Let’s go beyond the concept of SEO content as any content with keywords in it.

SEO writing is much bigger than this. It’s the right topic, the proper search intent, the thorough SERP
analysis, the perfect text structure, professional SEO, and a careful content audit. And all that should be
wrapped into the right business goal setting.
Puzzled? This article will help you figure out how to write your web content so that it appears at the top
of SERPs, converts, and sells.

What is SEO content writing?

SEO copywriting is the process of creating and optimizing content with a view to ranking in search
engines’ results.
Roughly speaking, SEO content = any web content + further on-page and technical SEO.
In other words, SEO content is content that is easily understood by search engines and completely
satisfies user search intent.
There are many types of webpages that “need” SEO content:
• Homepage
• Category pages
• Products pages
• Landing pages
• FAQ pages
• Blog posts
If those pages of yours aren’t SEO-friendly yet, it’s high time for you to take care of it.

What is required of you to succeed in SEO writing?

You can hardly succeed in SEO content writing without having some knowledge and skills under your
belt.

Know how search engines work

Writing web content without knowing how it will be further processed and ranked by search engines?
Never heard of that.
Mindless stuffing your text with keywords (many think that’s what SEO is) won’t help but hurt your
site. Meanwhile, there are plenty of other nuances you should take care of. Thus, you should at least be
aware of how search engines crawl, index, and rank your page so that you can effectively optimize your
page for them.
What can I recommend? You can start by reading this article about how Google works.
Mind your spelling and grammar
Grammar and spelling are not direct ranking factors. Google won’t rank you lower if you made a
couple of spelling mistakes. But since search engines need to understand what your page is about to
rank it, your poor grammar can become a real obstacle to that.
That said, grammar is still a strong quality signal for your audience. If they spot your poor language
skills, they will never trust your expertise, will spend less time on site, and will rocket your bounce rate
sky-high. And, of course, users will think twice before purchasing your service/product.
What can I recommend? Refresh your school grammar course — there might be things you forgot
with time. And always check your writing with tools like Grammarly or Writer before publishing. They
significantly ease the final proofreading process.

Know for whom you write

You know what they say, “If you try to sell to everyone, you’ll end up selling to no one.” That applies
to writing, too.
Knowing your target audience (TA) is an obvious requirement for any content creation process. If you
know your TA, you know how these people speak and what words they choose. Thus, you can
effectively adapt your keyword optimization strategy and eventually rank for the right terms. Plus, you
will understand how you should present content on your site (style, voice, and tone) and structure pages
for readability.
What can I recommend? Use Google Analytics. This free tool can provide you with valuable
audience insights, such as Demographics (Age, Gender), Geography (Language,
Location), Device (Mobile, Desktop, Tablet), Acquisitions (Organic, Direct, PPC, CPC), User
Behavior (Frequency of Visits, New vs. Returning, Engagement), etc.
If your site is new and Google Analytics data is insufficient, you can use Similarweb. With it, you can
check out your competitors’ data and then base your writing on this knowledge.

Be aware of your competition

You need to regularly analyze and monitor your competitors' SEO to learn from their methods and
mistakes. It's great if you know why your competitors are ranking better than you and how you can do
better than them.
For example, when doing your keyword research, you can find out who is currently ranking for your
target keywords, assess how hard it will be for you to rank your content for them, and identify the
keywords your competitors overlooked. This way, you can also spot an underserved niche and fill it
with your content.
What can I recommend? Allocate time to analyze your competitors at least once in a while. Our guide
on competitive SEO analysis will help you with it.

Know your niche and its trends

To create great content, you need to be up to date with industry news and facts. If you spot a trend
early, you can be the first to write on a topic and get fast and cheap traffic. And if you
are regularly among the first to cover another hot topic, it will only benefit your website authority.
And vice versa, if you create a page for a topic that people aren’t interested in, you basically waste your
resources in vain. Or, for instance, if you provide (god forbids) false/outdated information on your site,
this may severely harm your reputation and rankings.
What can I recommend? Subscribe to all industry-related social media profiles, communities, and
forums. This way, you will always be in the know of what people are currently discussing.
You can also use Google Trends to track rising topics and search terms. If something is marked
as Breakout, it’s worth your attention.
Know how to use SEO tools
SEO can’t be done effectively and quickly without 3rd party tools. Starting with topic research and
ending with a final spelling and plagiarism check — you need tools that will ease your life.
The most basic tools every SEO writer should be acquainted with are:
• Google Search Console to track keyword and URL performance, any indexation and mobile
usability issues.
• Google Analytics to track the number of site visits, traffic sources, and audience statistics.
• Google Keyword Planner to find relevant keywords and check out their stats.
What can I recommend? Here is a list of the 35 best content creation tools. Make sure you check it out.

Basic SEO writing step-by-step

Finally, the things you came here for — the SEO writing itself. Let’s dig into it.

