On-page SEO: which levers should you prioritize?

What is on-page SEO?

On-page SEO, or on-page optimization, refers to everything you improve on a page. The goal: make it easier for search engines to understand and more useful for readers. People also talk about on-site SEO when thinking at the level of the whole site. It is distinct from two other families:

Family	What it covers	Examples
On-page SEO	The content and markup of each page	Title, meta description, heading tags, text, images, internal links
Technical SEO	The site’s ability to be crawled, rendered and indexed	robots.txt, sitemap, canonicals, performance, JavaScript rendering
Off-page SEO	Signals from outside the site	Backlinks, brand mentions, reviews

On-page has one advantage: it depends only on you. Link building requires partners, and technical work often requires developers. A page can be rewritten in the editor in a few hours.

What are the levers of on-page SEO?

Google’s SEO Starter Guide (updated on December 10, 2025) covers most of these levers. Here is what to remember about each one, with the page that covers it in detail.

Page tags

• Title tag: the clickable title in the results. Unique, clear, true to the content. See the title tag.
• Meta description: the summary sometimes shown under the title. It affects clicks, not rankings. See the meta description.
• H1 to H6 headings: the outline of the page, useful for readers and essential for screen readers. See heading tags.
• Canonical URL: the reference version when several addresses show the same content. See the canonical URL.

Content and intent

This is the first lever. A page ranks because it answers what the person is looking for, not because it repeats a keyword. Google’s guide on helpful content offers a simple framework. Who wrote the page? How was it produced? Why does it exist? The expected answer is “to help the reader”, not “to rank”.

In practice, identify the search intent and answer at the very start of the page. Cover related questions, cite dated sources and show who is speaking. The keyword appears in the title, the H1, the start of the text and a few subheadings, without forcing it.

Images, URLs and internal links

• Images: alt text that describes the image in its context, a descriptive file name, a lightweight format (WebP, AVIF). Google uses the alt text together with computer vision and the page content to understand the image, according to its Google Images best practices.
• URLs: readable words rather than IDs, hyphens rather than underscores, few parameters. This is the recommendation of the documentation on URL structure.
• Internal links: crawlable <a href> tags and descriptive anchor text rather than generic phrases. Google asks that every important page receive at least one link from another page on the site (link best practices). Full method: internal linking.

Page experience

A slow or unstable page drives readers away before they read. Core Web Vitals measure three aspects. According to web.dev, a good experience is measured at the 75th percentile of visits. You need an LCP of 2.5 seconds or less, an INP of 200 milliseconds or less and a CLS of 0.1 or less.

What does not matter in on-page SEO?

Several old habits are still going around. Google’s Starter Guide explicitly rules out several of them:

Common belief	What Google says
Filling in the meta keywords tag	Google Search does not use it.
Aiming for a specific word count	There is no magical word count, minimum or maximum.
Repeating the keyword to increase “density”	Keyword stuffing goes against the spam policies.
Following a strict heading order for Google	Heading order does not matter for Google Search; it does matter for accessibility.
Putting the keyword in the domain name	It has almost no effect on rankings.
Treating E-E-A-T as a ranking factor	It is not one as such; it is a framework for assessing quality.

Where do you start an on-page optimization?

On an existing site, optimizing all pages at once spreads the effort too thin. The following method focuses the work where it is most likely to have an effect:

1. Choose the pages: in Search Console, keep the pages that already have impressions on useful queries, especially between position 4 and position 20. This threshold is a method benchmark.
2. Check the intent: type the main query and look at the top ten results. If Google shows guides and your page is a sales page, the problem is not the markup.
3. Rewrite the title and H1: topic first, a precise promise, one unique title per page.
4. Strengthen the content: direct answer at the top of the page, related questions covered, dated sources, visible author.
5. Add internal links: from related pages that are already visible, with descriptive anchor text.
6. Measure: note the date of the changes and compare clicks, impressions and positions four to eight weeks later.

How do you audit the on-page SEO of a page?

This short checklist takes about ten minutes per page. It does not replace a full audit, but it spots the most common gaps:

• The title is unique, 50 to 60 characters long and starts with the topic.
• The meta description summarizes the page in 140 to 160 characters.
• A single H1; the H2s and H3s, read on their own, are enough to understand the page.
• The answer to the main question appears in the first lines.
• Every figure has a source and a date; the author is identified.
• Images have useful alt text and a reasonable file size.
• The URL is short and readable; the canonical points to the page itself.
• The page receives internal links and links out to related pages.
• The page’s Core Web Vitals are green in PageSpeed Insights or Search Console.

For a whole site, the same checklist applies with a crawler and Search Console reports, template by template.

Does on-page SEO matter for AI search engines?

Answer engines such as AI Overviews, ChatGPT or Perplexity also read page content. No primary study yet measures the weight of each on-page element in their citations. The practices that help readers seem to help them too. These are the direct answer at the top, sections that make sense on their own, explicit headings, and sourced, dated figures.

These practices do not require a separate project. Levers specific to citation belong to GEO optimization. To place on-page SEO within a complete strategy, see the SEO guide.