If you would like help with on-page SEO please visit my website Rank Utah or contact me. If you are doing your own search engine optimization for a Utah business read on.
The #1 Most Overlooked Component of On-Page SEO: Keyword Research
If your website is not aligned with what your customers are searching for you won’t even show up in the search results. Here are some of the best free tools you can use to kick off your research.
Free Keyword Research Tools
Google Search Console
If your website has been around for and is already connected to Google Search Console, this will be your best free resource for optimizing your web pages for on-page SEO. If you aren’t currently connected to Google Search Console now is the a great time to start. Just visit Google Search Console to get started.
In Google Search Console you can click the Performance tab and look at the Queries section to find out which keywords are brining you traffic and clicks. If you click on the pages section you can click and filter on individual pages. Write down the keywords that are brining your page the most clicks and further align your page with those keywords.
One additional benefit of having your website on Google Search Console is you can enter your page url in the top. This will tell you if your URL is on Google. If not, you can click the Request Indexing button to submit it for indexing.
Google Autocomplete
One of the easiest ways to see what people are searching for is by using Google Autocomplete. Simple type what people would likely search for and see what Google suggests. Align your page with the related autocomplete queries.
Use Free Keyword Research Tools
The industry leading keyword research tools also allow users to perform a limited number of searches on their free keyword tools. Once you have an idea of the keywords you might like to align your webpage with, you can check out their traffic volume using these tools. Here are a few of the best. Be sure to include local modifiers in your research (like city, county, or state) to insure your keywords are highly targeted to your audience. Pay attention to not only the volume of searches but also the KD scores. KD scores tell you how difficult it will be to rank in the top 10 organic search results for your keywords.
Title Tag
The title tag is the most important signal you provide to Google on what your page is about. Use your keyword research to determine a title with keywords that have good volume and are easy to rank for. Do not worry too much about the length of the title. Conventional wisdom is to make your title tag under 60 characters but recent case studies show that longer titles do not hurt your results.
Meta Description
The meta description is used to summarize your page and is where you speak directly to your audience. Do not worry about using keywords in this description as it does not affect your pages rankings. The only purpose of this description is to help people understand what your page is about and decide if they want to click. The meta description shows up in the search results under your title tag.
URL Slugs
Keep your url slugs simple and keyword-rich. One common practice is to use the same url as your title just like is done in this blog post.
Headings (H1-H3)
Your page should have one H1 that tells your visitors what the page is about. It should match or be closely related to your title tag. It is often the largest or first headline on your page.
Your H2 and H3 headlines are used to support your H1. While you only use one H1 per page, you can and should organize your content with multiple H2 and H3 tags.
Your H1 and H2 and H3 headings have a large impact on your SEO and you want to use keywords that support your title tag keywords. In your research you want to identify you main keyword and also a list of related supporting keywords to use in your headlines and text. Your keywords should be natural throughout the content.
Image Optimization
The images for your Utah business should be compressed and optimally use modern formats like AVIF or WebP. Images are one of the largest determinants of your page loading speed. Every image on your page will be downloaded by the browser of the device visiting that page. Ideally you want your images to be less than 150 KB in size.
Free Tool: Tiny JPG
Here is a free tool you can use to compress your images. You simple drop in your images and the tool will give you a folder with your images in a compressed format. These images are ready to upload to your website.
Image Keywords
The Alt-text on your image is used for those who use screen readers to browse your website and is also used by search engines to understand your images. You use the alt-text to describe your images and can naturally include your keywords in this description.
Page Speed
The three biggest culprits of slow page loading times are unoptimized images images, too many scripts (javascript or tracking tools), and no caching or slow hosting.
Many modern editors let you lazy-load your images. This means they don’t load until they come into view. This can greatly improve how fast your pages load.
The same is true for scripts. Scripts can be edited to delay loading using defer. I’ve found that the most reliable method though is using a simple timeout function. Here is an example of one using a 4 second delay or user interaction to fire the script.
// Load both scripts after 4 seconds OR on user interaction
setTimeout(loadTrackingScripts, 4000);
document.addEventListener('scroll', loadTrackingScripts, { once: true });
document.addEventListener('mousemove', loadTrackingScripts, { once: true });
document.addEventListener('touchstart', loadTrackingScripts, { once: true });
Enter your page url into Page Speed Insights to test it’s page loading speed. In additional to page speed performance, this tool will also give you a score for the accessibility of your site, your use of best practices, and rate your SEO. Helpful tips will be below your scores.
Linking
Write good link text (anchor text) which is the text part of the link you can see. This helps your users and Google understand what you’re linking to. Link between your pages and link to relevant and helpful outside sources.
Schema Markup
Schema markup are files written specifically written to tell search engines about the page. You might use it to include your business hours, name, address, service areas, reviews, and reviews. This schema is particularly useful for small businesses and allows you to show up in the rich snippet results on Google. There are tools that help you create this schema automatically and you can also you AI bots like chat GPT to help write this markup. This is saved on your page as a json script. Here is Google’s documentation for Local Business structured data.
Once you have your schema markeup in place you can validate it at schema.org by pasting in your webpage to ensure there are no errors.
Additional Information
If you would like to have help optimizing your web pages for your Utah business, so you can focus on your business, you can find my contact information here.
If you are doing it all yourself you might also enjoy Google’s SEO Starter Guide.