1. Content ideation
There are two ways you can go when you start writing content for SEO. You can focus on the keywords
you want to rank for and then think up a topic for them. Or you can reverse the process and come up
with a content idea first.
Traditionally, SEO copywriting means you search for the keywords you want to rank for (high search
volume + as low difficulty as possible, please) and then create content optimized for them.
However, we need to recollect the fact we are no longer in Google’s keyword-focused era. Now Google
is more of a semantic and topic-focused engine. In plain words, you don’t need a bunch of exact-match
keywords on a page so that a search engine ranks it. That means that we should shift our minds from
keywords and their density to the topic and its depth.
There are dozens of ways you can think up a new content idea. I will mention the three most prominent
ones:
• Find your customers' pain points. Ask your customer support or sales team what complaints
or frequent questions they regularly get. You can also find hints in the comments on your social
media and blog. Putting emphasis on customers’ pain when choosing a topic will certainly help
you improve your conversion rate.
• Discover a trendy topic. Including buzz topics in your content plan is also beneficial. Such
content may bring you more traffic than any other content and faster. However, such a traffic
flow won’t last long.
• Check out what your competitors are writing. Competitor analysis is especially important for
newly born sites. Why waste time researching topics if you can just look at what already works
for your competitors?
Once you come up with the topics, you need to decide if this topic deserves to be a pillar (a broad topic
page or a hub) or one of the cluster pages (narrow topic pages).
How to decide if it's a narrow or broad topic? Use your best judgment: Think if this page can “house”
5-10 more narrow topic pages? If yes, this page is a pillar page. Normally, broad topic pages are ranked
for short-tail keywords, while narrow topic pages are ranked for long-tail keywords.
And here's where you need thorough keyword research.

2. Keywords selection
This step requires Rank Tracker. You can download it now for free.
DOWNLOAD RANK TRACKER
Coming up with worthy keywords for future content is actually easier than thinking up a topic if you
use Rank Tracker’s keyword research tool. With it, you can run keyword gap analysis; discover the
most frequent keywords your top competitors use; extract keywords from Search Console, Google
Analytics, Keyword Planner, Google Autocomplete, Related Searches, and Related Questions; and
generate all possible keyword combinations.
Launch the tool, go to the Keyword Research module, and choose the preferred method. You’ll need to
enter the required data (domain or seed keyword), and in a couple of seconds, you’ll get the list of
keywords.
Note
If you use several methods, it will be more convenient for you to move to Keyword Sandbox, where the
keywords generated are automatically collected, and continue working from there.
The work doesn’t stop here. Now you need to take a look at the whole list and sort out the irrelevant
keywords — with some other brand names in it, wrong locations and target audience, or any other
irrelevant terms. Right-click the keyword(s) and then Remove Keyword(s) or pick the odd keywords
and press Delete.
3. Search intent analysis
Once you’ve collected all the relevant keywords for your topic, you need to pay attention to their
search intent.

A quick note
There are 4 common types of search intent: informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional.
• Informational — a user came to Search to get information on a particular topic.
• Navigational — a user wants to find a specific website.
• Commercial — a user searches for specific information about certain services or products but
isn’t ready to buy yet.
• Transactional — a user wants to buy or order something.
So, why do you need to distinguish those types of keywords and not use the whole scope you’ve
found? Well, our aim at this stage is to avoid those situations when you create an informational blog
post optimized for commercial search intent keywords. Or it can be a product page with only
informational keywords on it. Such a discrepancy can cost you conversions — people won’t get what
they expected from a page and leave it.
As a rule, you can easily tell the intent behind a certain keyword. For example, informational keywords
usually contain how to, guide, why, what. If it’s a keyword with the commercial intent, there will be
words like best, review, vs., top. Navigational keywords are usually certain products or brand names,
and transactional keywords contain buy, order, book, price.
To get the work done quickly, use Rank Tracker’s filters. Click the filter button, then
choose Keyword + Contains and enter the signal word you need, and click OK.

4. SERP analysis
This step requires Rank Tracker. You can download it now for free.
DOWNLOAD RANK TRACKER
Once you have generated a list of keywords and cleaned it up, move on to the SERP analysis. With it,
you will understand how hard it will be for you to compete for the keywords in SERP and what type of
content will satisfy searchers the most. The aim is to conclude what is required to rank for these
keywords and what your chances of ranking high are.
Right in the keyword research tool you just used or in Keyword Sandbox, click Analyze SERP near
the Keyword Difficulty metric. You will be redirected to its SERP Analysis.

Or just switch to the SERP Analysis module and enter your keyword. You will see the keyword metrics
along with the list of the first 50 search results.
First, you need to estimate your keyword potential. Check out the Keyword Difficulty and # of Searches
metrics. It will give you a rough estimation of whether it’s worth the effort to rank for the keyword.
Ideally, search volume should be relatively high while keyword difficulty is low.
Then, discover the most important ranking factor. Rank Tracker will check what ranking factors affect
positions in SERP most. The ranking factors that are worth paying attention to will be marked
as High and Moderate. There, you may notice that you should put stakes on backlinks or domain
strength (authority), for example.
Now, look at the table of the 50 of your competitors and check their stats: traffic, overall page strength,
and page performance.

