A practical on-page SEO checklist for a small website

On-page SEO is everything you control on the page itself: what it says, how it is built and how it connects to your other pages. It is the part of search optimization that is entirely in your hands, and for a small website it is usually where the biggest gains are, because small sites rarely have the problems that need an expert, only the ones nobody has looked for.

This checklist has eight checks. Work through them in order, because the first ones decide whether the later ones matter at all: a page that Google cannot index will not benefit from a better title.

1. Make sure Google can find and index the page

Before anything else, check that the page can appear in Google at all.

• It answers with a normal "OK" status, not an error or a redirect to somewhere else.
• It is not blocked in robots.txt, and it does not carry a noindex instruction in its HTML or its headers, unless you want it kept out.
• It is listed in your sitemap, and the sitemap itself can be read.
• Its canonical link, if it has one, points to the page itself and not to a different page.

The quickest way to check a single page is the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console: paste the address and it tells you whether the page is indexed and, if not, why.

2. Give every page its own title and description

The title and the description are what a searcher sees before they decide to click, so they are worth more care than their size suggests.

• The title should say what the page is about, in words a searcher would use, with the most important ones near the start. Aim for around 60 characters. Longer titles are often cut off in results.
• The description should sum up the page in a sentence or two, around 110 to 160 characters. Google does not use it to rank a page, and may rewrite it, but a clear one often earns more clicks.
• Every page needs its own. Pages that share a title compete with each other and look interchangeable in results.

3. Use one clear heading structure

Headings give the page a shape, for readers who scan and for search engines that read the outline.

• Use exactly one main heading (H1) that says what the page is.
• Use second-level headings (H2) for the main sections, and third-level headings (H3) only inside those.
• Write headings as plain statements or questions that someone could understand without reading the text under them.

Do not pick a heading level for how it looks. Choose it for what it means, and style it separately.

4. Answer the question the searcher has

A page ranks and keeps its place when it is the best answer to a question. That is less about keywords and more about intent.

• Put the answer, or a clear summary of it, near the top. People who find it quickly stay.
• Cover the questions that naturally follow, so the reader does not have to go back to the results.
• Use the words people actually use, but only where they read naturally. Repeating a phrase to catch a search makes the page worse for people, and no better for Google.
• Keep the page current. If a fact changes, change the page, and say when you last updated it.

5. Link your pages together

Search engines find pages by following links, and they use links to judge which pages matter. Your own links are the easiest to improve.

• Every page you care about should be reachable from at least one other page, and ideally from a few.
• Make link text descriptive. "Our guide to reading Search Console" says more than "click here".
• Link from pages that already get visitors to pages that deserve more.
• Keep important pages close to the home page, a few clicks away at most.

A page that nothing links to is called an orphan. It may be in your sitemap and still be treated as unimportant.

6. Keep images and speed under control

Slow pages lose visitors, and Google measures speed as part of the page experience. For most small sites a few habits cover almost everything.

• Compress images and serve them at the size they are shown, not larger.
• Describe each meaningful image in its alt text, in a few plain words.
• Check the three Core Web Vitals in PageSpeed Insights: how fast the main content appears (LCP), how quickly the page reacts to a tap or click (INP) and whether things jump around while it loads (CLS).
• Remove scripts you do not need. Each one costs speed.

7. Make the page work on a phone

Google looks at the mobile version of your page first, so that is the version that counts.

• The text is readable without zooming.
• Buttons and links are big enough to press and not too close together.
• Nothing is hidden on a phone that matters on a desktop, because Google may never see it.

8. Add structured data where it fits

Structured data is a small block of code that describes a page to search engines in a standard form: that it is an article, who wrote it and when, or that a business has an address. It is optional, and it never replaces good content, but it removes guesswork.

• Add it for things that really are on the page and that a visitor could see.
• Use the format Google recommends, JSON-LD.
• Test it with Google's Rich Results Test before you publish.

The checklist at a glance

Doing this at scale

On a site of five pages you can do all of this by hand. On a site of fifty or five hundred, you need something that reads every page and reports what it finds. Visifluent's Site Audit crawls up to 5,000 pages and lists the problems it finds, with how hard each is to fix and how much it is likely to matter, so you can start with the quick wins. To see which of these changes made a difference, read your numbers in Search Console: our guide to reading Google Search Console shows how.