Why On-page SEO is Important [SEO Checklist 2024]
On-page SEO Optimization Checklist
Let’s talk business and find out why on-page SEO is important for a website. We’ve prepared a handy on-page SEO checklist that you can always come back to!
Our previous SEO was all about performing keyword research for your website, which is only a tiny fragment of the SEO 2024 strategy. Also, in 2025 search engine optimization is the kind of thing that no online business (at least one serious about its eCommerce sales) can afford to ignore.
A vital digital marketing tool, SEO has become some kind of a buzzword in the AI driven digital marketing world. In a sense, everyone talks about in 2024 asking questions like:
- Is SEO relevant in 2024?
- Will SEO exist in 5 years?
- What are the SEO guidelines for Google in 2025?
- What are trending keywords in 2024?
- How is AI used in SEO
- Should marketers use AI tools for SEO in 2024?
- What does a on-page Seo checklist do ?
Yet, despite the countless SEO blogs and questions, you may browse on the topic – with numbers somewhere in the thousands – there’s little concise information you can work with when you’re just getting started with optimizing your website during the AI SEO . So let’s roll back a bit and understand the basics.
Future of SEO in 2024
Search engine optimization for 2024 websites and apps boils down to the following
- Match User Intent – search intent and target audience , are terms that refer to the public that your website is intended for
- User Experience UX/UI – Core Web Vitals, security and page
- Valuable Content – Video SEO, Voice SEO and
- Using AI tools and ML – ChatGPT, Semrush AI assistant, MarketMuse, Frase, JasperAI
- GA4 and GTM integration
- CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization)
- ASO (App Store Optimization) is still something to optimize for your app.
SEO Best Practices for 2024
What a Should SEO list include?
- ✅ High–Quality Content – Google’s 2024 August core update is targeting low and thin spammy websites
- ✅ Content is King and context matters – Create content clusters and specific themes to niche down SEO
- ✅Proper technical adjustments via regular SEO audits and CRO will help your business grow
- ✅Optimize your website technically – to rank up higher for a particular search query solve all technical issues
- ✅Regular Content Updates – Use Google Trends and AlsoAsked, SeoDataviz – Update your content, keep it fresh and
- ✅Proper Tracking and Conversions – Essentially, this means your target audience reaches your platform, discovers your brand, and, best-case scenario, buys the products you’re selling online.
- ✅ Use SEO Monitoring Tools – GA4, GTM
- ✅Search Intent and AI Personalization – Personalize search results based on preferences, and past searches via voice, video and conversational search SE.
- ✅Organic positions NOT guaranteed : Google simply can’t guarantee that your website comes up among these first over-competitive spots on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). But don’t take our word for it. Instead, look at what Google’s Starter Guide on 2024 SEO tells us right away:
“This guide won’t provide any secrets that’ll automatically rank your site first in Google (sorry!), but following the best practices will hopefully make it easier for search engines to crawl, index, and understand your content.”
At its core, Search Engine Optimization – as the very name implies – is a collection of techniques, skills, best practices that render your website easier to discover and index by search engines like Google (whose unshakeable monopoly is hardly news).
Google’s search engine is our reference point in this blog. However, the more challenging part of SEO is not having the Googlebot crawl and index your web webpages. The real challenge is helping Google understand and adequately evaluate the quality and value of your website.
And, of course, the content evaluated by search engines extends way beyond website copy. Many other elements (design components, credibility, page loading speeds, etc.) shape a user’s experience with a particular web platform. Ultimately, they all reflect on how well that platform ranks on the SERPs.
The takeaway? If you convince search engines like Google that your website delivers what users are looking for when they type in a particular search query, you’ll have a higher chance of ranking well on the SERPs for that query.
In short, if your website delivers excellent quality and answers the user’s needs, search engines are likely to detect that. With a bit of help, that is.
