On-Page Optimization. How Fast Can You Rank?

[turbin3]

I figured I'd put this up, as it's something I've noticed more and more frequently over the past 2-3 years, through optimizing hundreds if not several thousand pages of dozens of client sites. I know it will be nothing new for a number of you, and I also know that it is possible to rank faster than this, including within as fast as a few minutes or few hours in certain cases. Though, I'm looking at this more from the perspective of cookie cutter client work. Not necessarily pushing the limits, just doing the due diligence of optimizing client sites.

For a change, I'm going to try and be clear and concise, since I'm in a rush. Basically, in short, if you do your on-page optimization correctly you might be able to see improvements in rankings within as short as 24-72 hours. There is no guarantee, and in some cases you may not see anything for a significantly longer period of time. More often than not, however, I find it to be the case that if you really did your job with on-page optimization, you are probably going to see an initial jump in rankings within the first few days to a week. Even if it's not the full 100% of the overall improvement you stand to see, there is usually an initial surge of rankings improving by several spots or by several pages. After this period immediately post-launch of your optimization, typically it seems that the rate of improvement tapers off and you see either ranking stabilizing where they are, or slowing to a slow progressive improvement that may still show some positive movement over the course of the following weeks or months.

Some of the things I typically look to accomplish with on-page optimization:

• Keyword placement in meta tags and body content
  • I aim for getting them closer to the front, and within the first 1-4 words if possible, though not usually at the expense of readability and quality. Even if it means only moving an existing keyword one or two spots within the meta tag, I find there can often still be value in it.
• Semantic variations
  • Semantics, LSI, blah blah blah. I don't have a hard rule for this, and I tend to be inconsistent in how I do it, but the strange thing is, I find that it almost seems to be ideal to be a bit inconsistent with this. Sometimes on some pages, I may have the meta tags optimized consistently, using the same keywords, not really containing any semantic ones, and only including semantic terms in the body copy. Sometimes I include semantics in meta tags. Sometimes I'll include semantics in meta tags, and will leave the main keywords out of an H1, or something like that.
  • In short, I basically just "roll with it", write what sounds natural, while keeping an eye on whether I've been repeating the same word more than a few times, and if I feel I have or I feel things are sounding too boring, I throw in some semantics. It doesn't have to be rocket science.
• On-page elements
  • The typical stuff. Images, videos, structured data, ALT text, etc. Keywords, semantic variations, do whatever. You all know the drill.
• Internal linking
  • I'll admit, honestly, I don't even bother half the time. With the types of client sites I'm usually working with, there are sometimes already a few internal links in the content, but there's also a pretty fair number that don't have any. I'm lazy, and frankly I just have too much volume to deal with, so I let this one slide a lot of times, unless I already know of some relevant URLs and it won't take me long.
• Keyword research
  • I spend an inordinate amount of time on keyword research. Where a situation calls for 1-2 primary keywords on a page and maybe 3-5 semantic variations, I probably end up pulling hundreds if not several thousand keywords several different ways from several different tools.
  • Usually I'm pulling data from Keyword Planner, Google Webmaster Tools, Moz Keyword Difficulty, sometimes Raven Tools Research Central, Bing Webmaster Tools (lots of stuff falls through the cracks with GWT, and you'll often find keywords reported as zero search volume in GWT, but noteworthy volume in BWT), sometimes Link Research Tools, Spyfu, and probably a half dozen other tools. Start with the basics, work up from there if necessary, if you're unsatisfied, or if something is particularly competitive.

Some details about this chart. This is a site that's PR5, DA50, Majestic 26TF / 33CF, and 9-10 years in age. The keywords in the chart below add up to 5,090 US search volume, and 8,580 global. The pages are all 2 levels deep. None of the pages have ANY backlinks. Most of the pages are actually still a bit light on content. A majority are 200-300 words, but a few are 150-200. A few have embedded videos with structured data snippets, and most have unique logo images with descriptive ALT text. Not much to say here. The pages are fairly light and uninteresting. Note that the date of implementation of my optimization recommendations was November 25th. Within 48 hours, several keywords shot up in rank from previously unranked to page 2-5. One keyword, 3,600 in US volume, improved from unranked to the 40's and stabilized around #45. Another keyword, 720 US volume, improved from #44 to #15. Another, 260 US volume, improved from unranked to #24. Most of these rankings have now been stable for about one week.

Over the past 2-3 years, I've seen similar results, usually within a 24-72 hour window, across a fairly wide range of sites. This includes small local business, low authority sites, to software/SAAS companies of mid-range authority, all the way to high authority international tech companies/manufacturers. So the results are definitely not a fluke of a high authority site, or anything like that. Anyways, all of this amounted to probably not a massive increase in traffic, but consider the fact that you could be doing this day in day out, especially with long tail keywords that could stand to deliver a much greater ranking improvement (albeit low to no traffic sometimes). There are often far more effective methods of generating traffic, such as "traffic leaks", but consider what you could be missing out on, just by optimizing what you have a bit further.

 

[Northstar07]

Turbin, sweet post. I definitely appreciate the detail on KW research and integration. Quick question: What tracking tool are you using in the picture?

 

[RomesFall]

The 'light' content stuff doesn't surprise me actually, the thing to remember about on-page optimization is that we're actually optimizing our content for Information Retrieval & Indexing.

Therefore this whole saying that you don't rank web sites, you rank pages is only a half truth. The web page gets ranked, but only because it houses content that's been indexed for specific SERPs due to IR & Indexing.

So the reality check is this, when sites like Moz and others tell you that 1500 word content tends to provide better rankings they may be right, simply because they have a better chance of ticking enough boxes to have some content/information on that page that's worthy of ranking.

What this doesn't mean is that 100-500 words of content can't rank, in fact it's evident that it can given that we see it all the time, the difference is that your on-page 'skills' have to be that much better, or you just need to be a little bit lucky.

LSI, ohhh LSI:

Now as for things like LSI; not going to say I am an expert, but my day-day work revolves around on-page optimization and even in the last two weeks I've been reading some more scientific/mathematical stuff on IR & Indexing Methods & what I can tell you is that LSI is 1000% NOT a ranking factor of any kind.

LSI is actually an IR method that uses an SVD Matrix to understand & weight the relationships between terms & topics in our content. Meaning all those go on the secondary index as a way to provide better search results, but it's just not used as ranking factor or signal.

What is LSI as other people tell you to implement it anyway? Just synonyms... While using synonyms in moderation doesn't hurt, it's really nothing compared to using broader keywords that subsume all synonyms. I could go on about this topic forever at the moment, but for brevity I won't.

Lesson here is that 90% of conventional on-page advice is BS that gets circulated without thought across the blogosphere until it's considered to be true. I'm actually putting together a resource, kind of like CC's traffic leaks site for on-page related topics that won't be available until the new year, but it's going to blow a lot of people's minds I think.

Instead of us chasing the mythical LSI unicorn and other 'factors' that we either don't understand fully or have no way of targeting properly it's much better to get back to basics. This is why I like your post here, because it's clear that a focus on the basics has helped you many a time.

Some of the things we should be looking at is essentially going back to basics;

• Linearization
• Tokenization
• Filtration
• Stemming
• Weighting

Weighting is one that's pretty interesting right now, especially for internal links & links in general, you're right, relevancy is a big one for this, you want to get co-citation because it is a relevancy signal; essentially if you can show relevancy between links/content on those pages then the weight of the link increases, or rather it isn't capped at a threshold and passes more value.

So it's something all SEOs should be paying a lot of attention to right now. Very easy for us to mess around with content on any page we control a link on, therefore if you know this stuff you can get more powerful links, even from spam.

Anyway I'm out, great thread and remember buddy it's probably best to stick to the basics right now because there's too much misinformation floating about & tbh a lot of the 'advanced' methods of on-page optimization are actually IR Methods which you can't target.

