You built a website. You wrote the copy. Maybe you’re even publishing blog posts on a semi-regular basis (good for you, seriously). But when you check your analytics, organic search traffic is… not what you hoped. That is why you need an On-Page SEO Checklist.
Here’s the thing. Most small business websites have on-page issues hiding in plain sight. Not catastrophic problems. More like a dozen small things that, left unfixed, quietly tell Google your site isn’t worth ranking. The difference between page one and page nowhere often comes down to fundamentals nobody bothered to explain in plain language.
That’s what this on-page SEO checklist is for. Not theory. Not a 47-step audit that requires a developer. Just 15 fixes, ranked by impact, that you can work through this week. Some take five minutes. One of them is something almost every website gets wrong (and it’s probably not what you think).
Google’s search algorithms have gotten sharper, but the items on any solid on-page SEO checklist still move the needle. Especially for small businesses competing against bigger players with bigger budgets. This is the on-page SEO guide for people who’d rather do the work than write the cheque. Or atleast now how to do it.
Why Bother With On-Page SEO When AI Is Changing Everything?
Fair question. AI search is changing how people find information. But here’s what the doomsday crowd leaves out: Google still processes billions of search queries every day. Bing is doing the same. Organic search isn’t dying. It’s evolving.
And on-page SEO? It’s the baseline for all of it. Without it, you’re invisible to Googlebot and every other crawler. If your site can’t be properly crawled and indexed, nothing else matters. Not your social media. Not your ads. Not your beautifully designed homepage.
For small businesses, this is the highest-ROI work you can do. No ad spend. No agency retainer. Just you, your website, and a clear understanding of the on-page SEO factors that influence how Google ranks pages.
There’s also E-E-A-T to consider. Google wants to surface content from people who demonstrate Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Your on-page signals communicate that to the algorithm. And small businesses have a surprising edge here. More on that later.
The on-page SEO checklist below is ordered by impact. Start at the top, work your way down, and you’ll cover more ground in a week than most site optimization checklists get you in a month.
Your On-Page SEO Checklist: 5 Fixes, Ranked by Impact
1. Write Title Tags That Actually Earn Clicks
Your title tag is the first thing people see in SERP results. It’s also the first thing Google reads when trying to understand what your page is about. This makes it the single most important on-page SEO factor on your site.
Include your primary keyword near the front. Keep it under 60 characters.
Make it specific. “Home | Smith Consulting” tells Google nothing.
“Small Business Marketing Consultant in Calgary | Smith Consulting” says it all.
On any on-page SEO checklist, this should be item number one. If you fix nothing else, fix your title tags and meta tags first.
2. Rewrite Your Meta Descriptions (Yes, All of Them)
Meta descriptions don’t directly affect your position in Google search results. But they affect click-through rate, which in turn influences rankings over time. Think of your meta description as a tiny ad for your page on the search results page, except you don’t pay for it.
Keep it under 155 characters. Include your keyword naturally. Give people a reason to click rather than scroll to the next organic listing.
3. Use One H1 Per Page (And Make It Count)
Every page on your site needs exactly one H1 tag. One. It should clearly describe what the page is about, written for the human who just landed there and needs to know they’re in the right place.
Don’t stuff it with keywords. Write it like a headline. You’d be surprised how many sites have zero H1s or five of them on a single page. Check yours.
4. Structure Your Content With Proper Heading Hierarchy
H1, then H2, then H3. This isn’t decoration. It’s how Google (and screen readers) understands your page structure. Each H2 represents a major section. H3s break those down further.
Good heading structure improves content discoverability and helps with search query matching. It also makes your content easier to skim, which matters because most people skim before they commit.
5. Audit Your URL Structure
Clean, descriptive URLs beat random strings of numbers every time.
Example:
/on-page-seo-checklist tells Google and visitors what the page is about.
/post?id=4827&cat=seo tells them nothing.
Include your target keyword. Keep it short. Use hyphens, not underscores. And if you’ve got legacy URLs that are a mess, set up proper redirects before making any changes.
6. Add Internal Links (This Is the One Most Sites Get Wrong)
Remember when I said one item on this list is something almost every website gets wrong? This is it.
Internal linking is free, powerful, and almost universally underused on small business sites. When you link between your own pages, you distribute page authority, help Googlebot crawl your content efficiently, and keep visitors engaged longer. It directly improves site crawlability and drives web traffic growth.
The rule of thumb: every page should link to 3-5 other relevant pages on your site. Every new blog post should link back to your cornerstone content. If there’s one item on this on-page SEO checklist that delivers outsized results for minimal effort, it’s this one. One of the most overlooked on-page SEO techniques, and it costs you nothing but ten minutes.
7. Optimize Your Images (File Names, Alt Text, Compression)
Before you upload another image, rename the file. IMG_4392.jpg means nothing to Google. “small-business-seo-audit.jpg” means everything.
Write alt text that describes the image for someone who can’t see it. Include a keyword if it fits naturally, but don’t force it. And compress every image on your site. Large, uncompressed images destroy website performance and tank your Core Web Vitals scores. On-page optimization isn’t just about words on a page. It’s about everything the page delivers.
8. Check Your Page Speed (And Actually Fix What’s Slow)
Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights will tell you exactly what’s dragging your site down. The question is whether you’ll do something about it.
Focus on big wins: compress images (see above), remove unused plugins, install a caching plugin, and consider a faster host if yours is sluggish. Core Web Vitals are a confirmed Google ranking factor. Speed matters for search engine ranking and for the real humans using your site.
9. Make Sure Google Can Actually Find Your Pages
This sounds obvious. It’s not. Check your robots.txt. Check your XML sitemap. Submit it to Google Search Console if you haven’t.
You’d be surprised how many small business sites accidentally block Googlebot from important pages. A bad robots.txt directive, a missing sitemap, a “noindex” tag left over from development. The crawling and indexing process can’t start if you’ve locked the front door.
10. Fix (or Remove) Thin Content Pages
Pages with fewer than 300 words of useful content can quietly drag your whole site down. Google’s algorithms aren’t kind to pages that exist without purpose.
Audit your site for thin pages. Either add real, helpful information or consolidate them into a stronger page and redirect the old URL. Sometimes the best website SEO improvement is removing the dead weight.
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