Trouble optimizing Google SEO for blog post pages

Hello,

My website The Complete Works of Shakespeare has every work by Shakespeare, which I created a separate blog posts for each of his plays. 

Homepage: https://www.thecompleteworksofshakespeare.com/

Example of play, created as a blog page: https://www.thecompleteworksofshakespeare.com/tragedy/hamlet

For some reason, Google SEO does very well with directing users to the website if they search for something that's made on a standard (non-blog) page, like the homepage. For example, if they search "shakespeare text" I get good SEO results. 

However, if someone searches for a specific play (each created as an individual blog post), Google SEO works very poorly. For example, if they search "Hamlet text" or even "Hamlet thecompleteworksofshakespeare" the SEO ranking is very low, and usually still has the homepage as the suggested search result (instead of the Hamlet page itself). 

Google's own SEO documentation says that they don't differentiate between "standard" and "blog post" pages in SEO, but clearly something in the Squarespace back end is differentiating the ability to search. 

Any suggestions on how to resolve this would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. 

On 3/6/2023 at 4:33 AM, SEOSpace_Henry said:

Hi @walevitt,

Yes, there's no differentiation between the pages. There are just a few things you need to do to improve the likelihood of ranking - "Hamlet" is a very competitive keyword, so you need to follow all best practices to rank.

I've used my Squarespace SEO plugin on your page (launching 18th April), and it's identified some things to fix below (also attached):

• Your page doesn't have a H1 - "Hamlet" at the top of your page is a H2 - your H1 is one of the main things that tell Google what you want to rank for, so no H1 isn't good
• Your meta description is 70 characters - make it between 150-160 characters long
• You have a "Hamlet test" page which could be causing keyword cannibalization (i.e. when two or more pages compete for the same keyword)
• You have a couple of images which need compressing or alt tags adding
• Your SEO title is "Hamlet — The Full Text Free Online by William Shakespeare — The Complete Works of Shakespeare: Free, Online, Full Texts by William Shakespeare" - this is 142 characters, but should be between 50 and 60 characters.

After fixing these, monitor how the ranking changes. If things don't improve, you may want to look at adding more internal links, backlinks or content around the topic.

I hope this helps!

@SEOSpace_Henry Thanks so much for this helpful reply — I will test this out and let you know what happens. REALLY appreciate it! 

No problem @walevitt, happy to help!