On site SEO (search engine optimisation) is the term that refers to all the elements that you can control on your website, (as opposed to off site SEO which are page ranking factors that occur off site e.g. external backlinks). On site SEO is vital for improving your search engine ranking and your visibility. 

Obvious tactics for on site SEO include optimizing meta descriptions, title tags and alt tags but it’s crucial not to underestimate content quality, content structure and page performance. 

So, let’s take a closer look at the elements you can focus on for your on site SEO.

Content

Keyword optimisation is the foundation for SEO but we have seen a shift towards long-tail keywords which fit the search patterns of users. So, consider your target audience and the keywords they will be using and create your content around those. 

In Google’s own words, ‘The most basic signal that information is relevant is when a webpage contains the same keywords as your search query. If those keywords appear on the page, or if they appear in the headings or body of the text, the information is more likely to be relevant.’

Keyword frequency is of paramount importance here too, but it isn’t about keyword overkill! Google’s confidence in a page that has a keyword only once, will not be great, but a page that mentions that keyword half a dozen times will show Google that its content is centred around that topic. 

More than proving that your page is relevant, successful content will drive traffic and grow your business. To do this, content must be optimized for high volume keyword but also well-written with the user in mind, in-depth and easy to read. A survey by Demand Metric showed that 76% of online shoppers felt excited and closer to a company after reading its custom content.

User experience

Following on from the previous point, if traffic-generating content makes your audience happy, and if we create websites for people (not just search engines!), then the user experience is key.

On site SEO begins and ends with your user – this is the person who will comment on, subscribe to, purchase and review your services. One way Google calculates this is to look at the amount of time a site visitor spends looking at your content, and this will depend on how long a visitor has to wait for a page to load.

Site speed

Time and time again, on line success comes back to creating positive experiences for your audience, with research by Ruby Newell-Legner showing that it takes 12 positive experiences to compensate for just a single unresolved customer experience. A quick and easy way to address speed issues is to look at duplicate content. This slows down indexing and no one likes to be kept waiting – research shows that a one second delay in page response times can cause a 7% reduction in conversion!

Search engine content delivery networks will address speed issues for a price, but WordPress users could also delete unwanted/unused plugins for immediate results. 

Bounce rate

Tied in with user experience is the bounce rate which is an indicator of the effectiveness of your landing page to visitors – if your site is not engaging or, in the case of e-commerce sites, attractive, visitors will simply bounce straight off it. To improve bounce rate, improve load time (see above), ensure your landing page copy is relevant to search queries, get rid of pop up adverts and lead with a persuasive hook.

Meta description

This is the short description which appears below a URL in search results and is what search engines use to decide what topic you are talking about and to decide which users to send to the page. A good meta description should be descriptive and not too wordy (<200 characters is ideal), with relevant keywords. With so few characters to work with, use LSI (latent semantic indexing) or synonyms of your main keyword. 

Title tag

Essentially, this is the title of your page and the main heading that appears in search results pages. This is a crucial opportunity to include salient keywords to boost the page in searches.

On site SEO

So in a nutshell we now see what are the basic requirements for on site SEO. This needs to work together with the user considerations, and off site SEO.

The benefits of Google Lighthouse for SEO and site performance

Introduced in mid-2018, Lighthouse is a Google tool that analyses web pages and their performance. Lighthouse’s primary focus is web applications and mobile sites, but the information it provides and the recommendations it suggests are useful for making any website more efficient. With over half of mobile users bouncing away from a page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load, it’s easy to see how anything that will increase website speed and performance should be taken seriously. 

Google Lighthouse for SEO is available as a chrome extension. You can also use ‘inspect’ when performing right click of your mouse on any open web page. Plus there are other individual websites that offer the test as well.

The Lighthouse tests (or audits) cover 5 areas of performance – accessibility, performance, best practice, SEO and progressive web apps – and scores a website when viewed on the lowest common denominator i.e. a weak 3G signal on an older, slower device. Simply put, it views a page with the same eyes as a user on an old phone with a poor connection. Although this may feel like setting a page up to fail (after all, the most optimized page would struggle in such a scenario), the idea is to improve speed. If Lighthouse can improve the performance of a page under such poor conditions, imagine what it can do on the latest device on the fastest network!

The audits yield scores out of 100. A good result is 90-100, an average score is 50-89 and a poor score is 49 and below. Any score of 90 or above will, according to Google, place you in the top 5% of top-performing sites. 

How can Google Lighthouse be applied to SEO?

The Google Lighthouse for SEO check will run a simple SEO audit to uncover basic SEO issues. Once complete, Lighthouse will offer suggestions to solve the issues. 

Current SEO checks are an ongoing, evolving, works in progress and currently look for:

• a <title> element
• a <meta name=”viewport”> tag with width or initial-scale
• a meta description
• a successful HTTPS status code
• page load times
• image sizes
• links with descriptive text
• legible font sizes
• indexing issues e.g. blocks
• unwanted plug ins

Additionally, there are also extra, manual checks that can be carried out, again with suggestions for solutions. 

Google Lighthouse for SEO isn’t the one-stop tool to use above all else, but it is a very valuable addition to your toolkit. Unlike other tools which give a static high-level overview of your site, Lighthouse is more fine-tuned and offers instant feedback, based on real-world usage.  Although the SEO checks are basic for now, they are welcome nonetheless. 

Lighthouse can be run on any web page, allowing you to check your performance in relation to the performance of your competitors’ pages. Regardless of whether you are selling a product, there is always competition between sites in similar fields – Google search results are the best illustration of this; if you want to rank higher in Google search results, and therefore be seen sooner, you will be competing with hundreds or thousands of similar sites. Lighthouse is just one tool that may help you have the edge.