Understanding the Difference Between On-Page and Technical SEO

To optimize your website effectively, you need to understand both on-page and technical SEO. Each one plays a key role in boosting your site’s visibility and performance in search engine results. This means making it easier to find you as an answer when you audience is searching for a solution to their problem.

Optimizing your website effectively requires a solid understanding of both on-page and technical SEO. On-page SEO means focusing on things like relevant keywords, correct and interesting meta descriptions, and unique title tags. This helps to improve the user experience and plays into your overall site health.

Technical SEO means more of your website structure, your site speed, how crawlable and indexable your site is, and removing duplicate content (to name a few). Each plays a crucial role in improving your site’s visibility and performance in search engine results. Here’s a deeper breakdown of what each entails:

On-Page SEO

This means optimizing individual web pages to rank higher and earn more relevance and relevant traffic in search engines. Things like keyword integration, meta tag optimization, content quality, and more tie into this critical component of SEO. Let’s break it down further, by placing things into one of two buckets: content optimization and user experience.

Content Optimization: What matters?

• Target Keywords: Use relevant keywords throughout your content to rank higher and attract targeted traffic. Identify relevant keywords your audience is searching for and naturally incorporate keywords into titles, headings, meta descriptions, and throughout the content.
• Meta Descriptions: Create unique, keyword-rich titles for each page. Craft compelling meta descriptions that include keywords to improve click-through rates.
• Title Tags: Ensure each page has a unique, keyword-rich title tag that accurately describes the content.
• Headers: Use H1 tags for main titles and H2, H3 for subheaders to structure content and make it easy to read. Include keywords in headers where appropriate.
• High-Quality Content: Provide valuable, engaging, and original content that meets the needs and intent of your audience. Avoid duplicate content and provide unique insights or information.

User Experience: What matters?

• Internal Linking: Use internal links to guide users to related content and improve site navigation. Effective internal linking helps users navigate the site more easily, finding related content and resources without frustration.
• Multimedia Optimization: Optimize images, videos, and other media to enhance user engagement without slowing down the page.
• Mobile-Friendliness: Ensure your content is accessible and readable on all devices, especially mobile phones. Ensuring your website works well on mobile devices is crucial as more users access content on smartphones and tablets.
• Readability: Use clear, concise language and break up text with bullet points and short paragraphs. Using headers, subheaders, bullet points, and short paragraphs makes content easier to read and digest.
• Engagement Metrics: Monitor bounce rates, session duration, and other metrics to understand and improve user engagement. Looking at your current site and taking assessment of your metrics and finding ways to improve them and tie them into updated keyword research means making well-rounded decisions about how to get users to your site and keep them there.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is all about the behind-the-scenes elements of your website that influence its performance and visibility in search engines. It’s like tuning the engine of a car to ensure it runs smoothly and efficiently. A big majority of technical SEO is ensuring your site is crawlable and indexable. This makes it easier for search engines to search and understand what content is on the page and why it matters.

Website Structure: What matters?

• URL Structure: Create clean, descriptive URLs that are easy for users and search engines to understand. They should be short, keyword-rich, and reflect the site’s hierarchy. For example, a URL like www.example.com/category/subcategory/product is much clearer than www.example.com/p12345. This helps search engines understand the relationship between different pages.
• Site Speed: Optimize your website’s loading times to improve user experience and search engine rankings.
• Mobile-Friendliness: Implement responsive design to ensure your site works well on all devices. When users find it easy to navigate your site, they stay longer, reducing bounce rates and increasing engagement metrics, both of which are positive signals to search engines.
• Security (HTTPS): Use HTTPS to secure your site, which is also a ranking factor for search engines.
• Structured Data: Implement schema markup to help search engines understand your content and enhance SERP features. Rich snippets, local business information, the right context. and more detailed information means enhanced visibility of the website.

Crawlability and Indexing: What matters?

• Robots.txt: Use the robots.txt file to control which pages search engine bots can crawl. This guides search engine bots on how to crawl and index your site, instead of leaving it up to them.
• XML Sitemaps: Create and submit XML sitemaps to guide search engines to your important pages. An XML sitemap provides a structured map of your site, listing all important URLs and helping search engines discover content more effectively.
• Crawl Errors: Regularly check and fix crawl errors using tools like Google Search Console.
• Canonical Tags: Use canonical tags to prevent duplicate content issues. These canonical tags help manage duplicate content, consolidate link equity, improve crawl efficiency, maintain consistent rankings, and simplify content management, all of which enhance technical SEO.
• Pagination: Properly implement pagination to help search engines understand the relationship between pages. Organized navigation and pagination helps search engine bots navigate through large sets of data more efficiently by breaking content into manageable chunks.

To effectively optimize your website, you need a strong grasp of both on-page and technical SEO. Each plays a vital role in boosting visibility and performance in search results, making it easier for your audience to find you when they need solutions. The main purpose of a site is to REALLY answer the why when someone says “why should we choose your business to solve our problem?”

On-Page SEO focuses on optimizing individual web pages with relevant keywords, compelling meta descriptions, and unique title tags. It also includes creating high-quality, engaging content and improving user experience through internal linking, multimedia optimization, mobile-friendliness, and readability. Monitoring engagement metrics like bounce rates and session duration helps refine these efforts.

Technical SEO involves the behind-the-scenes elements of your website, such as ensuring a clean, descriptive URL structure, optimizing site speed, and implementing mobile-friendly designs. Using HTTPS secures your site, while structured data (schema markup) helps search engines understand and index your content more effectively. Managing crawlability with tools like robots.txt and XML sitemaps, fixing crawl errors, using canonical tags to prevent duplicate content, and properly implementing pagination are all crucial for technical SEO.

Together, on-page and technical SEO ensure your site is user-friendly, searchable, and efficient, driving better search engine rankings and user engagement. Need some help? Looking for a website audit to help you get a crystal clear understanding of how you can improve your site rankings in less than 90 days? Let’s chat! Patrick Zangardi and I are running a special on our site audits this summer – so email me at vanessa@zangardi.com and let’s go! We can get a site audit done in less than a week, so let’s get your site spruced up headed into the back half of 2024.