Nail on-page SEO before doing anything else!

Olga says: “Focus on on-page SEO, pay a lot of attention to on-page SEO, and treat it as a priority.

Do that before doing anything else.”

Why should on-page be a priority?

“Based on my experience and the audits I have done, most websites still lack SEO fundamentals – and those SEO fundamentals can usually be found in on-page SEO.

On-page is the part of SEO that we have full control over, and there are so many things that you can do within that realm. This should be a priority because on-page SEO is around 85% of your success. It can be less, it can be more but, without the on-page, other activities do not make sense.

If on-page SEO is not done correctly or is incomplete, then other activities won’t be as powerful as they could be.”

What aspects of on-page SEO are most often neglected?

“The structure of headings. Very often, websites use headings for styling purposes, especially on custom-coded websites where the developer didn’t know a lot about SEO.

This is very common on lawyer websites, where you see 100 headings and all of them are numbers – the amounts of money they say that they can gain for their clients, for example. However, there is not one single heading that says, ‘Personal Injury Lawyer New York’.

Then, keyword focus: making sure that each page on your website is targeted at one specific keyword. Of course, it has to be the right keyword or topic. Topic is an umbrella term here because you can also focus on that in the wrong way.

Make sure that each page has a keyword mapped to it and it is actually optimized for that keyword, and the internal linking is used correctly to reinforce that mapping.”

Do lawyer websites not use WordPress?

“They use WordPress, but they do not use the up-to-date themes.

Very often, they use WordPress through Elementor but, when the site is being built, there is a design process happening. A designer designs it in PDF files or other formats and then the coder comes in and codes that to look the way they want it.

With some websites, especially in Elementor, it is possible to code it in a way that will allow you to edit a lot of those custom elements. However, there are also cases where it is not really possible, and the website ends up having tonnes of custom fields.

On the other hand, if the website doesn’t use Elementor, then you have a WordPress site that is almost not a WordPress site because you cannot edit anything – or it is very tricky, and you can break the entire site. This is the most common case that I see with lawyer websites.”

Do you advise moving away from Elementor?

“Elementor is usually not that problematic, the problem tends to occur when there is no Elementor. Instead, they use WordPress with some theme, and within that theme, you have those custom fields.

This is probably not something that a lot of people will agree with, but I recommend not obsessing about the design phase. Just code the website, make some changes, and push it live. The coding phase can take months or even a year, so you might find that you cannot migrate because you keep coming back.

Instead, you could launch the website relatively quickly, with the SEO already done. Then, you can make the small changes later on, but the SEO clock will have started ticking. Very often, these businesses want a new website because their current one is very old. If you get stuck in the design/refinements phase, that doesn’t serve much of a purpose.

I know that designers will kill me for saying it, but a lot of people don’t really care about design. They don’t remember what they ate yesterday, so they don’t care about the website’s colours and all of those things.

Of course, accessibility is important. You want to use colours in such a way that it is easy to read and easy to find information or a call to action. However, for lawyers especially, someone who needs a lawyer is often looking right after an accident has happened.

They’re typing something on their phone, and they just want information and how to contact them. Then they have to scroll through these weird visual elements and effects. The website can be very slow because of those, and they’re on a mobile phone with a poor internet connection, so it could take ages to load.

An ugly website that’s well-coded is much better than a beautiful website that’s badly coded – and the SEO needs to be done properly. It needs to have the content it should have, it needs to have headings, and the content on it needs to be easy to read.”

Do you need to do on-page and off-page at the same time, or do you have to get your on-page spot on before you think about off-page?

“It depends. Usually, I recommend trying to do as much as you can with on-page. Then, when you are sure that you have done everything that you can with the on-page and you can clearly see that the pages ranking above you have more backlinks than you have, off-page is something you should be doing.

One exception where you could potentially start with both is when you have a brand-new website – a new domain with zero traffic and zero backlinks. Then you can probably do both at the same time to get your website crawled and indexed faster, and maybe skip the sandbox phase, whether you believe in it or you don’t.”

Are there aspects of on-page that have become more important recently?

“This isn’t super new, but I’ve been playing a lot with the Cora SEO tool that you can find on SEOtoollab.com recently. Basically, if you know what entities, LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords, and variations of the keyword you should have, and which ones your competitors have, then Google will better understand what you are about.

This is especially true with entities. By just sprinkling some entities on your website and on your page, you can boost your relevance many times over. This is a very important element. Some tools help you to know exactly what LSI words and entities you are missing, and you can simply add them.

It is now super easy to do that with ChatGPT. You can just ask ChatGPT to write some FAQs and add those entities into those FAQs. Then it’s done. You don’t have to think about stuffing them in hidden places or other tricks like that.

I know there are different opinions about it, but my understanding of LSI words is that they are basically entities, but they do not have a Wikipedia page. However, they still carry a message about the context and related concepts for a given page and its main topic.”

Are there any tools that you’d recommend for crawling your site to determine your on-page performance?

“Definitely the Cora SEO tool from Ted Kubaitis. I think that is the best one.

It measures around 100,000 factors right now. It statistically correlates all of the top 100 pages ranking for a given keyword, and then it shows you exactly what you are missing and how your competitors are doing, and you can see exactly where you should improve.

Usually, you have a long list of things to improve, and you can just start with the 5 that are easiest to implement. Sometimes that is all you need to do, and you move up after 24 hours or so.

Sometimes you need to do a couple of iterations but very often, with that tool and a very scientific approach, you can rank almost any keyword – or at least get it to the point where you know that it’s time to do a press release or earn some backlinks before you can get into the top 5, especially with very competitive keywords.”

Can you also measure the impact that specific on-page changes have had on your SEO performance or your rankings?

“With Cora, you work on one specific keyword, and the report is usually super long and in-depth. You need to know SEO very well to be able to make sense of that report, and people who do not do SEO get really scared when they see it.

You do it for one keyword, then you choose what recommendations to add. When I work on a specific keyword for a specific page, I simply create a new group of keywords in my rank tracker, mark those as the keywords I have done with Cora, and add them for tracking on the day that I worked on it – or I add a notation in rank tracking if I’m already tracking that keyword, so that I know exactly what I did.

I also have a Google document where I simply state the dates when I make each improvement. However, with SEO, we cannot be 100% sure what caused the change, so this is still guesswork. Sometimes, though, you can be almost 100% sure what it was that you did that moved the site up.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“Stop building backlinks and buying backlinks, especially the spammy ones.

I have seen a lot of SEO agencies or inexperienced consultants who have a page that they want to rank, and they are obsessing about backlinks. They are buying backlinks and doing a tonne of different things with their backlinks, and they are not making any progress.

There is a rank aggregation algorithm called MC4 (Markov Chain Type 4), that is all about the diversity of factors. If you are overusing one factor, it works for a while, and then it stops working. You have to use other factors.

If you use other factors and fill in the gaps, then whatever you overused before may start working again. That is very often the case with backlinks.”

Olga Zarr is an SEO Consultant, and you can find her over at SEOSLY.com.