A client asked me this week how to optimise a new service page for search. It’s one of those questions that deserves a proper answer, and it occurred to me that if I’m going to put pen to paper to answer it, I may as well put that explanation somewhere that others asking the same question could access it too.
The good news is that basic on-page SEO isn’t as complicated as it’s often made out to be. Here’s exactly what I do when I’m optimising a page or post.
Start with some keyword research
Before you write a single word, it helps to know what people are actually typing into Google when they’re looking for what you offer.
This is where the idea of a long tail keyword comes in. A short keyword is something broad like “photographer” or “accountant.” A long tail keyword is the more specific phrase someone types when they actually know what they want — something like “newborn photographer in the Perth Hills” or “tax accountant for small business Mundaring.”
Long tail keywords have less competition and attract people who are much closer to making a decision. They’re the ones worth targeting.
There are free tools that can help with this – Google’s own search suggestions are a good starting point. Start typing your service into Google and see what it suggests. Those suggestions are real searches real people are making.
Get your title right
Your page title should clearly describe what the page is about and include your keyword phrase. Not in a forced, awkward way – just naturally.
“Photography Services” is vague. “Newborn and Family Photography in the Perth Hills” tells Google and your reader exactly what to expect. That clarity is what you’re aiming for.
Use subheadings to break up your content
You’ll notice this post uses spacing and subheadings to break the main idea up into its component parts. The headings are created using what are called header tags – bits of code that tell your browser (and Google) that a line of text is a heading rather than a paragraph. To create one you just highlight the heading text and using the text editor, select ‘heading 2’ or ‘heading 3’.
Your main page title is an H1. Subheadings within the page are H2s and H3s. You don’t need to worry too much about the code itself – your website builder will handle that – but you do need to make sure you’re actually using subheadings rather than just bolding a line of text, making it a bigger font size and hoping for the best.
Subheadings do two things. They make your page easier to scan for humans, and they give Google more context about what your page covers. Both of those things are good for SEO.
Use a relevant image and name it properly
A relevant image makes your page more engaging, but there’s an SEO step that most people skip entirely – the file name.
When you take a photo on your phone or export something from Canva, the file name is usually something meaningless like IMG_4872.jpg or graphic-export-final-v2.png. Before you upload it to your website, rename it to something descriptive that includes your keyword phrase. Something like newborn-photographer-perth-hills.jpg.
Google can’t look at an image the way a human can. It reads the file name and the alt text (a short description you add when uploading) to understand what the image is about. A well-named image is a small thing that adds up over time.
Fill in your SEO plugin details
If your website is on WordPress, you should have an SEO plugin installed. My preference is AIOSEO, though there are a few good options out there.
These plugins give you a dedicated section on every page and post where you can fill in three important things:
Your keyword phrase – the term you’ve decided to target, which the plugin uses to check how well your content is optimised.
Your page title – this is what appears as the clickable blue link in Google search results. It can be slightly different from your actual page heading, and you can make it a bit more compelling here.
Your meta description – the short paragraph of text that appears under the title in search results. Google doesn’t always use it, but when it does, it’s often what convinces someone to click. Keep it under 155 characters and make it clear what the page is about.
None of this is magic. It’s just being clear and consistent about what your page is about and making sure all the right signals are pointing in the same direction.
Do these five things and you’ll be ahead of a lot of your competition. And if you’d like some help from a web designer who’s all about uncomplicated marketing, take a look at my standard web design packages to find out working with me looks like.