On-page SEO checklist

1 The search the page is for, decided before a word is written

A page written for no particular search ranks for no particular search. This is the decision everything below depends on, and it is the one most pages skip.

• Name the one search this page answers, in the words people actually type. If you cannot name it, the page is either two pages or none.
• Look at what already ranks for that search. If the top results are all guides and your page is a sales page, or the other way round, you are entering the wrong race and no amount of polish fixes that.
• Check no other page on your own site is already aimed at the same search. Two pages after one term split the signal, and Google picks one, usually the wrong one.
• Decide where the page sits: which section, what it links up to, what breadcrumb it carries. A page nobody can reach from the navigation is a page Google visits rarely.
• Write down the questions people ask around that search, from the questions Google shows beneath the results and from the phone. They become the headings.

2 The title tag

The strongest single line on the page, and the one Google rewrites when it is written badly.

• Put the search phrase near the start, in the form people type it, and say what the page offers after it. A title that opens with the brand name gives the searcher nothing to click on.
• Measure it in pixels rather than characters, because that is how Google cuts it. A title of wide letters runs out early and one of narrow letters goes further; the free SERP preview tool on this site shows exactly where the cut falls.
• Make it unique across the site. Duplicate titles almost always mean a template writing the same string for many pages, which is one fix rather than a hundred.
• Add the brand at the end only when it still fits. Google will append it anyway on many results, and a truncated title with a brand at the end has lost the part that mattered.
• Keep it honest against the H1. They need not be identical, and should not be, but a title promising one thing above a heading offering another is the fault Google rewrites most.
• Never stack keywords in it. A title that reads as a list of searches is treated as one, and clicked on by nobody.

3 The address

Short, made of words, and never changed once it is live.

• Use the words of the search, in lower case, separated by hyphens, with nothing else. Dates, category paths and numbers are the parts that go stale.
• Keep it short enough to read aloud. Long addresses are cut in the results and mistrusted in the mind.
• Decide it once. Changing a live address costs a redirect, and a redirect is a request to Google to move the history rather than the history itself. The migration checklist on this site is what that costs.
• Match it to the title in subject, so that the address, the title and the heading agree about what the page is.

4 The meta description

Not a ranking input, and it decides the click, which is the thing rankings exist to produce.

• Write the promise in plain words: what the reader gets from this page, in a sentence and a half. It is an advert for the click, and it is read by a person deciding between five results.
• Include the search phrase, because Google shows the matching words in bold and a searcher scans for them.
• Keep it within the length Google shows, measured in pixels like the title, so the promise is not cut in half.
• Make it unique. A description shared across a template is usually replaced by Google with a sentence it chose, which is rarely the one you would have picked.
• Never open with the name of the page or the site. "Welcome to" and "This page covers" are the two most wasted openings in search.

5 Headings

One main heading that says what the page is about, and sub-headings that answer the questions in the order people ask them.

• Exactly one H1, and it names the subject of the page in the words of the search. A heading that repeats the brand, or that says "Welcome", says nothing to a reader or a crawler.
• Sub-headings are the questions from the first section, written as people ask them, in the order the answers are needed. When Google shows questions beneath the results, they are worth answering under a heading in those words.
• Keep the order H1, H2, H3 without skipping levels. A skipped level makes the page harder to parse for a screen reader and for a machine deciding what is subordinate to what.
• Make every heading a real heading in the code. Bold text styled to look like a heading is a paragraph to Google, and a design that restyles headings into styled text quietly removes the structure the page ranks on.
• Do not force the search phrase into every heading. One heading that names it and the rest that answer the questions reads as a page; the other reads as a machine.

6 The first paragraph

The answer, before anything else. A page that warms up for four paragraphs is left before the answer arrives.

• Answer the search in the first hundred words, plainly, then give the detail. A searcher who finds the answer keeps reading; one who finds an introduction leaves.
• Write the plain answer in one or two sentences a machine could quote. AI answers and featured results are drawn from exactly this kind of paragraph, and a page without one is not a candidate.
• Say who the page is for and what it is not for, early. A page that says it is for one kind of reader keeps that reader and loses the ones who would have bounced anyway.
• Put the most important fact, number or step first. The order of a page is the order of its usefulness, and most pages are written the other way round.

