On-Page SEO in 2022 (Checklist Included!)

A graphic depicting an astronaut next to the letters SEO.

Ever noticed a change in your SEO rankings for better or for worse, even though you didn’t make any major changes? This may be Google at work.

Over the past few years, Google has released several updates to their search engine algorithm, with Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird being some of the biggest. Those updates set augmented rules on how owners should structure their sites for link building, both building incoming links and using anchor text for outgoing links.

Despite the updates, however, on-page SEO hasn’t really changed all that much. Every on-page SEO task is really for the user’s benefit. Yet, most SEO professionals still haven’t come to terms with that fact.

Google wants the user to be happy when they visit your web page. The only way that Google will know that your site users are satisfied is when they’re engaged. How long do they spend reading your content?

In this on-page SEO checklist, I’m going to show you the essential things to pay attention to. They’ll improve your search traffic, boost your rankings and make off-page SEO a lot easier for you.

1. Site Speed

Inadvertent duplicate content can slow indexing down, so examine your site to remove it.

It makes sense. After all, don’t we all hate to wait? And, the instant gratification of the web has only made us more impatient.

So, it makes sense that Google cares about page load time (and has for a very long time). From the Webmasters Central Blog:

Back in 2010, Matt Cutts announced that site speed would carry less weight than other key ranking factors, such as relevance, authority links, and so on. That’s no longer quite as accurate. Nowadays, speed is essential, nearly as much as a cornerstone keyword phrase.

One study showed that a delay of a single second in page response time can yield a 7% reduction in conversions.