By now, you should realize how much effort you should put in to rank for a certain keyword.
However, that’s not all. Look at the list of the first 10-15 pages and make note of:
• what types of content have been written (how-to/listicles/landing pages),
• whether these are mostly long/short pieces of content,
• what subtopics are being discussed in those pieces, i.e., page subheadings,
• if they provide some visual aid or contain some other distinctive features,
• if it’s quality or thin content.
This “investigation” will help you come up with an idea of what and how to write.
5. Choosing the content type and angle and developing the structure
Once you spot some common patterns, weaknesses, and strengths of the top SERP pages, you can
decide on the type of content you are going to write. It may be a new product page or a how-to blog
post.
Then decide from what angle you’ll develop the topic. It may be a broader or narrower target audience;
you can choose more practical or theoretical narration; you may also express personal opinion or
approach the topic with pure objectivity.
It’s not necessary to copy the angle your competitors have chosen — come up with yours based on your
knowledge of your TA.
For example, if your topic is what vitamins to choose to feel good, the angle may be women after 40.
Once you decide on this, start to develop the structure of your piece of content. You need to create
something more valuable and comprehensive than your competitors. So, make an effort — outperform
their strengths and play on their weaknesses. When pursuing that aim, remember that the content
structure should be logical and consistent.

6. Writing a non-beginner text

Now it’s time to write the text body. Yes, sometimes preparation can take more time than writing itself.
• Show your expertise. Go in depth on a topic, drill down to the very core of it (if the topic
presupposes that — it’s not a checklist or listicle).
• Show uniqueness. There should be some unique components in your text: an original
presentation or a distinct UI/UX. For example, there can be some visually attractive and
informative infographics to support your text.
• Remember, you are not your audience and write with this in mind — for them. That requires
empathy — the ability to wear the shoes of your TA. It goes beyond knowing that your audience
is young stay-at-home mothers. You actually should think, what bothers young stay-at-home
mothers the most? and so on.
• Take care of good user experience. Add more visuals where it’s appropriate. Keep in mind
mobile layout: don’t write long paragraphs and don't use small print in text and pictures. And
make your content easy to share with social share buttons.
• Use simple language if you don’t write for scholars. The easier it’s written, the easier it will be
perceived by your audience.
• Include a CTA to convert your readers. Even if you write purely informational content where
you don’t speak about your service or product, invite your reader to take action on your site: to
subscribe, comment, share on social media.
• Avoid plagiarism. Search engines won’t be pleased with you if you copy content already
published by others. Plus, it’s not funny to copy other people’s works — it won’t bring you any
satisfaction.
A pro tip: I recommend starting using WebSite Auditor’s Content Editor at this stage. It will make it
easier for you to create content and do further SEO. There, you will find all the editing tools needed.
Plus, the tool generates optimization tips tailored specifically for your page.
Launch Website Auditor and navigate to Page Audit > Content Editor. Click Create New Page
Content and enter the keywords you’ve picked.

Then click Create Content. You will see your perfect working space, which consists of a text editor on
the left and an SEO brief on the right.
You can optimize your text simultaneously with writing or you can finish your text first and then
proceed with SEO. Do as you feel like.

A quick note
If you choose to work with Content Editor, you will notice that it has already generated SEO
instructions for you to follow. This SEO brief is editable — you can refine it before you start
optimizing your page.
You can also download this SEO brief and send it to your copywriter if you outsource writing.
7. Making use of the best SEO practices
So how do you make your page content SEO-friendly?

Metadata
Title tags and meta descriptions are vital for SEO. They communicate to Google what your page is
about and help it make a snippet of your page. That’s why your title and description should contain a
focus keyword or its variations. However, you shouldn’t stuff them with keywords.
Plus, neither your title nor description should be too long or too short. Make your title 50-60 characters
long and description 140-160 characters. Otherwise, Google may consider changing your title in search
results. Or simply some parts of your text may not be visible.
Apart from these nuances, your title and description’s aim is to catch as many eyeballs as possible, so
make them super appealing and selling. And do not copy competitors’ titles and descriptions
completely. Otherwise, you won’t stand out.
A pro tip: There is a great feature of WebSite Auditor’s Content Editor that visualizes how your title
and description will look on the SERP. You just need to click on the title to start editing. You will
immediately preview your future snippet.

H1 - H6 headings
H1 - H6 subheadings allow visitors to easily navigate your page and help search engines understand the
content on your page.
Google can use any of your H1 - H6 tags to create a snippet of your page (however, it's considered that
H1 is used more often). So, they should show some relevance to the topic. It's achieved by adding
relevant keywords to your headings.
As for the number of characters you should use, the rules are pretty the same as for the title tag.
A pro tip: In Content Editor’s SEO brief, find the Topic and Questions section. These are the possible
ideas for H2 - H6 subheadings to improve your text. The recommendations are based on Google’s
People Also Ask, so it’s your chance to create a useful copy visitors will read out.

Keywords in the text body

Keywords also should be included naturally throughout the text body. Use both exact match keywords
and their close variations. And avoid keyword stuffing and unnatural use of keywords by all means. As
for keywords with grammar mistakes and misspelled keywords, it just isn't worth it.
What SEOs recommend is to use keywords early in the text. That’s just advice, not instruction. We
believe using a keyword in the first 100-150 words speaks to topical relevance for Google.
A pro tip: Content Editor can take your keyword optimization to the next level. Apart from those
keywords you have come up with during your keyword research stage, it provides you
with Recommended Keywords. These are the words WebSite Auditor has found during TF-IDF analysis
of your top competitors’ pages. Using these words will drive your SEO score even higher.
Structured data
Structured data is the tool that also helps search engines understand what your page is about. Therefore,
it helps create entities and get a rich snippet thus improving your rankings. So how do you apply
structured data?
You can do it manually or with the help of special schema markup generators. Whatever you prefer,
this is our comprehensive guide on structured data use. Make sure you read it.

