4 Important On-Page SEO Factors
If you want to get people to find you online, resonate with what you’re saying, and want to take it a step further—you need these SEO pieces on every page.
There are 4 critical pieces you must have in place on every single page on your site in order to improve your SEO ranking. Following best practice guidelines enables you to show up in search results—right where your ideal clients are looking for you! With these quick fixes, you’ll elevate your copy, market more easily, & convert people more easily (to podcast listeners, blog readers, paying clients, & more)! Get your notebooks ready—and press play!
Topics covered in this podcast episode:
Which on-page SEO factors matter most
How to prioritize your SEO efforts if you’re short on time
How to include keywords in these different SEO factors
Which of these SEO pieces you can repurpose (and how)
Best practices for each of these SEO factors
Don’t forget you can submit a question that will get answered in an upcoming podcast!
Links & Mentioned Resources:
SEO-ified Podcast Show Notes & Blog Templates
Related Episodes:
Quick Win: SEO title + meta description
Connect w/ Brittany:
This episode of The Basic B podcast is brought to you in partnership w/ Leah Bryant Co.! Help me reach more service providers like you by following the show & leaving a rating or review on Apple & Spotify!
The unedited podcast transcript for this episode of The Basic B podcast follows
Welcome back to the short and sassy series of the podcast. I've been having a lot of these conversations with my clients recently. So I decided to package it up as its own little podcast. And today I'm gonna be getting into the four most important factors for your SEO. These are four pieces that you really need to make sure are in place for each and every page that you have that you of course want to get discovered.
Sometimes we have, you know, course login pages or quiz results or some other page that we just don't necessarily want to show up in search. But for this, I'm talking about, you know, your about page, your homepage, your blog posts, any case studies, these are the pages we really want to be showing up in searches. And because of that, we really need these four pieces to be complete, to have an SEO strategy. So like I said, they're coming up.
these pieces, these questions, this conversation is coming up a lot with my clients. For example, I have one client who is a nonprofit consultant and we've been optimizing some podcast transcripts that also get a little bit of zhuzhing from chat GPT and then I come in, I'm like the last stop and I am doing the SEO strategy. And when we were first talking, one of the things that I made a really big point about was, hey, we really need to make sure that these four elements are here.
and that they have keywords and we had a really good discussion about that. And then this last week, I was having a conversation with a former client and she had done some SEO stuff late last year and she's kind of taking her business in a new direction slightly. It's like a slight shift. It's not really a full-on friends pivot, but it's a slight shift. And so we needed to go back in and optimize the SEO pieces. And she's short on time.
So what we decided to do was really to focus on these four pieces for a couple of pages. And with that, I want to share them with you today. They're actionable. There's going to be a couple of other like next steps if you want them toward the end of the episode. So with that, let's get into it, shall we? These are the four critical pieces that you need to have in place. They need to have an SEO strategy. The first one is your SEO title. If I am speaking a different language to you, just hang on.
Brittany Herzberg (02:30.498) Buckle up, I'm going to take you down the street. It's going to be fine. So your SEO title, let's backtrack a little bit. If you think about you have a question and you type it into the Google search bar, you hit enter, and then you see that page with all the results. The SEO titles are those blue hyperlinked pieces of text. In my mind, they kind of look like headlines on that page. And what you are doing as a searcher is you're looking at these headlines to evaluate, okay.
I had this question, are these things going to give me the answer that I want? Are they going to give it to me quickly? Are they going to explain it as much as I want it to be explained? Are they going to have examples? All these kinds of questions are rummaging around in your head really, really fast as you're looking at this results page and you're deciding where you're going to click next. Guess what? Your ideal clients are doing the same thing. So the SEO titles are really critical because if someone is finding us through a search,
that SEO title, that blue hyperlinked headline looking thing on the results page, is their first introduction to can we help them or not. So your SEO title really needs to first of all, it needs to have your key, your target, your oh, what's the word, your target keyword, your focus keyword, it needs to have that in there. Two is that it needs to fit the proper character count so that it doesn't get cut off. That's where you see the dot in headlines.
That means it was too long and it got cut off. We don't want that to happen. We want to write a really impactful headline that has keywords that's going to let someone know, hey, we can help you. I can help you over here with this article or with this webpage. And if it gets cut off, that's really just not gonna serve the right purpose. So there's two ways also that I like to figure out how to write this headline, this SEO title.
I want it to, more often than not, either speak to a problem that someone is having or speak to the desire that someone wants to get to. That's just a really simplified, boiled down, distilled way to think of it, but it's really actionable and it can really help you when you're going in to write an SEO title. Something else I should point out about SEO titles is that they need to be different. They need to be unique. They cannot repeat from page to page.
Brittany Herzberg (04:56.022) let's say you duplicate a blog post because you like the formatting. I do this with my podcast blogs. You like the formatting, you like the flow, things are how you need them to be. So you decide to duplicate that blog post. You need to make sure that your SEO title is different on that new page. So again, that's why it's important to have the keyword in there. That's why it's important to speak to you. Okay, what question am I really answering? How am I really going to help someone with this page?