On-page vs. Off-page SEO
People commonly distinguish between two types of SEO practices: on-page and off-page. For now, let’s talk about them in broad terms:
- On-page SEO focuses on your internal website structure, its functionality, and its overall content
- Off-page SEO looks at how authoritative DA (domain authority) and popular the website is compared to other web platforms.
Off-page SEO
- 🔗So Off-page SEO is about increasing your website’s domain authority.
- 🔗This authority refers to its trustworthiness, credibility, and popularity, according to assessments performed by search engines.
- 🔗Usually, your platform’s domain authority increases when other authoritative websites link back to you – backlinks
For this reason, off-page SEO is largely outside our direct control (there are some things we can do in terms of off-page, but that will be the talk of another blog). For now, let’s stop at on-page SEO.
Why On-page SEO is Important to Your Website?
When hearing “on-page SEO,” people generally think about setting up a keyword strategy. But that’s just half the story.
On-page optimization encapsulates all measures we can take directly within our website, from altering technical elements (code, architecture, indexing, rendering elements, etc.) to website copy and all of its design elements.
With so much to do and pay attention to, you’re most likely wondering if SEO is ultimately worth the effort and the resources. We’ll, here’s what SEO can achieve for your online business:
- Drive relevant customers and leads to your website (organic traffic);
- Improve customer experience and increase website conversions;
- Grow your domain authority;
- Produce a trackable increase in sales and business growth.
Now, let’s move on to the on-page SEO checklist we’ve promised!
On-page SEO Checklist
1. WEBSITE ARCHITECTURE
First, you need to start with a solid website structure. This involves
- Proper content categorization
- URLs, sitemaps and the robots.txt file (which we use to block search engines from crawling certain pages that could deter your ranking).
The Googlebot can easily crawl and index a website if it features a good architecture (or hierarchy) on a few levels.
For a smaller website, we recommend you go for a clear, flat architecture. Keep in mind that a well-structured, simple website layout helps and encourages users to navigate it. Other advantages follow: clients are discouraged from quickly leaving your website (which, by the way, sends off “bad signals” to Google).
Other website architecture elements include:
- 🔗Internal Links, which take users or search engines from one website page to another
- ✅Call to Actions (CTAs), which encourage your website audience to take action
- 🔴URL Structure: when adequately crafted, URLs provide both humans and search engines with a clear indication of what the destination webpage is about.
2. TECHNICAL SEO IMPROVEMENTS
- Build efficient, clear code (make sure to remove superfluous functions and idle code sections);
- Improve website loading speeds (server response times);
- Ensure your platform is fully optimized for mobile devices;
- Consistently perform website security checks;
- Run technical performance checks regularly
- Use analytics to make structured, regular improvements to any of the elements above.
3. CONTENT & DESIGN IMPROVEMENTS
- Performing text optimization based on a website keyword strategy is no longer limited to keyword density (how often you use a particular phrase on a page). In fact, overusing key phrases can lead to overoptimization, which may appear “spammy” and lead to the opposite outcome. This is because the quality of your content heavily outweighs how many times you throw in a particular word. To understand how to perform your keyword research properly, make sure to why keywords are important to your website
- Fill in all meta-information for all of your pages accordingly (this includes meta titles and meta descriptions).
- But there is also image optimization, which you’ll have to perform for on-page graphic elements, some of which can rank in Google’s image search. We suggest you keep image sizes as small as possible without sacrificing quality to ensure your web pages load quickly.
- You must also correctly fill in the alt tags for all the images on your website. They may be “invisible” to users, but search engines use these descriptions to understand the content of your images.
Final On-Page SEO Checklist Thoughts
Is SEO still working in 2024 for businesses?
We hope our on-page On-page SEO checklist will be of use to those just starting out with performing website on-page optimization.
SEO may initially seem like a friendly practice, but in fact, encompasses elements that take a long time to master. We’ll provide more in-depth coverage of particular SEO topics in our future blogs, so check back for some SEO news & tips every once in a while!
And if you need help with performing On-page SEO for your website, you can always reach out to our experts at Mejix Agency!