Internal and external links

Both internal and external linking are important for SEO. Usually, we link when we want to provide
some proof for what was mentioned (statistics, research results) or provide additional reads that visitors
might be interested in.
To refresh your memory
Internal linking is when you link to the pages of your own site. Such links help crawlers and users
easily navigate your site and discover new pages. Plus, they tell search engines what pages on your site
are super important. And external linking is when you link to 3rd party pages. Though these links make
your readers leave your site, they still bring value to it (if they point to not-spammy, high-authority
sites).
• Anchor texts are also one of the main relevance signals for search engines. It’s good that they
contain a keyword, but its relevance and descriptiveness are a priority.
• Set the setting so that each new linked page opens in a new tab. This way, your readers can
easily come back to your site.
• You can make your external links either dofollow (default) or nofollow. Dofollow links pass the
link juice while nofollow links don’t.
• Don’t forget to instruct your readers to click on the link with a CTR. It may be something
like read our guide or click the link to read the post.

URL
Of course, you’d better include a keyword into your URL. Not because Google will immediately rank
you atop (because it won’t, obviously). But because the URL is a part of your future search snippet and
it clearly depicts what your page will be about. This way, users won’t be misled.
For this very reason, URLs should always be clean and short. That means you shouldn’t use symbols
such as %, &, @, or even spaces. Use only hyphens to separate words.
It would also be great to avoid numbers (e.g., top-5-vitamins-for-optimal-health) and dates (e.g., top-5-
vitamins-for-optimal-health-in-2022) in your URLs. The number of points may increase due to future
updates, while dates tend to expire.

Images
Images are an important type of content and require diligent SEO as well. Thus, you should always
provide your image with an alt tag. It will tell search engines what your image is about.
So, your alt text should be descriptive and detailed — you basically describe what you see in a picture
without any “personal style” in it. For example, a man sits on a blue chair with a cup in hands.
Make sure your image is of standard format (JPEG or PNG) and no more than 200 KB. Since high-
quality images are usually of big size, you should compress them before publishing. Otherwise, your
page will load forever and that puts your page speed and user experience in peril.
And finally, pay attention to how you name your image so that it describes the image briefly in a few
words. Separate them with hyphens, e.g., vitamins-pack.

8. Page audit
This step requires WebSite Auditor. You can download it now for free.
DOWNLOAD WEBSITE AUDITOR
Finally, when all writing and optimization are done and the content is published, don’t forget to make
the final check.
First, check your on-page SEO. In WebSite Auditor, go to Page Audit > Content Audit.
You will get informed on what flaws in optimization there are and how to fix them.

Then check if everything is OK from a technical point of view. Move to Technical Audit. There, you
will find info on Page Availability, Mobile Friendliness and Page Speed, Links, etc.
Advanced SEO writing: Applying digital marketing funnel
framework
You can write according to basic SEO writing tips described above and you will see the results of your
efforts, no doubt.
But there is one thing you can improve — be more strategic. At the end of the day, SEO writing can’t
be isolated from digital and content marketing. So, I suggest you think about your users once again
and correlate their customer journey with your content strategy.
At different stages they need different types of content. And in general, there should be enough SEO
content for each funnel stage. Now, let’s go over the details.

Top-of-funnel content
First goes top-of-funnel content. It’s aimed at those users who are at their Awareness stage — they still
don’t know anything about you and therefore don’t trust you.
You want to change it, so you create the content that will teach them that you can be trusted, i.e.,
awareness-creating content aimed at introducing your brand to your target audience.
Such content is supposed to form the many touch points needed to build the trust required for someone
to convert. So, here focus on attracting traffic content with how-to guides, landing pages, infographics,
checklists, ebooks, etc.
As a rule, short-tail keywords of informational intent are used while writing this type of content.

Middle-of-funnel content
Middle-of-funnel content is aimed at those who are at their Interest and Desire stage.
Since your visitors already know about your existence, you should now distinguish your solution and
simultaneously push your visitors to a decision in your favor.
Here, focus on generating leads with product overviews, testimonials, service pages, case studies,
landing pages, webinars, and success stories.
As for the keywords, use mid-tail keywords of commercial or navigational intent.

Bottom-of-funnel content
Bottom-of-funnel content is aimed at those users who are at their Action stage.
As a rule, such content is presented in the form of ultimate buying guides that help users decide which
product is the best for them. It should explain why users need your product and what they should be
aware of when buying.
That’s why here you need to focus on customer-generated and case-oriented content: product
overviews, customer reviews, use cases, pricing pages, conversion popups, and contact pages.
This type of posts drives organic traffic by answering purchase-focused search queries and targeting
long-tail transactional keywords that are not targeted at any of the sales or feature pages on your
website.
Here is a little content funnel cheat sheet for quick reference:
Final thoughts
Don’t create content for the sake of creating content. You need to have a goal in mind (Increase brand
awareness, generate sales leads, convert more leads into customers, improve retention and drive
upsells) and a clear understanding of how to reach it through digital marketing and SEO. I only hope
this article won’t leave you even more puzzled. If anything, you know where to find us.

