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An effective search engine marketing (SEM) strategy can be split into two parts: paid listings and organic listings. Organic listings, also known as search engine optimization or SEO, are supported by four pillars, with On-Page SEO being one of them. In On-Page SEO, there is an emphasis on producing reliable content that can be optimized to help nestle your business into your chosen niche.

Defining On-Page SEO is not as simple as finding its listing in the dictionary. Truly understanding what On-Page SEO is and how it can be applied to your business requires a more in-depth look into how search engines and your website content define you, and how Google then sorts your website into the dictionary of search results.

Defining On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO can be split into two questions: What is your webpage about and is it worth reading? These are the questions Google is asking you about your website, so it is important to make sure you are providing a strong, concise, and positive answer.

The first question is centered around defining yourself as a company. What problem do customers have that you promise to fix through the use of your product or service? How is this process accomplished? Why is your process better than your competitors? These questions are a great starting point for defining your business and outlining what your website may look like from a content perspective.

The second question focuses on actually making that content appealing. Your website can contain all the right keywords in all the right places, but if people visiting your website get bored with your content or find the text itself hard to read, then they are going to go elsewhere to answer their query because your content is not worth the effort it requires to read it. This is where optimizing your content comes into play.

Optimizing Your Website Content

There are two main kinds of content: entertaining and informative. Entertaining content does exactly that; it entertains your audience usually through the use of images, video, or audio that is appealing. Informative content focuses on educating your audience on a given topic, usually related to the problem your business was created to solve and the process by which you accomplish that task. These two kinds of content are not mutually exclusive. They function more like a sliding scale, where you can produce blogs, videos, and infographics that fall on a range from pure entertainment to purely informational.

Like with most things, the extreme points at each end should be avoided. Purely entertaining media makes us ask “so what”, while purely informative media tends to make us want to skip it together, assuming that it is not worth the mental energy to find our answer. In both cases, your audience leaves your site because your content is not worth reading. We want to make content that falls somewhere within the bell curve of entertaining to informative.

Alongside the content topic itself, we want to make sure that keywords are included in the content we produce. This is so that your website appeals to the second audience you need to market yourself to; the algorithm. These lines of code use the information on your website as a definition of what it means to be your business and then sort your website with hundreds of thousands of others to best serve their customers. Keywords in your content help the algorithm sort your website properly so that your business is put with – and hopefully ahead – of your competitors.

This is what makes on-page SEO so important. You are not just marketing to potential customers, but to the lines of code that determine whether your website should be shown to those potential customers in the first place. Finding the right balance between entertainment, information, and keywords can be a tricky process but when done right can bring huge boosts to your business.

Understanding the Broader Context

On-Page SEO is only one of the four pillars of building an organic listing. Without putting effort into the other three pillars, the work you put into making your website amazing is for naught.

The first pillar is Technical SEO, which is focused on understanding how the lines of code that make up an algorithm identify and index content and keywords. There is also Off-Page SEO which focuses on making internal links between the pages of your website as well as external links connecting your site to other trustworthy sources. Content is the fourth pillar of organic SEO and one we have already touched on at length as it is integral to creating strong On-Page SEO.

On-Page SEO is only one part of a strong and effective SEM strategy. Understanding how On-Page SEO fits in with its sister pillars in supporting a strong organic presence in search engine algorithms is integral in making a stable and multi-pronged SEM strategy for your business.

Putting It All Together

By boosting your organic and paid listings, you can expand your site visibility, improve user experience on your website, boost your search rankings, increase your overall website traffic, grow your brand credibility, and extend your influence during the audience discovery phase. All of these tend to lead to substantial growth in your customer base and can give you an extra edge over your local competition.

While the benefits of developing an SEO strategy are obvious, knowing how to properly build an SEM strategy that will promote your business most optimally can be difficult—especially for smaller firms that cannot afford to hire an entire in-house team of marketers that eat, sleep, and breathe everything digital marketing.

A much more affordable option that still allows you to reap all the benefits of a customized SEM strategy is to hire a digital marketing company like BluShark Digital to handle your business’s online presence. To see how your business could benefit from partnering with our digital marketing team, give us a call or fill out our contact form.