7 The body: what makes a page the best answer

Not the longest page, and not the page with the search phrase in it most often. The one that covers what the searcher needed and nothing they did not.

• Cover the sub-topics the top results cover, in your own words and your own order. The search results show the shape of the answer people expect; a page missing half of it is judged incomplete.
• Be specific. Named things, real numbers, steps in order, a worked example. Vague pages are interchangeable, and interchangeable pages lose to whichever one has more links.
• Add something the other results do not have: your own photographs, your own measurements, a comparison the others skipped, an honest answer to the awkward question.
• Use the search phrase and its plain variants the way a person would, and no more. Repeating it every paragraph reads as a trick to a reader and to Google.
• Break the text so it can be scanned: short paragraphs, lists where the content is a list, a table where the content compares things. Long grey text is not read on a phone.
• Remove anything that is there to make the page longer. Length is not a ranking factor; covering the subject is, and padding buries the covering.
• Date the page honestly and update the date only when the content changes. A page dated three years ago reads as abandoned; a page dated today that has not changed reads as a trick when somebody notices.
• Check the page does not repeat another page on the site. Merge or remove the weaker one rather than publishing two.

8 Images

Every image is text to Google and a wait to a visitor. Both have to be handled.

• Give every image an alt that describes what is in the picture, for somebody who cannot see it. Not the file name, not the keyword, and not empty unless the image is purely decorative.
• Name the file with words: what the picture shows, hyphenated. A camera-generated name tells Google nothing.
• Size and compress the image for the space it fills. A picture served at four times its displayed size is the commonest reason a page is slow on a phone.
• Load the images below the fold lazily and the first big one eagerly. The largest image at the top decides the page speed score, and lazy-loading it makes the page slower rather than faster.
• Add a caption where the picture needs one. Captions are read more than body text, and a caption that says what the picture proves is worth a paragraph.
• Use pictures that are yours, or that show your work. A stock photograph everybody has seen adds nothing and is recognised instantly.

9 Internal links, in both directions

The half of SEO you control completely and the half most on-page checklists leave out.

• Link to the page from the pages that already rank, with anchor text that says what the destination is. "Read more" and "click here" tell a crawler nothing; "the local SEO checklist" tells it everything.
• Give the page at least a few links from within the site beyond the navigation and the sitemap. A page reachable only from the menu is treated as less important than one the body text points at.
• Link out from the page to the pages that support it, and up to the page it exists to feed: a guide links to its service, a product to its category.
• Keep the anchor text varied and natural. The same exact phrase on every link to a page is the pattern of a manual campaign.
• Check that no link on the page goes through a redirect or to a page that has gone. Both are found in a minute with a crawler and both leak.
• Put the most important links high on the page. A link in the last paragraph is followed by almost nobody, and by the crawler last.

10 Structured data and the visible page

Markup describes what is on the page to a machine. It must never describe something that is not there.

• Add markup for what the page is: an article, a product, a service, a set of questions, a business. One type per page, chosen for what the page mainly is.
• Make everything the markup declares visible to a reader. Questions in the markup that appear nowhere on the page, a rating nobody can see, a price the page does not show: each is a manual action waiting to happen.
• Validate it, then read it. A validator checks syntax; only a person checks that the markup is telling the truth about the page.
• Carry the breadcrumb in the markup as well as on the page, so the result can show where the page sits.
• Render the questions and answers from the same source as the markup, so they cannot drift apart when one is edited. That is how this page and every guide on this site is built.

11 The next step, which is the point

A page that ranks and produces no enquiry has decorated the search results. The next step is an on-page element like any other, and the one most checklists forget.

• Decide the one thing the reader should do next and make it obvious: a phone number, a form, a booking link, or the service page this guide exists to feed.
• On a service page, put the way to enquire above the fold and again at the end. On a guide, link up to the service where the guide runs out and where the reader is ready.
• Name the action on the button. "Get started" and "Learn more" say nothing; "Send us your website" and "Book a call" say what happens.
• Track it. A form that emails you and a phone number you can tell apart from the one on the van are what turn a ranking into a number you can see.
• Measure the page by enquiries and sales in Search Console and in your own accounts, and change the page when the visits rise and the enquiries do not. That gap is always on the page.

12 On WordPress and on a shop

The list above is the same on every platform. Two platforms have specifics worth knowing.

• WordPress: the post title becomes the H1, so write it as a heading, and set the title tag and description separately in the SEO plugin fields rather than leaving them to be generated.
• WordPress: categories and tags each produce an archive page. Keep the ones people search for and set the rest not to be indexed, or the site fills with thin pages that compete with the real ones.
• WordPress: the image sizes the theme generates decide the page weight. Check the size actually served on a phone, and switch off the sizes nothing uses.
• A shop: the category page is the page that ranks for the kind of thing, and it needs text above and below the products, written for a buyer who is choosing. The product page needs a title in the words people search and a description that is not the manufacturer’s.
• A shop: filters, sorting and tags create pages that copy the category with no text of their own. Decide which deserve to exist and keep the rest out of the index. The ecommerce SEO audit on this site goes through it.

Protecting what you build

Getting the visibility is the half everybody sells. Keeping it is the half that decides whether businesses still have customers arriving from Google in three years, and almost nobody writes it down, so here it is.

The on-page faults that get a site demoted are the ones done on purpose: headings stuffed with the search phrase, markup describing things the page does not show, and text written for the crawler rather than the reader.

What actually breaks a business in search

Not usually an algorithm update, whatever the industry press implies. Core updates move positions; these remove you.

What to refuse, however it is sold to you

Every one of these still gets sold, usually by email, usually cheaply, and usually to somebody who does not know it is being done in their name. All of them work for a while.

• Bought links, in any packaging

  Guest post networks, paid directories that exist only to sell links, anything offered by email with a price per link. These are the clearest thing Google acts on manually, the action can arrive years later, and recovery means removing what you paid for and then waiting.

• Reviews you did not earn

  Bought, incentivised, written by staff, or traded with another business. Google removes them, and where the pattern is obvious it suspends the listing rather than the reviews. It is also the one that damages you with customers if it is ever visible.

• Keywords stuffed into the business name

  It moves the map pack for a while, which is exactly why it keeps being sold. It is also the single most common cause of a suspension, and the suspension takes the whole listing rather than the extra words.

• Pages written to have pages

  A page per town you have never worked in, a page per service you do not offer, content generated to fill a content calendar. It does not rank and it drags down what would have.

• Anybody who guarantees a position

  Nobody controls Google’s results. A guarantee means either the terms are meaningless or the method is one of the four above.

The monthly discipline

Twenty minutes a month, and it is the difference between noticing a problem in week one and noticing it in month six.

• Check Search Console coverage once a month and look at the Excluded reasons, not just the errors.
• Watch impressions rather than clicks. Impressions fall first, usually weeks before anybody notices the phone is quieter.
• Open the Business Profile and look for edits the public has suggested and Google has accepted without telling you.
• Reply to every review that arrived since last month, and keep asking, steadily rather than in bursts.
• Before any site change, write down what the URLs are now. After it, check they still resolve.
• Keep one note of what changed and when. Almost every traffic mystery is solved by a change nobody wrote down.
• Re-run the audit checklist once a year, and the first two sections after any redesign, host move or new plugin.

Own your own accounts

The domain, the hosting, the Google Business Profile, Search Console and Analytics should all be registered in the business’s name with the business’s own email, and anybody working on them should have access granted rather than ownership transferred. It costs nothing to set up that way and it is close to impossible to unwind afterwards. If any of those are currently in somebody else’s name, that is worth fixing this week whether or not anything is wrong.

The two free tools this list uses

The SERP preview shows where Google cuts a title and a description, measured in pixels rather than characters, for desktop and phone. The LocalBusiness schema generator writes the markup for a business page from the facts you type in. Both run in your browser and nothing is sent anywhere.

Using this as a template

One sheet per page you care about, with the twelve headings as rows and three columns: done, not yet, not applicable. Add a fourth for the evidence, which for on-page work is usually a screenshot of the result or of the page. Then run it on the ten pages that already get the most impressions in Search Console, because those are the ones where a better title turns into a visit soonest.

If you would rather it was done for you

The same list, applied page by page to the pages that earn, with the enquiries as the measure. This is the work our on-page SEO service covers, and it starts with the pages Search Console says are already close.

• On-page SEO services
• SEO audit checklist
• The ecommerce SEO audit
• All guides