Why on-page SEO is still worth doing properly
On-page SEO is every part of a webpage you can directly control: the title tag, the headings, the image descriptions, the URL, the internal links. None of it is glamorous and none of it involves any trickery. It's just making sure a page clearly tells Google (and your visitors) what it's actually about.
I get asked a lot whether this stuff still matters given how much SEO advice online talks about backlinks and technical audits and AI-driven ranking factors. It does. On-page SEO is the foundation everything else sits on. You can have the best backlink profile in the world, but if your title tags are all "Home" and your headings are a mess, you're making it unnecessarily hard for Google to understand and rank your pages.
Here's the checklist I actually use, explained in plain English, no jargon.
Title tags
The title tag is the blue clickable headline you see in Google search results, and it's one of the strongest signals you have for telling Google what a page is about. It's not the same as your page's visible heading, it's a separate field set in the background.
A good title tag:
- Is unique on every single page, never duplicated across the site
- Includes the main thing that page is about, ideally near the front
- Includes your location if you're a local business ("Roof Repairs Silverdale" beats "Roof Repairs")
- Stays under about 60 characters so it doesn't get cut off in search results
The most common mistake I see is every page on a site sharing the same title, or the homepage title just being the business name with nothing else. That's a wasted opportunity on the single most important line of text on the page.
Meta descriptions
The meta description is the grey summary text under the title in search results. It doesn't directly affect rankings, but it directly affects whether someone clicks your result over the one above or below it. Think of it as your one-line sales pitch, not a keyword dump.
Write one for every important page, keep it around 150-160 characters, and make it specific to that page rather than a generic sentence about your whole business copy-pasted everywhere. If you leave it blank, Google will pull a random chunk of text off the page instead, and it's rarely flattering.
Heading structure
Headings (H1, H2, H3 and so on) aren't just a way to make text bigger. They're a structural outline that tells both readers and Google how the content on a page is organised.
The rules are simple:
- One H1 per page, and it should describe what the page is about, similar to but not identical to the title tag
- H2s break the page into its main sections
- H3s sit under H2s for sub-points within a section
- Don't skip levels or use headings just for visual styling, use actual paragraph text styled with CSS for that instead
A page that's just one big wall of text with no headings is hard for visitors to scan and hard for Google to understand at a glance. Breaking content into clearly labelled sections helps both.
Image alt text
Alt text is a short written description attached to an image, invisible unless you inspect the code or use a screen reader. It exists for two reasons: accessibility for visually impaired visitors, and giving Google something to read since it can't actually "see" a photo the way a person does.
Write alt text that describes what's genuinely in the image, briefly and specifically. "Tiled bathroom renovation with walk-in shower, Orewa" is useful. "image1.jpg" or "bathroom" tells Google and anyone using a screen reader nothing. Don't stuff keywords in either, if it reads unnaturally to a human, it's wrong.
Internal linking
Internal links are links from one page on your site to another page on your site, and they're one of the most underused tools in on-page SEO. They help Google discover and understand the relationship between your pages, and they help visitors find related content instead of hitting a dead end and leaving.
Practical ways to use this:
- Link from blog posts back to relevant service pages, using descriptive link text rather than "click here"
- Link between related blog posts so visitors (and Google) can find more of your content
- Make sure every important page on your site is linked to from somewhere else, an orphaned page with zero internal links is much harder for Google to find and rank
URL structure
Your URL is the web address of a specific page, and a clean one is short, readable, and describes the page. Compare `/services/website-design` to `/page?id=4827&cat=12`. The first tells a human and a search engine exactly what's there. The second tells them nothing.
Good practice: use lowercase, separate words with hyphens not underscores, keep it short, and avoid changing URLs once they're live and indexed, since that breaks links and loses any ranking history the page has built up.
Bringing it together
On-page SEO isn't complicated once you break it down, it's title tags that say something specific, meta descriptions that earn the click, headings that organise the page properly, alt text that actually describes images, internal links that connect your content, and URLs that are clean and readable. None of these individually will transform your rankings, but together they're the difference between a site Google can easily understand and one it has to guess at.
If you want a second opinion on how your site stacks up against this list, or you'd rather have someone handle it properly across the whole site, this is exactly the kind of groundwork I do for small businesses on the Hibiscus Coast. Get in touch and I'll take a look at what you've got.