Why is On-Page SEO Important?

Does traditional on-page SEO still make a difference in 2021?

Yup!

In fact, Google’s own “How Search Works” report states that:

Google on On-page SEO
Even though Google is MUCH smarter than it was back in the day, they still use old-school stuff (like looking for a specific keyword on your page).

Google still crawls your site for keywords
And there’s data to back this up.

Our analysis of 11M Google search results didn’t find a correlation between keyword-rich title tags and first page rankings.

Keyword optimized title tags don’t correlate with higher first page Google rankings
But if you search for any competitive keyword, you’ll notice that the top-ranking pages almost all use that exact keyword in their title tag.

Keywords in titles on SERP
That said:

There’s more to on-page SEO than cramming keywords into your page’s HTML.

To rank your content in 2021, you also need to optimize your content for: