Pick the right page first
On-page SEO means the things you control on the page itself: its words, title, headings, links and images. It's the opposite of off-page work, like earning links from other sites.
Don't run this on your whole site. Start with one page that could bring in customers. Open Search Console's Performance report, which is free, and look for pages with plenty of impressions (times they were shown in results) and few clicks. Those pages are already being seen, so small changes have somewhere to land.
Say you run a made-up three-person tax practice in Reno. Your "small business tax preparation" page gets seen a lot and rarely clicked, and every client who comes through it is worth a few thousand dollars a year. That's your page, well ahead of the home page or last year's blog post.
The checklist on one screen
| Check | It passes if |
|---|---|
| 1. Google can reach it | It loads normally, and URL Inspection shows no problem |
| 2. It isn't blocked | No noindex tag by accident |
| 3. Same content on phones | The mobile version has what the desktop version has |
| 4. Title | Unique, specific, and it describes this page |
| 5. Main heading | One clear, prominent heading that says what the page is |
| 6. Meta description | Written for this page, in sentences |
| 7. URL | Readable words, separated by hyphens |
| 8. It answers the search | Someone arriving from Google wouldn't need to search again |
| 9. It adds something | It has facts or views only you could supply |
| 10. Who and when | It's clear who wrote it and when it was last really updated |
| 11. Headings help readers | You could skim them and follow the page |
| 12. Links | Other pages link here, and every link has descriptive text |
| 13. Images | Useful alt text, near relevant words |
| 14. Structured data | Valid, and it matches what's visible on the page |
| 15. Page experience | Core Web Vitals are good and nothing blocks the content |
The rest of this post explains each one, in that order. Plan on about an hour a page, and the first three checks take a few minutes.
Checks 1 to 3: can Google use the page?
Google can reach it. Google's technical requirements come down to three things: Googlebot (its crawler) isn't blocked, the page returns a working status code, and there's content it can index. Google also says meeting these doesn't guarantee indexing. Paste the address into the URL Inspection tool in Search Console to see what Google has on file.
It isn't blocked. A noindex tag tells Google to leave a page out of its results. They can get left behind after a site redesign. There's a catch: Google has to be able to crawl the page to see the tag, so blocking it in robots.txt, the file that tells crawlers where they can go, won't reliably keep it out.
Same content on phones. Google uses the mobile version of your content for indexing and ranking. If your mobile design hides your service list or pricing, assume Google may not count it. You can arrange it differently on a phone, but the main content should be equivalent.
Checks 4 to 7: what people see in the results
Title. Google's title guidance asks for descriptive, concise text that's distinct on each page, without repeated boilerplate or stuffed keywords. There's no length limit. Titles just get cut off to fit the screen, which is why the common advice is to stay near 60 characters. That's a habit and not a Google rule, so don't sweat 63. Put the important words first.
| Version | Example title for the made-up firm |
|---|---|
| Weak | Services | Sierra Tax Group |
| Better | Small Business Tax Preparation in Reno | Sierra Tax Group |
Don't be surprised if Google shows something else. It builds the title link from several sources, including headings and text in links pointing at the page. After you change a title, it can take a few days to a few weeks to show up.
Main heading. Google says to make the main title obvious, for example by putting it in the first visible H1 (the page's top-level heading), since it can get confused when several headings look equally important. Its content guidance also asks whether the heading is a helpful summary and avoids exaggeration, so "Your Trusted Partner in Success" doesn't pass.
Meta description. This is the short summary you write for search results. Google mainly builds the snippet from the page itself and uses your description when it gives a more accurate picture, so there's no guarantee it appears. Google asks for a unique one per page, and notes there's no length limit here either. Skip lists of keywords. Say what the customer gets, and include facts like price or location if you have them.
URL. Use readable words and hyphens, such as /small-business-tax-preparation/. Google says keywords in a domain or path have hardly any ranking effect beyond showing as breadcrumbs, so don't change an old working URL just to add one. If you ever do change it, redirect the old address.
Checks 8 to 11: the page itself
These take the longest, and they matter the most. They're also the ones no tool can tick for you.
It answers the search. Search for your target phrase and look at what comes up. If you see price guides and your page is a sales pitch, you may have the wrong kind of page. Google's self-assessment asks whether people would leave satisfied, or need to search again. For the tax practice, that probably means saying what the work includes, what it costs, what clients need to bring and when to call.
