On Page SEO Will Only Take You So Far

Writing by Nick Stamoulis in SEO

In my opinion, any full service SEO campaign should be broken into two parts: on page SEO and offsite link building. Whenever I’m working with a new client I always start with on page SEO first which includes keyword research, content optimization, high level SEO recommendations to the site structure and so forth. I’ve found that the best offsite link building campaigns aren’t nearly as effective as they could be if your site isn’t properly optimized and ready to handle whatever influx of traffic your new links and other off site SEO efforts send. That being said, it’s important to remember that on page SEO will only take your site so far.

I was speaking with a client the other week that wanted to know why their site wasn’t doing better in the SERPs for some of the new keywords we’d optimized their site for. For the record, those new keywords were performing pretty well. About 25% of them were on page 1 in Google and most of them we ticking upwards a few spots from month to month. But my client wanted to know what else my SEO team could do to help those new keywords perform even better. What other changes did we plan on making on to the on page SEO to push things along?

I had to remind my client, like most site owners need reminding from time to time, that there is only so much on page optimization you can do to a site before it starts to get spammy and counter-productive. Sure, I could try to squeeze a keyword into the content a few more times, but then we run the risk of getting flagged for keyword stuffing. True, I could create a few more pages of content centered around each new keyword, but chances are those pages would be too thin to be of any real value for the site and then we have to worry about a thin content penalty courtesy of Panda. After a site has been properly optimized it’s time to let go of the on page SEO (for a while any way) and focus on the offsite link building!

I told my client that in order to make stronger headway with those new keywords we had to start pushing out more shareable content that targeted those keywords. The company blog would be a great place to start! I suggested they send a list of all the new keywords to their blogger and have the writer start incorporating those keywords into the posts and linking to the corresponding pages on the site. That is one way to start building links to those pages, using the new keywords as anchor text, so that every time a blog post is shared it creates another signal for that keyword. I also recommended they ramp up their guest blogging and article marketing campaigns, building links from other quality sites using those new keywords as anchor text. When you combine those content marketing efforts with social media marketing and traditional link building you’re bound to see the kind of movement you’re looking for!

On page SEO is incredibly important. After all, your website is your single most valuable piece on online real estate and the end target of all your SEO efforts. However, great on page SEO will only take you so far. If you’ve found that your SEO is starting to plateau then it’s time to push ahead with your content marketing!