We all keep learning!

- RF

 

[turbin3]

So the reality check is this, when sites like Moz and others tell you that 1500 word content tends to provide better rankings they may be right, simply because they have a better chance of ticking enough boxes to have some content/information on that page that's worthy of ranking.

Yep, quantity vs. quality. That's a subtle point often missed. If you are writing a piece of content and can get your point across in a clear and concise manner, that might even be engaging, and that is taking advantage of some basic factors that help with IR & Indexing like you say, then it may not take a massive amount of content to get the job done and have the same effect as some 1500+ word article. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. I guess we could also say, a well-written and well-structured paragraph is worth a thousand words.

What is LSI as other people tell you to implement it anyway? Just synonyms...

EXACTLY! To be honest, in hindsight I realize I said "LSI", but that was not at all what I was thinking of and what I intended. What I really was getting at is simply synonyms and semantics, both broader and/or more specific.

Instead of us chasing the mythical LSI unicorn and other 'factors' that we either don't understand fully or have no way of targeting properly it's much better to get back to basics.

This is kind of the gist of what I was getting at. Basically, learn enough about some of the fundamentals, but ultimately with an aim towards kind of building the awareness of those factors into your subconscious, so that when you're writing a piece of content you can just write, and you will naturally be including semantics, synonyms, incorporating basic fundamentals of a well-structured, readable, engaging piece of content. This kind of dovetails with another thread I put up the other day about diminishing returns. I'm not sure if people will get where I'm going with that.

The best example I can think of, to somewhat describe the mindset, is this. One of the tools I use for certain tasks is Link Research Tools. It's a decent set of tools that do have some excellent capabilities, but as with anything, there are always flaws. Theoretically speaking, if I wanted to overtake a competitor in the SERPs, I could run several of the tools and pull a ridiculous number of metrics and data about competing pages. Authority or Trust? You could come up with a dozen authority or trust metrics, all from major industry sources (SEMrush, Majestic, Moz, etc.), based on different factors. You could then see how EVERYTHING stacks up, finding all of the shortcomings and wins that your target page has in comparison to competing pages. You could then develop a formula from this, to determine what you need to acquire to overtake your competition. Maybe it's a combination of more linking domains, more links, more links of specific authority and trust levels, more social links/signals, or whatever. This is a pretty deep rabbit hole that you can probably take as far as you could ever want to. So you spend all of this time doing all of this research, developing all of this strategy, over many hours, days, maybe even weeks or months........................................................................................................................................................................... OR, you could just look at a few basic factors, keeping in mind some basic fundamentals, and then go actually do something to start making forward progress. So I guess, ultimately what I was getting at is, you don't have time to sit there actively considering and taking into account all of the potential ranking factors, site engagement metrics that could be influenced, etc. Just freaking WRITE! Keep it simple, and write. Just keep an eye on a few basic principles while doing so, which if you do enough will eventually become more of a subconscious consideration that you're not having to quite actively spend much time thinking about, but ultimately DO something and make some forward progress.

I've seen some of my former team members plan out a piece of content, spend all of this time strategizing, revising, etc. over a period of several weeks or even a month, even putting out various teasers and YT video teasers.........ultimately to end up with a 1-2k word article that no one cared about, the webinar of which cost us several hundred dollars and only got a dozen attendants and later 20 views on YT, the blog post of which only got 100 site visits. And then I come in and spend 1 hour putting a 500-750 word article together, and easily eclipse those results within 1 day. Making forward progress means simply putting one foot in front of the other.

 

[emp]

On page optimization is easily the most missed opportunity around. I consulted for an alternative news portal here... They got 50% more traffic after realizing the changes. On site and structure was almost all of my recommendations.

 

[RomesFall]

On page optimization is easily the most missed opportunity around.

I agree... Honestly I think it lacks the excitement appeal to many, heck maybe that's not even the right word, but you know what I mean right?

Oh well at least here on BuSo we all seem to take it seriously.