With countless optimization tips and techniques, landing page SEO may often feel overwhelming.
You’ve got keywords, and backlinks, and technical audits, and where do you even start?
Well, why not start with the basics. The goal of your SEO effort is to make your pages appear in
Google search results. But it’s all going to be in vain unless the landing pages themselves are built the
right way. So, let’s take a look at what makes a perfectly optimized landing page.
Even though there is no exact formula that makes your page a guaranteed #1 in Google results, there
are some common rules of thumb to increase your chances to rank. Let's look at them one by one and
optimize each element to create a perfect landing page.

1. Clean URLs
Clean and consistent URLs are preferred by both search engines and human visitors. And though the
best practices mentioned here are not "a must", it's a good idea to optimize your URL structure
accordingly whenever possible.

Use keywords
Many SEOs believe that the influence of keyword-rich URLs on rankings is a thing of the past. While
it may or may not be true, you are not losing anything when you include keywords in your URLs. So,
at the chance that it still works, we do recommend building your URLs around your main keywords.
Not to mention that a keyword-rich URL may actually improve your click-through rate in search
results. URLs are a part of your snippet, and having it show another keyword will make it appear more
relevant:

Avoid special symbols

Special symbols (&, %, $, @) are not expressly forbidden, but they do make your URLs harder to read.
Also, keep in mind that you can’t use spaces — they will be converted to %20, which does not look
appealing to your users.

Think ahead
Avoid including information that may change in the future. Let’s say you publish an article called Top
10 Gravel Bikes to Buy in 2020 and your URL ends with /10-gravel-bikes-2020. A year goes by, the
article ranks very well, and you want to update it to Top 12 Gravel Bikes to Buy in 2021. Except you
can’t because your URL will forever give you away:

Be consistent
Make sure that all of your URLs follow the same formatting rules. This way you will avoid creating
duplicate pages and messing up your website structure. Some of the popular URL formatting rules
include sticking to lower case letters, using slashes to separate folders, and using dashes to separate
words.

Mind the content length

Shorter URLs are, generally speaking, preferable. You don't need to take this to the extreme — it is
normally ok for URLs to be up to 50-60 characters long. But if you have URLs pushing 100+
characters, there's probably an opportunity to rewrite them and make them more appealing.
If you're building your URLs based on the title of your post, think of cutting down on stop words (and,
but, a, the, and others) to make them shorter and more readable. Also, try to avoid an excessive number
of folders — use your folder structure to show the hierarchy of your content.
How to check
1. Launch WebSite Auditor and go to Site Structure > Site Audit to check your website for dynamic
URLs and URLs that may be too long and need rewriting to make them SEO-friendly.

2. Switch to Site Structure > Pages to inspect a full list of your website’s URLs.
2. Attractive title
The cornerstone of landing page optimization is adding the right keywords into your content. The title
tag is one of the most important on-page SEO elements. It is the biggest part of your SERP snippet and
it tells search engines what is the main subject of your page.

Start with keywords

The closer your target keyword is to the beginning of your title tag, the more relevant your page will be
considered by search engines. Try to always start your title with your keywords to emphasize their
importance.
Mind the length
Titles that are over 50-60 characters long will be truncated in SERP. This is not a big deal — you will
often see truncated titles ranking on the first page of search results. In fact, sometimes it may even
create a cliff-hanger effect and encourage users to click through. But, it is essential that you include all
of the important words before the cut-off point:

If you need to squeeze more text in the page title, it is perfectly ok to ignore proper grammar and use n-
dashes instead of m-dashes, use ampersands instead of “and”, leave some words to be implied, and
even skip articles.

Make it sell
A snippet is very much like an ad for your page and your title should be designed to drive click-
through. When writing a page title, make sure to include your main selling point, your competitive
advantage.
The type of information you include will largely depend on the type of content you are promoting.
Sometimes it is important to highlight that the content is fresh:
Other times, it is more important to attract people with the sheer volume of the information on your
page:

If you are not sure which aspects of your content to advertise, then simply google your topic and take a
cue from top-ranking snippets.
How to check
In WebSite Auditor, you can audit the list of your page titles to find any missing, duplicate, and too
long titles.
And if you switch to the Content Editor tab, you can actually create and edit your titles with the help of
character count, live preview, and snippet samples from your search competitors:
3. Meta description
A meta description is a short paragraph of text that appears in your search snippet. The approach
towards crafting a perfect meta description is not that much different from crafting a good title. It has to
be an ad-like copy designed to sell your page, it has to include a few keyword variations, and it has to
fit into the character limit of 150-160 characters.
Some SEOs say that meta descriptions do not matter anymore because Google would often ignore them
and instead use a different part of your copy as a description. Truth is, Google does it for a small
percentage of searches, to make your snippet appear more relevant for some outlier queries. For the
majority of searches, however, your description remains unchanged.
How to check
To check meta descriptions across all of your pages, launch WebSite Auditor, and go to Site Structure
> Site Audit. There, you will be able to find a full list of pages with missing descriptions, as well as a
list of duplicate descriptions, and descriptions that are too long:

4. Schema markup
Structured data can do wonders for your SEO effort. It can help you create entities, accelerate your
rankings in local search, and enhance your search snippets. A rich snippet has a huge potential to
increase your listing's click-through rate and traffic to your site:
Not all types of content can benefit from schema markup, but some pages will have a hard time ranking
in search without it. Today, it is almost impossible to rank a cooking recipe page without using schema,
but also news articles and product pages. And as time goes on, more and more types of pages become
eligible for structured data benefits.
However, the thing to remember is that to optimize your landing pages using schema properly,
you'll need some extra skills. And the two main options we recommend if you're dealing with Schema
for the first time are:

WordPress plugin
If your website is built on WordPress, then you will find no shortage of plugins offering structured data
optimization.

