.
4. Have an Excellent Internal Linking Structure
A great linking structure is made up of internal links and external links to quality sites. You need both to enjoy a fully optimised website. Internal links, in particular, are very useful to help search engine algorithms crawl through your website and help understand the most important pages on said site. Internal links also encourage more click-through traffic and can reduce bounce rates, and work to keep users on your website for longer.
Everything you Need to Know About Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO is far more complex simply because there are a lot of players involved that you do not have direct control over. That being said, both on-page SEO and off-page SEO are critically important for your SEO strategy and should both be invested in so that your site sees the best results for its investment.
The biggest difference between on-page and off-page SEO isn’t where your SEO efforts are located, though that is the clearest definition. The biggest difference is the set of tools and strategies you will use.
What is Off-Page SEO?
Off-page SEO is a wide variety of strategies designed to improve your search engine optimisation on any site that isn’t your main domain. In some cases, you may even have control over these elements, such as your social media or your Google My Business profile, but you won’t have direct control in others, like link buildingLink building is a process of acquiring links pointing to your website. These links are obtained by creating content, participating in social media or commenting on other blogs..
Why is Off-Page SEO Important?
Off-page SEO is one of the most important investments you can make for your business, and done right works to bring in plenty of organic trafficOrganic search traffic (sometimes called natural or unpaid search) is the traffic that's driven to a website because of unpaid placement on a search engine results page. and search engine traffic to your site.
What is Included in an Off-Page SEO Strategy?
For best results, your off-page SEO strategy will always start with an off-page SEO audit. This audit will help you understand your link profile, how healthy it is, and what you can do to improve it. There are many ways to improve your link building strategy, but the good news is that link building is not the only way to improve your off-page SEO.
Generally speaking, there are three main branches of off-page SEO, and these include:
· Social Media
A healthy link profile has a mixture of dofollow and nofollowThe nofollow attribute is an HTML tag that tells search engine crawlers not to follow a link. links. Social media is a great way to increase those nofollow links and bring greater awareness to your brand through paid advertising and organic engagement.
Nofollow links don’t increase your ranking on search engines, but they increase organic traffic. Having thriving social media pages, therefore, gives you ample opportunity to bring traffic to your website while also allowing you to showcase your content strategy to new audiences.
· Link Building
Link building is one of the most important parts of any off-page SEO strategy. You don’t just want your link anywhere. In fact, having your link on low-quality, or unrelated sites can actually hurt your SEO efforts. Instead, you need high quality links from sites with a high domain authority. Ideally, these will be naturally acquired. For best results, you want a very high ranking, popular site to link to yours. These sites have a high domain authority (DA) and send that trust flow to your site.
PageRank, which is the system Google uses to determine rankings on its search engines, weighs those high DA sites above multiple low DA sites. This doesn’t mean it’s bad if a small-time blogger references your site, however. So long as those links are natural, it will only work to make your link profile more robust.
Link building can be the most complex and difficult aspect of off-page SEO, which is why we offer advanced off-page SEO services.
· Local SEO
Local SEO is one of the most effective types of off-page SEO. Local SEO works to improve your Google My Business profile, uses schema markups to make your business more visible on local searches (and also on maps), and is generally one of the best ways to forget about competitors that are not in direct competition with your business. There are many, many different strategies and tools to help you improve your local SEO efforts.
- Increase NAP listings
- Use local business schema markup
- Improve Google My Business
- And more.
Why Do You Need These Different SEO Strategies?
Both on-page and off-page SEO are essential to improving your search engine ranking. Though there is a significant difference between on-page SEO and off-page SEO, they are two sides of the same coin. Both sides are essential to improving your ranking on search engines and boosting the overall SEO performance of your domain so that it can thrive.
