The Ultimate On-Page SEO Checklist For 2025 + Cheat Sheet

By making your images SEO-friendly, you’ll help search engines discover your website’s visual content and rank your store’s pages in image search results. Own an online store and still getting to grips with your SEO basics? Keyword research involves identifying the terms and phrases your target audience uses to search for information. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, or SEMrush to find relevant keywords.

Improve page loading speed

Website load speed is a very important on page SEO ranking factor. New users might see relevant content while returning visitors might see free downloads or offers. Afoma Umesi is a freelance writer and editor for software companies in the marketing industry. She’s the founder of Reading Middle Grade, a book blog with over 100K monthly visitors.

Additionally, if Google can’t navigate your website properly, it won’t be able to discover all of your website’s pages and show them in search results. CO—is committed to helping you start, run and grow your small business. Learn more about the benefits of small business membership in the U.S.

Keep in mind that there are a lot of potential issues that can affect the bounce rate. Page speed, for example, can lead to people bouncing before the page ever loads. A poor mobile design SEO Anomaly that’s difficult or impossible to read or use will also increase the bounce rate. In general, you can tell how engaged people are with a page based on its bounce rate.

• Furthermore, Clarity is designed to be privacy-friendly, ensuring that personal data is not recorded, making it a responsible choice for web analytics.
• Each page should have one H1 tag, and H2 tags to outline the main categories of information on the page.
• Looking at the content, images, page titles and more, Google scans websites to learn about them.
• Search engines would wither away, with people turning to AI answer engines like Perplexity and Gemini to answer all their queries.

Internal links help search engines discover new pages and determine the structure of your website, while also providing clear pathways for users to navigate your content. A well-structured URL provides both humans and search engines an easy-to-understand indication of what the destination page is about. Keeping URLs relevant and compelling can impact the page’s visibility in search results. In the rapidly evolving world of digital marketing, SEO remains a cornerstone of any successful B2B marketing strategy. 49% of marketers report that organic search has the best ROI of any marketing channel. You’ll want to optimize your visual content this way — and be sure to include your keyword in your image alt text.

Tools like Google Analytics can provide valuable insights into your organic traffic measurements and the effectiveness of your on-page SEO through keyword ranking changes. Large images can increase the load time, particularly if positioned above the fold, where they are immediately visible to the user upon loading the page. That is why it’s essential to ensure images have been optimized through compression.

How To Optimize Your On-Page SEO

The target keyword is the main topic of your article and the term you want to rank high for. The goal of on-page SEO is to help pages rank higher for relevant keywords in search engine results pages (SERPs). On-page SEO refers to the practice of optimizing individual web pages to rank higher in search engines for relevant keywords. While social media doesn’t directly affect SEO rankings, effectively shared content can lead to increased website traffic and engagement, which are positive signals to search engines. A B2B company might use LinkedIn to share expert articles from their website, driving both direct traffic and enhancing domain authority indirectly. Header tags (from H1 to H6) organize and structure content for both readers and search engines.

List common questions people ask about your topic, business or niche. Lastly, add an FAQ section at the end of your content and FAQ schema to highlight it for Google. Then, ensure that each of those sections are titled by headings and sub-headings that tell readers (and Google) exactly what each section will contain. Don’t forget to test the quality of your schema markup with a schema tester.

In column H of our template, you’ll have the opportunity to define your page’s target audience. A very important next step, which is often overlooked, is establishing a value proposition for each page of your website. Each page should have a goal aside from just ranking for a particular term.