SEO title is very important. They need to catch someone's attention. They need to really resonate quickly. And this is also not only a good place to use keywords, but also to use possibly some words that your clients are actually saying to you. There's a lot you can do here. Part two of this situation is your meta description. So go back to that Google search with me in your mind. You've typed something in Google, you hit enter, you're looking at that search results page.
We know the blue hyperlinked text is your SEO title. And if you look under that, there is usually one to two sentences, they're in gray. That is your meta description. So your meta description really needs to provide a high level, and I'll explain more in a second, a high level overview summary of what's going on that page. This is what I wanted to say in addition to that. A lot of my clients are like, okay, but I need to say this and I need to add this in.
There's just not the space and people just don't have the attention spans. We're looking at these results pages and we're trying to make really smart decisions quickly. We're trying to make the most of our time. We're trying to make the most of our effort. We're trying to, you know, help our brains the most that we can. And often when we're doing searches, not always often we're looking for some kind of help, support, answer to a question that we have. So meta descriptions, there's another character count you have to pay attention to here.
Also with meta descriptions, they cannot be duplicated either. So again, if you're going in and you're duplicating a blog post and you're writing that fresh new blog, you want to make sure that meta description is unique. Now you don't have to go like wild with this. You don't have to make it super complicated for me with my podcast blogs. So every time I pump out a podcast episode like this one, I also create a blog post on my website and don't worry like
Brittany Herzberg (07:16.702) If you're not doing this, it's okay. It took me a while to find the flow for this, but I did. And now I can duplicate that blog post and I can pop the things in there that I need to and call it a day. But one thing that really helps me to work through this efficiently is to have a pre written kind of a template for that meta description. So that way, maybe the beginning of the sentence says the same thing or says something similar every single time. But then the rest of the sentence.
can be its own thing, can have its own focus. You know, whether I have a podcast guest or if it's a solo episode like this one, I can focus the keywords to really resonate with the thing that I'm trying to say. Like, what's the big concept here? What's the big point? What's the big takeaway? What's the question that I'm answering? All of that you can think about. Another couple things to keep in mind with your meta description.
Brittany Herzberg (08:12.647) I really love writing that meta description as if I'm talking to you. Let's say you see my podcast blog in a search results page. I want you to be reading that sentence and almost feeling like you and I are having a conversation. That really stands out. It's going to stand out from something that AI has written. It's going to stand out from something that
just got auto populated because someone didn't even know about meta descriptions so they don't have anything in there. It just takes it to the next level and really makes the reader feel cared for. So again, higher level summary written as if you're speaking to someone, pay attention to that character count and don't duplicate it. Make sure that you've got unique meta descriptions and unique SEO titles. Before I give you the final two pieces, I do want to let you know if you want to go geek out hardcore.
with SEO titles and meta descriptions. I have a podcast episode, another one of the short and sassy episodes that is dedicated to these two pieces. So I'm going to make sure that's linked below. With that, let's go to our third piece, which is our H1 headings or headlines. I've heard people call them different things. So your H1 is when you go to someone's website, let's say that you're going to go to my homepage. When you get to my homepage, you're going to see some text that's pretty large and it's toward the top of the page.
That's your H1. So back in the day when I first started my website, I didn't understand H1, H2, H3. I had no idea. I just knew that this font looked really pretty and I wanted to put it in all of the places that I really wanted to make a big flashy point. So I had more than one H1 on my homepage. Bad idea. Bad, bad, bad idea. Do not do what I did. Do what I'm going to tell you to do.
H1s are incredibly territorial. If I can think of it like that, that really helps me. So there's only one H1 per page. And yes, there must be one H1 per page. They are, I would say, 95% of the time at the top of the page. And that's with a blog, that's with a case study, that's with a webpage, like your homepage or your about page. You, again, want to include keywords here. And in case you haven't connected the dots.
Brittany Herzberg (10:30.71) That is the biggest point that I want to make with all four of these SEO factors. They have to have your target keyword in there. That is really going to elevate them and help them perform the best and that's going to help your page show up where you want it to in front of the right people, draw those people in and then hopefully convert them into something. A podcast listener, a blog reader, an email subscriber or yeah, sure, maybe a buyer or a client that you get to work with.
So your H1s again, they kind of sort of have a character count, an ideal character count, not necessarily. I'm going to say more about that. So one thing that I've done specifically with this podcast is I tend to, and you may have already noticed this, make some of these things the same. My episode title, my SEO title for the blog post, and my H1 headline often are the very same.
