How Do I Improve On-Page, Off-Page & Technical SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) impacts the behind-the-scenes mechanism that generates results whenever a user conducts a search. Every search is a bit like someone asking for directions, and the results page is where businesses position themselves as the most logical destination. Good SEO is how one brand convinces a search engine to prioritize it over another.

As a branded website, traffic is the lifeblood of your online business — making search engines a critical piece of any business looking to make the most of its digital presence. Though the ins and outs of the SEO universe can be complex, it’s in every marketer’s best interest to understand the basics of what makes a site valuable in the eyes of a search engine.

Great SEO Takes Constant Refining

When a shopper searches “2022 spring fashion trends,” related ecommerce brands compete near-instantaneously to receive top priority on the results page. Streamlining your company’s SEO means pushing what you have to offer to the forefront in a crowded digital marketplace, making it a critical component to your advertising efforts.

However, SEO is also a fluid process. Frequently, search engines make internal changes to their search algorithms, causing ripple effects that alter SEO performance. Search engines are always seeking better ways to determine which content is most relevant to a user, but they rarely make the inner workings of their algorithms public knowledge. Thus, optimizing your brand’s searchable qualities is far from a set-it-and-forget-it job — it’s a constant refining process requiring some detailed understanding of what exactly goes on behind the scenes.

What Is On-Page SEO, and How Do I Improve It?

Your website is loaded with information — the company blog, product descriptions, even the “About Us” page has data for search engines to locate and index through a complex system of ranking factors. On-page or on-site SEO relates directly to your user-facing web content, including headlines, images and HTML tags. 

Search engines can’t read web content the same way people do. Instead, these engines collect all available data on the page to determine if it meets the intent of a user’s relevant search. They have grown so complex, these algorithms can actually determine which web pages come from the most trustworthy sources (as opposed to spammy, suspicious content).

There are several key areas that can improving on-site SEO, including the following:

• Metadata: Below the surface of every webpage there are HTML elements that “talk” to search engines. When you tag content with certain descriptors or add page titles and meta descriptions, you’re allowing search engines to more easily gauge your page’s contents.
• Titles, Headlines & Headers: Formatting your content to match detailed headlines and subheads is another element that can help search engines understand the information on your page.
• Smart Use of Keywords: The days of over-saturating your written content with words and phrases you want search engines to latch onto are over. Algorithms have grown smart enough to gauge user intent, and that means applying keywords in relevant, useful ways or risking search engines downgrading your content as superficial and unauthoritative.
• SEO-Friendly Content: Many site-building platforms now include “readability” metrics and other indicators approximating how likely it is for both search engines and users to like your content. These indicators analyze everything from sentence paragraph length to vocabulary usage and overall scannability.

What Is Off-Page SEO, and How Do I Improve It?

Think of off-page SEO like search engines seeking a second opinion — what do other sites think of your web pages? If off-site destinations are regularly linking to your content through backlinks, it gives search engines a massive confidence boost when it comes time to prioritizing your site on a results page. You’ll notice Adtaxi’s own written content regularly links back to sites like AdAge, Statista and Forbes Business for the objective expertise they regularly offer.

Search engines treat these backlinks as an affirmation of those sites’ trustworthiness, which in turn raises their respective ranking among both users and content creators. Link building is essentially building your reputation in the online community — and the best way to do that is producing worthwhile content. Guest blogs, interviews, case study findings, and regular updates on emerging trends are great ways to establish your site as a central hub of information.

What Is Technical SEO, and How Do I Improve It?

Though closely tied to the elements above, technical SEO acts as the framework for all other optimization efforts. If a search engine is unable to crawl or index your site content due to insufficient technical requirements, even the best content won’t see the light of day. Web pages that take too long to load, are difficult to navigate on mobile devices or appear to be plagiarizing content will suffer in the technical SEO ranking department.

Improving your site’s technical SEO might also mean reimagining how your site is organized. Site structure and navigation plays a major role in SEO ranking — basically, if it’s difficult for a web crawler to identify and index all of your site’s pages, a search engine will assume users will have a similarly difficult time and likely bounce from the site. Cleaning up your site map, sticking to a consistent URL format and ensuring each web page has its own unique content will help boost your technical SEO up to speed.