Google's Markup Helper

If you are willing to get your hands a little dirty, you can visit Structured Data Markup Helper. The tool
helps you apply your own markup in a user-friendly manner. Just choose the type of page you are
creating, highlight page elements, and assign the type of markup. When done, download the HTML file
and upload it to your website.
How to check
Conveniently, Google also provides a way to check your markup — Rich Result Test. Simply enter
your URL and get the verdict, along with some advice on how to fix discovered issues:
5. Optimized headings (H1-H6)
HTML heading tags (H1-H6) are used to structure your content by splitting it into distinct sections.
Heading tags are a strong relevancy signal to search engines, so it's a good idea to include your
keywords in some of them.

H1 heading
Technically, each of your pages has two titles. The title tag, which is displayed in your search snippet,
and then the H1 tag, which is displayed on the page itself. The benefit of the H1 tag is that, unlike the
title tag, there are no character restrictions. It means you can make it longer, include more keywords or
different keyword variations.

H2 headings
H2 tags split your page into high-level segments. They help users navigate your page, but also help
search engines understand what the page is about. Think of them as mini-titles within your content —
make them informative for users’ sake, but don’t forget to include secondary keywords.

H3-H6 headings
These are used to mark further subsections within the content. It is doubtful that you will see a
measurable impact of using keywords in these tags, so there is no need to force it — do whatever feels
natural.
One thing I would like to add is that it is very rare for a piece of content to require headings beyond the
H3 level. If you find yourself venturing into H4 and H5 territory, then there is probably a missed
opportunity to optimize your content structure.

6. Keyword saturation
Google is getting pretty good at processing natural language, so there is less of a need to stuff your
landing pages with keywords. And yet, keyword optimization is not completely gone, it’s just evolved.
Here are some keyword optimization tips that still make sense:

Use keywords early in the copy

This is something that you probably do naturally. But a lot of people start their posts off with a long
intro and don’t get to use their main keywords until later in the post. It's better to drop your keyword
somewhere in the first 100 words or so. It helps Google understand what your landing page is all about.

Go beyond exact matches

Remember the Hummingbird algorithm update? The one with which Google learned to recognize the
meaning behind a search query and give a common answer to a number of "different-in-keywords" but
"same-in-meaning" queries? This update changed the way SEOs optimize landing pages — now we no
longer think "single keyword optimization", but try to make our pages relevant for a whole group of
synonyms and related terms.
So, for a perfect landing page, adding all kinds of related keywords will help you improve your pages'
rankings and avoid the keyword stuffing issues.
How to check
So how do you discover the relevant terms and concepts that you may use to optimize your landing
pages with? Launch WebSite Auditor, go to Content Analysis > TF-IDF, select a page you want to
optimize by adding your main keyword. The app will analyze top pages ranking for the keyword, and
calculate recommended keyword saturation:

And if you switch to the Content Editor tab you will be able to create and edit pages using live
keyword recommendations:
7. Content length
You would often read about the ideal content length being this or that many words. The exact number is
always changing and currently hangs at about 2,000 words per page. In reality, there is no such thing as
the ideal content length — what matters more is for your page to cover the topic in full.
So, instead of using some arbitrary number for all of your pages, we suggest determining word count
for each of your pages individually. One way to do that is to look at top-ranking competitor pages and
take note of their content length, as well as content composition.
How to check
Launch WebSite Auditor and go to the Content Editor tab. Whether you are creating a new page or
editing an existing one, the tool will analyze competing pages and suggest an optimal content length:

Keep in mind that the number of words is not the goal in itself, it’s more of an indicator. If your content
is significantly shorter than the benchmark, then perhaps your competitors have covered more talking
points. In this case, explore their pages in more detail and borrow some of their content ideas. Do not
just fluff your content with empty words.

8. Visual aids
Engaging images, videos and diagrams on your landing pages can definitely improve user experience,
and thus reduce bounce rate and increase time on site. And, besides optimizing user experience, you
can use these elements for the benefit of your landing page SEO.
For instance, properly optimized images are a great way of telling search engines what your images are
about. High quality multimedia make your site eligible for image search, and it can actually drive
backlinks to your website — if your visuals are unique enough to be borrowed by others.

Fill out your alt tags

Alt tags are pieces of HTML code that describe your image. They are not visible on the page, but
search engines can access them to better understand what the image is about. The best practice is to
keep your alt tags to a few phrases, describing the image as literally as you can. Keyword stuffing and
overly long alt tags are viewed by Google as a red flag.

Compress your files

Use standard image formats and compress your images before uploading them. This will have a
positive effect on page speed and overall user experience. If you do not have any experience processing
images, use an online compressor or a CMS plugin — most of them do just fine.

