Earlier this year, a friend asked me for help. He had written a good piece of content for a local bariatric surgeon, but after a few months, the content was not ranking for the intended focus keyword, not even on page 10.

He asked me to take a look at it and sent over a Google Doc. The content was good, and it “checked” all the SEO boxes. I then asked him for the live URL to dig a little deeper. It took me 10 seconds to see the problem.

The focus keyword was absent from the two most important places: the Page Title tag and the H1 tag.

Both tags are super important for SEO because they provide strong signals to search engines about the topic and context of the content.

Relevant and optimized page titles can also help increase your organic CTR.

I told my friend to optimize those two tags and include the focus keyword. Within two weeks of making the changes, the content started ranking on page #2 of Google. A couple more weeks passed, and it was already at the bottom of page one!

Granted, this was a low-competition local keyword, but it was very relevant and high intent—the type of keyword that can drive sales.

Here’s your SEO tip for the week: creating great content is not enough. You need to make sure that your Page Title and H1 tags are optimized for your topic and keyword. Go check your website right now! Start with your homepage and then continue with other pages with high-converting potential.

If you didn’t have any planned SEO tasks for the week, you do now 😂

Extra Tip: After you make the changes, send a recrawl request via Google Search Console for faster results. You can also use an indexing tool like the ones I recommend below.

~ Roberto

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