The 80/20 Guide to Troubleshooting Your Onsite SEO

Source: Neil Patel

These days, there is an enormous amount of marketing information you can read on any topic.

Which means there’s also a lot of noise to sift through.

And when you do sift through it, you still have to answer one question:

How do you apply all of this knowledge to your marketing strategy?

Even if you know what you’re doing, that the tricky part.

Thankfully, there’s a hack you can use to cut through the clutter and find powerful, actionable insights about your on-site SEO.

It’s called the 80/20 Rule.

In this post, I want to show you how you can use this rule to optimize your on-site SEO without having to consult the experts.

I’ll show you what the 80/20 Rule is and then talk about some practical ways you can start using these insights immediately.

Let’s start by defining and clarifying the rule for you so we’re on the same page.

What is the 80/20 Rule and how is it related to SEO?

It’s no secret that SEO can be overwhelming if you don’t have a clear focus.

You can spend so much time considering the details of your site’s coding or trying to build backlinks that you neglect what can truly help you immediately.

That’s why the 80/20 rule, or the Pareto principle, is so powerful.

The gist of it is that 20% of your invested input is responsible for 80% of the results obtained.

That means there are a handful of elements you can focus on to improve your SEO drastically.

And the best part is that this principle can be used in just about every industry.

Here’s a very simplistic representation of how it works in theory.

So we’re looking for the 20% of on-site SEO actions that are the most profitable.

And that means we need to talk a little about on-site SEO in general.

On-site SEO is when you take the individual elements of a website and optimize them for a search engine crawl.

This is opposed to off-site SEO like backlinks.

On-site SEO looks at both the HTML and the content of your page.

It’s designed to help users on your site quickly understand your page and address their concerns.

So I want to answer one question:

What 20% of my on-site SEO efforts brings me 80% of my traffic?

Focusing on these elements will give you a swift way to troubleshoot your SEO and optimize your website.

And that means you’ll have higher organic search traffic, brand awareness, and conversions.

Before we begin, I should add that most of this advice will be geared toward optimizing for Google.

And it’s because Google dominates the Search Engine market share by a long shot.

Optimizing for Google means you’ll be higher everywhere else, too.

And with Google changing the SEO landscape all the time, finding a few things to always keep optimized is the only long-term plan you should truly rely on.

So start looking at the 20% of elements that will give you the best results for your onsite SEO.

Beginning with keywords and titles.

Start with your keywords and headlines

You’re always going to need keywords.

And you’ll forever be creating eye-catching headlines.

But how often do you focus on marrying those two concepts?

Because it’s part of the 20% of your SEO you should focus on.

When the SEO experts from Yoast experimented with their titles, they found that simple improvements gave a 30% boost to their site traffic.

You can see where, aside from a short dip, they saw the increase.

What did they do to earn this increase?

They put keywords in their headlines.

And they focused as much as possible on getting the keyword at the beginning of the headline.

That means it was the very first thing both Google and their audience would see.

It left no questions about the content of the articles they were posting, making it easier for everyone involved.

The result was more clicks and an increased time on site.

But how do you find the right keywords?

I recommend using a service like Moz’s Keyword Explorer.

It can help you find competitive keywords in your industry that you can rank for.

And it even links you right to your competitor’s content, so you know what you have to beat.

It’s by far one of the easiest ways to optimize your time and stick to your 20% input.

Once you determine your keyword, then it’s time to optimize your keyword and title combination.

If you want to do this manually, here’s a helpful excerpt from an infographic made by Backlinko:

As you can see, they recommend starting with your keyword like I’ve discussed.

They also recommend optimizing your URL by keeping it simple and including the keyword.

You can also add modifiers to help your rankings for long-tailed versions.

And make sure you wrap your title in an <H1> tag.

All of this will ensure that your page is crawl friendly and easy for your audience to find.

It’s also recommended to keep your headline under 60 characters if you can.

And I highly recommend consulting Google’s guidelines for strong title creation if you’re ever in doubt.

You don’t always have to optimize this process manually though.

For anyone that uses a WordPress site, you can also install the Yoast SEO plugin.

It’s a simple way to double-check your SEO and make sure that you don’t forget anything when posting your content.

Here’s what it looks like:

As you can see, it provides a snapshot of how your page will appear in Google, along with an analysis of how optimized your post is.

In this case, we would need to input the focus keyword that we’ve researched.

Let’s say in this case we use a simple one: thought leadership.

Now we want to make sure our title is keyword optimized, eye-catching, and the right length.

Obviously, just “Thought Leadership” is too short and isn’t very interesting.

Let’s lengthen it.

Now that it’s longer and interesting, we need to double check to make sure it’s not too long, and we need to revise our URL.

Scroll down to the Yoast tool, and click edit snippet.

Your window will expand to this:

And now we see that we still have an issue with our headline. It’s too long, so it won’t fit cleanly into our Google snippet.

Let’s fix that.

Now we have a title that has all of the essential SEO elements.

It’s been double-checked by Yoast, and we can move on.

Edit your URL by changing the Slug:

And now you’re good to go. Let’s tackle your content next.

Optimize your content

Your page’s content is what will ultimately determine its search position.

It’s what your visitor came to see, which makes it very important to a search engine’s crawler.

So creating optimized content should fall into the 20% of your efforts that yield results.

What does good content look like then?

According to Kissmetrics, it’s based on three things:

Accessibility, topic targeting, and quality.

It has to fulfill your audience’s needs, have a good degree of readability, and it has to be easy to share.

Ultimately, your content factors into what Google calls “Dwell time,” or time on site.

Someone immediately clicking the back button or closing your page when they enter is a sign to Google of low-quality content.

But if…

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