On-page optimization is one of the most valuable ways to improve organic search rankings and visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). But first, you have to determine which pages to optimize within your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.
SEO is inherently a data-driven discipline. Three sources of data should drive your decisions around which pages to prioritize for optimization first: demand, business need, and performance. Spoiler alert — the best SEO strategies utilize all three data sources in combination.
1. Optimize According to Current Performance
The first place to look for optimization opportunities is your own organic search performance data. Start by analyzing data in Google Search Console or Google Analytics 4 to identify pages that are decreasing in performance or those that are driving traffic but not converting well. Make sure to look month over month for the most recent trends but also year over year to account for any seasonality that might occur.
In particular, look for pages that have seen negative shifts in performance recently and pages that have lots of impressions but aren’t ranking well enough to drive strong traffic. You might also look for keywords ranking on the cusp of page one — perhaps number six to number 15 — to identify ways to push rankings over the edge into stronger visibility.
2. Optimize According to Demand
Keyword demand identifies how many times per month a keyword or phrase is searched. Google Keyword Planner is an excellent, though Google-centric, source of demand data. Platform agnostic SEO tools Semrush, Moz, and others offer another view into demand.
Deep keyword research can feed a keyword mapping exercise that outlines the keywords for which you want to optimize each major page on your site. For an ecommerce site, that might be category or collection pages and key products. For a lead gen site, it would be service pages and other content. And for an informational site, it might be the most valuable content hubs and spokes.
After mapping the high-demand keywords to your pages, simply sort by the column that totals up the keyword demand to identify the pages that have the highest potential to drive organic search traffic.
3. Optimize According to Business Value
Pages can also be chosen for optimization based on business value. Determine which products or services you need to drive the most visibility for. Concerns such as seasonality, profitability, what’s in stock, where you’re most competitive, and other business factors can come into play to affect the decisions on which pages to optimize.
Typically, a combination of these three strategies — performance, demand, and business value — will be required to choose pages optimally for optimization. Think of the three strategies as a three-legged stool: It’s most balanced when all three legs are in place.
Other Things to Consider
- Seasonality: Seasonal products or services may be important to the business as they gear up for the holiday season. Planning ahead to optimize these pages before the holiday rush is critical. Give yourself three months’ lead time so that the search engines have enough time to crawl and index these pages before they need to perform at their peak.Â
- Be Flexible: Your business needs may change over time, and you may need to revisit your optimization strategy. As you monitor your organic search performance, some pages will surge ahead, and others will decrease. Identify what is causing the shift in performance, and make adjustments to your list of prioritized pages to optimize as needed.Â
- Ride out Google Core Updates: During a Google Core Update, rankings can be more volatile, so it’s best to wait until the algorithm update is finished rolling out to make optimization adjustments.Â
It’s impossible to optimize everything at once, so it only makes sense to choose pages to optimize based on the data. Those who put time and effort into an on-page optimization strategy based on data and business needs — rather than randomly choosing pages — are much more likely to see results in the long term.
