Goal: Knowing which of the pages you should optimize in a website, especially when there are a lot of them and you don’t have much time at your disposal to optimize each of them.
Ideal Outcome: You will be able to easily determine the most important pages in your site so that you get the highest ROI on the time you spend optimizing your site.
Prerequisites or requirements:
It is recommended that you know how to perform keyword research. SOP 011 (web version) will teach you how to do this.
Why this is important: On-page optimization is absolutely crucial for your SEO efforts. However, if your website is hundreds or thousands of pages long, and it has never been optimized, the 80/20 site-wide on-page optimization method presented in this SOP will help you determine which pages to optimize first.
Where this is done: In your browser, using Ahrefs and Google Sheets, as well as KW Finder for your keyword research.
When this is done: When you decide to perform on-page optimization on a large website.
Who does this: You, your VA, your SEO specialist, or a digital marketing agency you have employed.
Finding the on-page optimization opportunities
Go to 80/20 Site-Wide On-Page Optimization – Worksheet and make a copy of the spreadsheet to use throughout the process.
Open Ahrefs.
Enter the website URL in the search bar.
Make sure to include both http + https (left selection menu).
Select *.domain/* (domain with all its subdomains in the right selection menu).
Click search to analyze your domain.
Click on “best by backlinks” in the left sidebar.
Under http code, select “200 OK”.
Sort results by “Dofollow”.
For each result with more than 10 dofollow links, click on the little arrow next to it → right click on Organic keywords → Open it in a new tab.
Ask yourself the following questions to see if this is a good opportunity for on-page optimization:
Is it ranking for high-volume keywords that are also relevant to that content?
If NO, then this is probably a good candidate for on-page optimization. You can add it to the worksheet and move on to the next result.
If YES, then move on to the next question.
Is it optimized for that keyword?
If NO, then this is probably a good candidate for on-page optimization. You can add it to the worksheet and move on to the next result.
If YES, then move on to the next question.
Is it ranking in the top 5 positions for that keyword?
If NO, then this is probably a good candidate for on-page optimization. You can add it to the worksheet and move on to the next result.
If YES, then you can skip this URL and move on to the next result.
Repeat the previous steps until you’re done with the URLs on the “best by backlinks” list.
Finding target keywords for each page
Take each of the URLs you have gathered in your worksheet and perform keyword research to relevant keywords for the content of that page.
As mentioned in the beginning of this SOP, you can learn how to run in-depth keyword research in SOP 011 (web version).
When you find a relevant keyword that shows an attractive search volume for the page, add it to the “Target keyword” column in the worksheet.
If you cannot find any relevant keywords with a search volume large enough, just write “N/A” in the “Target keyword” column and move to the next link/page in your worksheet.
Like all keyword research processes, this might take some time, especially if you have a large site. Hang in there, it’ll be more than worth investing this time into your website’s health!
Performing on-page optimization
Once you go through the steps described above in this SOP, you can move on to the actual on-page optimization for each of the URLs with a relevant target keyword in your worksheet. On-page optimization is an easy process that will usually take less than 5-10 minutes for each of the URLs you have to optimize. We have described this process in SOP 018 (web version) so if you don’t know how to do it, you can check it out. That’s it! Remember, this is not a full website optimization – but it will still help your website perform better in the SERPs. If you are running short on time and if your website is large enough to make a full optimization a lengthy process, the 80/20 method will give you a good head-start in the SEO world, giving you more time to optimize the remaining pages as well.