Use descriptive filenames

This one is hardly a ranking signal, but Google does suggest using descriptive names for your image
files. This should probably be a short version of your alt tag. Although I wouldn’t worry about it too
much.

Add a video transcript

Thin content may be a signal of poor page quality. If you're placing a relevant piece of video on a not-
that-rich-in-content page of your website, consider adding the video transcript as additional textual
content on the page.
How to check
To check your website’s images for missing alt text, launch WebSite Auditor, and go to Site Structure >
Site Audit. There, you will be able to find a full list of images with missing alt texts:
9. Above-the-fold content
The term "above the fold" was initially inherited from newspaper editors, who were preoccupied with
getting their content to look perfect above the physical fold in the paper.
In the same manner, website designers and copywriters have always aimed at making this content eye-
catching and compelling enough for the visitor to continue reading beyond the scroll.
However, after Google's page layout update, above-the-fold content became an SEO concept just as
well for landing page optimization — the search engine started penalizing sites for lots of ads (and not
much content) above the fold.

Remove distractions
While display advertising may be an essential revenue model for your websites, too many ads may
have a negative impact on search rankings and traffic. Google does not endorse excessive pop-ups,
distracting ads, and other obstacles that get in the way of viewing page content. So, optimize your
landing pages to make display advertising non-intrusive and to have enough content above the fold. Be
doubly vigilant on mobile, as screens are smaller and distractions are bigger.

Optimize for Core Web Vitals

Google has recently introduced the concept of Core Web Vitals. The vitals are user experience metrics
that are measured based on the above-the-fold content. Specifically, how fast it loads, how stable it is
while loading, and how soon it becomes interactive:
How to check
Core Web Vitals are tracked in your Google Search Console account, where you can see your
optimization progress over time as well as view a report of all issues discovered on your pages:
Alternatively, you can check individual pages using Google’s PageSpeed Insights:

Page speed refers to the amount of time a page needs to be completely loaded. Page speed depends on
many different factors, from host to design, and can be optimized.
Page speed matters to Google
Google has officially confirmed that it uses page speed in its ranking algorithm. And more to it, page
speed can also influence your SEO indirectly — search engines will likely crawl fewer pages if your
site is slow due to the allocated crawl budget. This, in turn, could negatively affect your site's
indexation.

Page speed matters to visitors

While page speed is important to Google and for your rankings and traffic, it does also impact your
user experience. It is not a secret that a positive user experience often leads to better conversions.
Slower pages tend to have higher bounce rates and lower average time on page. Research shows a 1-
second delay in page load time can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.
So what's the page speed you should aim for? Google's mentioned they expect pages to load in 2
seconds or less to rank well. That is why page speed is a crucial factor in your landing page
optimization.
How to check
In WebSite Auditor's Content Analysis module, switch to the Technical factors tab and scroll the list of
factors to Mobile: Page speed and Desktop: Page speed. Under this section, you'll see the exact list of
speed-related factors Google's looking for in web pages, according to their PageSpeed Insights.
You'd want to concentrate on any factor in this section that has an Error or Warning status. Click on
any of the factors you'd like to improve on for how-to-fix tips.
If there're any uncompressed images or unminified resources found on your page, jump to
the Details column to find the resources that cause the speed issues. Follow the link to see the specific
piece of JS/CSS code or the image that needs correction, and check out additional tips that will help
you optimize your landing pages (the Learn more link).

10. Mobile-friendliness
With a large share of Google searches coming from mobile devices, Google is increasingly focused on
improving mobile search results. From a nice-to-have, mobile-friendliness has turned into a must — if
your page isn't optimized for mobile devices, it's likely to be discarded from mobile search results
completely.
Responsive design is perhaps the simplest and most widely used solution to go mobile-friendly — and
it's the one Google recommends, too. If you use WordPress (or any CMS, really), choosing
a responsive template for your site is about all it takes.
You're in for more work if your site is HTML-coded with no CMS in place. However, there's
some documentation available on adapting the responsive design for web developers. It might take a bit
of work to get every aspect right, but it's an investment that'll definitely keep paying off.
How to check
If you are using Google Search Console, then you can check your pages en masse and even track your
optimization progress over time. Go to Enhancements > Mobile Usability and see your mobile
optimization dashboard. Just below the graph, you will also find a list of all discovered issues and
offending pages.
If you are not yet on Google Search Console, then you can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to check
each of your pages individually:
11. Internal links
A properly structured website should have a well-organized flow from one page to another. One goal of
such flow is to pass authority associated with PageRank from popular pages to less popular ones.
Another goal is to move users down the sales funnel.
As you create a new page, you should think of where you want your visitors to go from there — do not
let them exit your website. Ideally, each of your pages should link to other relevant pages and,
eventually, to products or other conversion points.

Site structure
To get a quick overview of your current website structure and get a better idea of how to link your
landing pages on the website, in WebSite Auditor's Pages module, click on the button to Switch
between the tree and list view.
This way you'll get a list of pages presented in a hierarchical tree-like structure:
The Visualization graph will show your site structure with all internal links, click depth and
prominence of your landing pages. You can use colors, notes, labels and connection tools for building
pages in a concise clear structure, recalculate PageRank, and rebuild the project to see your new site
structure after changes are applied.
Suggest related articles
An easy way to create this flow is by adding a recommendation system that automatically suggests
pages related to the one currently viewed — the way we do at the end of our blog posts. Additionally,
you can place internal links within your main content through various “read more” suggestions. We
also use these types of internal links in our blog and they help us retain between 5% and 10% of our
users.