It adds something. Google's questions include whether the content has original information or analysis beyond the obvious. This is where small firms can do well, because you know things a generic page doesn't: the mistake you see most often, what a typical job costs, the question clients ask on the first call. Write those down.
Use the words your customers use, and don't force them. Google says keyword stuffing is against its spam policies, and that writing naturally with varied words gives you more chances to show up anyway.
Who and when. Google suggests making authorship clear, with background on the author or the business where people would expect it. If a page shows a date, make it visible and label it. Only change that date for a real update, because Google's guidance specifically warns against making pages look fresh when nothing substantial changed.
Headings help readers. Use them so a busy person can skim. Google says order and number don't matter for Search, though proper order does help people using screen readers, so it's still worth doing right.
Checks 12 and 13: links and images
Links. Google says every page you care about should be linked from at least one other page on your site. New pages are the usual victims. Add links in the text of related pages, and write link text that describes where it goes: "small business tax preparation" and not "click here". Google can only reliably follow normal links with an href, so ask your developer if your menu or buttons are built some other way.
Images. Alt text is a short description of an image. Google calls it the most important attribute for image metadata, and it helps people who can't see the picture. Describe the image plainly and don't pack it with keywords. Place images near related text, and use a short descriptive filename.
Checks 14 and 15: the technical extras
Structured data. This is code that labels your page for search engines (a business, an article, a product). It can make you eligible for richer results. Google recommends JSON-LD in most cases, and you can check it with the Rich Results Test. Google doesn't guarantee that it will show, and it says not to mark up anything readers can't see. For most small businesses, the page with your business name, address and hours is the place to start.
Page experience. Google says its ranking systems look to reward a good experience overall, and that you shouldn't fixate on one or two aspects. Its Core Web Vitals targets are measurable, though:
- Loading (LCP): the main content appears within 2.5 seconds.
- Responding (INP): the page reacts to a tap or click in under 200 milliseconds.
- Stability (CLS): a score under 0.1, meaning things don't jump around as it loads.
Check them in the Core Web Vitals report, which uses real visitor data, or in PageSpeed Insights for a single page. Google's page experience questions also cover secure pages and excessive ads, and it warns against pop-ups that block the content. A big "join our newsletter" box on a phone is worth a second look even if you don't care about SEO, because it gets between you and the client.
What you can stop worrying about
A lot of checklists include rules Google has said plainly don't matter. Its SEO starter guide has a whole section on them.
| The rule you'll hear | What Google says |
|---|---|
| Add a meta keywords tag | Google Search doesn't use it |
| Write at least 1,500 words | There's no word count target, minimum or maximum, and no preferred count |
| Headings must go in perfect order, with an exact number of them | Order doesn't matter for Search, and there's no ideal number |
| Get the keyword into your domain | Hardly any effect on ranking, so choose a name that's good for your business |
| Duplicate content gets you penalized | It won't cause a manual action. It's inefficient, and a canonical tag or redirect tidies it up. Copying other people's content is a different matter |
| E-E-A-T is a ranking factor to optimize | Google says thinking so is a misconception |
| You need an llms.txt file for AI search | Google says you can ignore it for its AI features |
Other AI assistants work differently, and we cover those in how to rank in ChatGPT.
After you've made the changes
Write down the date and what you changed. Then look at that page in Search Console in about a month. You're looking for more clicks from the same impressions, and ideally more calls or form fills, since that's the number you care about. There's no fixed timeline and nobody can promise a result, so don't read much into one week.
Then move to your next most valuable page.
If nobody has time to do this every week
One page is an hour. A whole site, kept up over a year, is a job. Free tools can find a lot of these problems, and our list of the best free SEO tools shows which do what. If you're a founder doing this yourself, SEO for founders covers where this fits among everything else.
Sojig is our product, so weigh this accordingly. Its weekly site audit checks your pages, and it drafts the fixes for titles, descriptions, structured data, internal links, headings and alt text. In the default mode you approve each one, and it publishes on WordPress, Shopify or Webflow, or as a GitHub pull request. It starts at $99 a month.
It won't do checks 8 and 9 for you, because it doesn't know what you know. Its drafts mark the spots that need your own numbers and examples. And if you've got a small site and an hour a month, you don't need it. This list and Search Console will do.