There are many different On page signals Google uses when trying to rank pages on the search engine. The 3 kings refer to the 3 most important factors of on-page optimisation. They are the URL, SEO Title tag and page title. This post will explain the factors in detail and further explain 2 more factors that are less important but still important nonetheless. If you implement these factors correctly, you should see improvements in your search engine rankings.
Let’s break down a few things first. On-page SEO refers to any change you make on the actual webpage itself.
A selection of on-page SEO changes can include the following:
- Updating the title tag
- Changing the heading or H1 tag
- Editing the meta description
All these changes happen “on the page”, hence, On-page optimisation.
URL
First up is the URL. You need to optimise the URL for the main search query you are targeting. How you decide which keyword to use is you will conduct keyword research with SEMRush or a similar tool. There are two important metrics. The first is the search volume and the second is whether the query has any commercial intent.
If you find the keyword “plumber Cape Town”, you then will need to optimise your URL for that search query. An example is yourdomain. co. za/plumber-cape-town
This is a very strong signal to google.
If you are targeting only one location, you may only need plumbing service or something similar. I do, however, like to add in location targeting if the business decides to expand at a later date.
It is important to note that if your domain has a keyword in it, it can be very easy to over-optimise and thus lose rankings for example biasseo.co.za/seo-cape-town/ can be very easy to over-optimise. Another important note is if your webpage has been around for a while, has been indexed and already has a few backlinks – it may be wise to leave the URL as is and move on to the other kings.
SEO Title Tag
The next step is to optimise the SEO title tag. This is usually optimised with the SEO plugin, the same as the URL structure. The Title page is the highlighted main text section in the search results. If you open up the webpage and right-click on it to view the page source you will see the HTML code saying <title>plumbing service cape town</title>.
A few key points are to write the SEO title naturally. Don’t try keyword stuff in the title because google will penalise you for that as they think you are spamming the search results. Also, don’t try to repeat the keywords eg SEO cape town | best SEO cape town | greatest SEO cape town. You will lose rankings faster than you can say what the hell happened?
Page Title – This is called the H1 tag
The third step is to optimise the page title. Now there are two things to note here: sometimes the theme pulls in the page title as an H1 from the actual page title in WordPress. Other themes allow you to override that setting and change it with a theme builder or page builder. For example, Generatepress and Generateblocks, DIVI theme and Elementor all allow this to happen. You have full control to tweak and change these settings as you, please.
An important tip is to have the keyword in the page title but you need to write it naturally. For example, “Top rated plumber in Cape Town”. The keyword plumber is in the page title and the geolocation “Cape Town”
Let’s put this all into practice:
Page Title: Plumber servicing cape town or if you can have a separate page title in WordPress and H1 tag you can set it to Plumber servicing cape town and the H1 as “Top rated plumber in Cape Town”
Permalink Structure: yourdomain. co.za/plumber-cape-town
SEO Title: Top rated Plumbing service in Cape Town | Company Name
Those three tweaks alone should help you improve your rankings. Some other aspects of On-page SEO can help you further your rankings. Whilst they are not as important as the 3 kings, they still are important and something you should consider changing or tweaking. Remember, SEO is a big puzzle, if you are missing pieces you won’t be able to see the whole picture.
Other important aspects of On-page SEO (H2)
Once you have tweaked and optimised your 3 kings there are two other important aspects you may want to optimise for. This will assist Google in understanding exactly what the webpage is about and will more often than not increase your organic rankings. When you talk about a topic or expand on the topic/ product/ service etc Google can better understand the webpage.
Subheadings such as h2, h3, h4
It is important to be mindful of the headings used on the page. As mentioned earlier, the H1 is the main heading. All the other headings are subheadings of that heading. For example, an H2 heading is a subheading of an H1. An H3 heading is a subheading of an H2 heading and so on.
How to decide on which subheadings to use (H4)
Tools like SEMrush can give you keyword ideas but another way is to work off your main keyword.
An example list of headings and subheadings may go like this:
- Top-rated plumber in Cape Town (h1)
- About us/ About Company name
- Our plumbing services (h2)
- 24hr emergency plumbing service (H3)
- Geyser repair (H3)
- Drain blockages (H3)
- Bathroom plumbing refurbishment (H3)
- Why use our plumbing service (h2)
- All those headings are related to the company and the plumbing service itself. As google crawls the website, it can easily understand that the company is a plumbing service and it provides 4 different types of plumbing services. On top of that, you may even rank for an emergency plumber, Geyser repair, blocked drains and bathroom plumbing. More keywords + higher rankings = more business.
It is important to play around with these keywords to get the most out of your website.
Content (H3)
The content on the page should be helpful, useful and relevant to the search query. For example, it may be helpful to explain the details of the service or have a click-to-call button so that can click it and you can get a phone call. Useful and relevant information may be how what your call-out rates, office hours etc. If you have subheadings like the above and discuss the service in enough detail you will have a perfectly optimised page. My testing has indicated that if each subheading has about 200-350 words per section that page should be optimised well enough.
That is a rundown of the 3 kings and two other factors that can help improve your on-page SEO. It is worth noting that this helps with on-page SEO. If you aren’t interlinking, building backlinks, blogging and having a site that is easily crawled by the search engine, you will still struggle. As mentioned earlier, SEO is a big puzzle. On the other hand, if you build links and do everything else correctly without an optimised page you still won’t rank.
I hope this post helped you with your 3 kings. If you need any SEO services for your business please contact us and we can discuss improving your rankings.