Implement breadcrumbs
A breadcrumb is a simple menu of internal links located at the top of the page that help users indicate
their current position in the hierarchy of your website.

First, it allows users to quickly navigate the website and understand how deep they are from the home
page or main section page.
Second, breadcrumbs become an additional way for you to better explain to search engines what your
pages are about and get an extra SEO benefit.
To help search engines identify your breadcrumb hierarchy, you can use structured data markup to tag
the different components that make your breadcrumb menus.

Internal site search

Internal search lets a visitor search the content they need within your website. And if your website is
over 20 pages, having a search box in place is definitely a good idea for your landing page SEO.
Site search can be seamlessly integrated with Google Analytics, making it easy to view the search
queries that users are entering into your search bar. You can follow these steps to link your site's search
to Google Analytics reporting. Internal site search can help you solve two tasks:
• Reduce bounce rates.
Quite often visitors land on your site from Google not on the keyword-targeted page that suits their
query best. And not seeing the content they were looking for, the searchers bounce back to Google, thus
telling the search engine that your page has little value and is not the best one to rank for that query. If
your website provides an easy way to find that desired information, your visitors are much more likely
to stay on the website. And the internal search option is a great help to accomplish this.
• Find new SEO keywords and ideas for content production.
It's very likely that people are typing the same (or similar) queries into your site's search bar as they are
typing into Google and other search engines. It's also very likely that while mining through these
queries, you'll find new keywords that you'll want to target. More to that, internal search queries
provide insight into how users are searching for your existing content and show you what content they
expect or hope to find on your site. By digging into this data, you can find what content you are
currently missing on your site and add landing pages for SEO purposes.

12. Outgoing links

Outbound links to related pages is a relevancy signal that helps Google figure out your page's topic. It
also shows Google that your page is a hub of quality info. Google may not have explicitly stated that
this improves your rankings, but many SEO experts believe so from their personal experience.
A good rule of thumb for most sites would be to link out 2-4x per 1000 words. However, you need to
keep in mind that the sites you link out to reflect on you (make sure to link out to authority sites
whenever possible.) A perfect landing page in top results is the one having a few outbound links and
plenty of backlinks from high authority domains.
How to check
Same as with everything in landing page SEO, overdoing is not the right pass to go with your external
links. Having a really large number of outgoing links on a page (namely, more than 100) could be
overwhelming to users. Besides, when a page has too many outbound links, this is often a sign of a
low-quality site or a page that sells links, which could send the wrong kind of signal to search engines.
In WebSite Auditor's Content Analysis -> Page Audit module, look at the Pages with excessive number
of links factor. The software will signal you if you have too many outgoing links, as well as give you
the exact list of those outgoing links.
13. Comment section
If you allow comments on your website, then you should make sure that any links posted in the
comment section are automatically set to nofollow. The nofollow tag stops links from passing any link
juice to their destination, which makes these types of links useless for link-building. This, in turn,
discourages other SEOs from spamming your comment section with their links — something you could
get penalized for by Google.
It should be noted that most comment integrations (WordPress, Disqus, Facebook) automatically add
the nofollow tag to all links. So it’s only an issue if you are building a custom solution or using an off-
brand plugin.
14. Social share buttons
Although social signals do not influence ranking directly, yet, they can play a big part in your landing
page optimization. More social shares means people find value in your content and thus generate more
traffic. And the more traffic you get, the more likely someone is to link. So don't be shy about placing
social sharing buttons prominently on your site.
In fact, a study by BrightEdge found that prominent social sharing buttons can increase social sharing
by 700%.

Be strategic about social share buttons

Even though social share buttons are a great way to generate referral traffic, they can also slow down
your page load time (because most share buttons are javascript-based, meaning they're generating an
iFrame on the page.)
So, try to use social share buttons strategically on your website. For example, opt-in landing pages may
not be suitable candidates for social share buttons (because you want visitors to respond to the CTA on
that page, instead of getting distracted by social sharing.)

Make use of Open Graph

Open Graph is the markup that enables any web page to become a rich object in a social graph. It is
used by Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ to add a unique title, description, and image to your page's
snippet on these social networks. While it is unlikely that Open Graph markup has a direct impact on
landing page SEO, it can bring much help to your social media efforts (which, in turn, are likely to
affect SEO in some way).
The only problem is — as you keep adding new content to your site, it gets harder to keep the markup
on each of your pages in order.
How to check
The easy way to audit your pages' Open Graph is right in WebSite Auditor's Open graph and structured
data markup tab (under the Pages dashboard). Here, you can make sure all your Open Graph titles,
images, and descriptions are set up correctly and social signals are rendering properly.
Final thoughts
All in all, these are the most important things to consider in on-page SEO for your website. If you take
into account most of the factors listed above, you will be able to build a strong base for your future off-
page SEO efforts.

Tools
In this guide, we've used WebSite Auditor to illustrate each step in the anatomy of landing page
optimization. Mind that if you're using its free version, the analysis will be limited to 1/3 of website
pages. To run a full audit you'll need a Pro or Enterprise WebSite Auditor license.