H1 headlines don't technically have a character count, but here's why I've decided to tell myself that I want to write them in a certain character count. Google thinks it's smarter than the rest of us. And what it will do is randomly, sometimes it will decide not to use your SEO title that you plugged in. Instead, it will pull your H1 heading. So in my mind, if it's gonna pull the H1 heading,
Why don't I just go ahead and have them be the same thing? An exception to that is sometimes you just need a little bit more space, a little bit more characters, a few more words to really drive your point home. So maybe you say this succinct version, the, you know, certain character count version on your SEO title, but then you let yourself expand on that in the H1 heading. You could totally do that. I've definitely done that for myself and I've done that for clients because again, sometimes just a little saying a little bit more.
makes it clearer to someone and that's really important. You could be a little bit more succinct in the SEO title because again, we're glancing and we're just like rolling through that stuff, you know? So H1s, again, I kind of keep this same idea of similar to the SEO title where I'm either speaking to a problem or I'm speaking to a desire that someone has very often. Again, it just helps when you're writing copy to give yourself a couple of easy things to
Brittany Herzberg (12:55.702) you know, format the copy to best practices to just keep in mind. Again, there's more nuance and as you get more skilled, things can evolve and grow and expand. But when you're starting out, if you're just now being mindful of keywords and SEO, this is a really good practice. Finally, our fourth factor that we want to pay attention to is your image titles are your image titles. Let me use proper English. So your image titles.
One thing to keep in mind is that they are words written with dashes in between. No periods, no underscores, no spaces. Words with dashes hyphens, whatever you want to call them. The short ones. You want that in between it. So an example of this is a lot of my headshots. And I'm actually going to come back. I've been teasing this one for this idea for a while, too. I'm going to come back and create a podcast episode that is specifically about updating your headshot titles because it's going to serve you so much better.
for podcast appearances, for speaking engagements, for blog article swaps, anything like that. It's gonna be so important and so helpful to get your name out there and get it associated with keywords. I digress. An example of this is for me, I have one of my headshots say, brit Something that I'll tell clients often, just again to keep it simple, is aim to have your image titles be about three to five words.
It's not going to break the internet if you go to seven or nine words. It's just a little bit easier when it's in that three to five word range and it gives you a goal something to shoot for, you know, so you've got that example where if it's a headshot, I've got my name in it. So if your face is in the picture, put your name in there and no matter what, you want to have your target keyword in here. So for a blog post, you definitely want to have your keyword, your target keyword in that image title in at least one.
And then for the other images, you could go to those secondary, similar or supportive keywords, as I call them, where they're kind of like your second tier. This is so fun to watch this actually help you start ranking for things. So people will go to the main Google results page where there's the articles, the websites listed, where you see the SEO title and the meta description. And it's more it's going to take you to a web page. The second place they go is to the images. I
Brittany Herzberg (15:21.75) really started implementing this for myself, hmm, a couple years ago was when I really, really started implementing it. And I did such a good job that I started dominating this one keyword, it was healthcare copywriter. That was back when I was focusing all of my copywriting efforts around health and wellness providers. That was really cool. I took over like the top three lines, the top three rows. So it was just my face or pictures where I had this keyword.
stock photos that I use or lifestyle photos from some of my branding sessions. It was really cool to see that happen. Now I have a lot more different keywords. I haven't actually tracked them. I really should go back and just like test and see how things are performing. But it is always worth the effort to put keywords in your image titles. It also, keep this in mind, helps anyone who's visually impaired to actually make sense of what the picture is about. So let's say you f-
forgot to put alt text or that hasn't been a practice of yours. If you can at least get the image title to have make a little bit more sense using keywords that's going to be helpful. So it's also kind of like a fail safe, a backup to ensure that it doesn't say IMG 4573. It's a good practice. All right, so to recap, we have SEO title, meta description, H1, and your image titles. Also before I wrap up, I'm going to tell you this too.
When I first learned about SEO, the very, very first thing I did was go in and make sure all of the web pages I wanted to get found online, I made sure that they had an SEO title and a meta description, and a unique one, that none of them duplicated. So if you're like, give me one starting point, go do that. Do your keyword research, figure out what you want to rank for, and focus on your SEO title and your meta descriptions. Again, unique.
Every single page needs one that you want to get found online. And it's a, it's a really great smart starting point. Okay. Now, what do you do if you're like, Britney, I need more help. And what's that character count you're talking about? So I've got two things that you can definitely do. One, make sure you have that SEO basics checklist downloaded. That is going to give you the character count. There's a video that accompanies it. It's I think an email that comes to you on day two or day three.
Brittany Herzberg (17:43.094) and I guide you through this checklist. I talk you through keyword research. I tell you how to complete these different fields. There's more than four, but for today's episode, I just wanted to focus on the most important four. But it goes really in depth, and then it gives you a place to house all of these things, and you can take that Google Doc and copy it so that you have your SEO strategy for your homepage, for your about page, another one for your services page, another one for a blog post you're writing.
It's meant to be copied and utilized for every single page that you feel like you need help with. The second thing you could do, if you're like SEO sounds amazing, I do not want to do all of this work. I totally understand. And this is why I created the Done For You SEO Packet offer that I have. So I will make sure that's linked below and I will also encourage you to listen to Amanda Walker's podcast episode with me because we talked through what that experience was like for her.
And with that, I'm going to just encourage you to go and, you know, maybe start with simple keyword research. I'll link the YouTube tutorial that I have. It's somewhere around like five or six minutes. So I'll link that below for you as well. And you totally got this. I totally believe in you. If you have questions, you know where to submit them. It's down below or wherever you're listening or watching, listening to or watching this. Just find me and ask a question and I'd be happy to answer it on a future podcast. All right, friend, I will catch you later.