On-Page & Technical SEO That Actually Moves Rankings

On-page and technical SEO won't win you anything on their own, but getting them wrong will cap everything else. Think of this chapter as removing the handbrake: do the basics well, skip the busywork, and let your content and links do the ranking.

On-page: the 70% that matters

For each page targeting a query:

• Title tag — put the exact query near the front. This is the highest-leverage on-page element.
• One clear H1 that matches intent; H2/H3 phrased as the questions people ask.
• Answer early — give the core answer in the first paragraph (good for readers, AI extraction, and featured snippets).
• URL — short, readable, keyword-relevant: /compare/ahrefs-vs-semrush, not /p?id=482.
• Internal links — link new pages from your strongest existing ones with descriptive anchor text. This is the most neglected on-page lever.
• Image alt text — describe the image; it helps accessibility and image search.

That's most of on-page SEO. It's not glamorous, but skipping it is why good content underperforms.

Technical: what to actually check

You don't need a 200-point audit. You need these:

1. Indexability — is the page actually in Google's index? Check site:yourdomain.com and GSC's URL Inspection. A page that isn't indexed can't rank. (Robots.txt blocks and stray noindex tags are the usual culprits.)
2. Crawlability — a real XML sitemap, a sane internal link structure, no orphan pages.
3. Core Web Vitals — pass LCP, CLS, and INP (INP replaced FID). Mostly: don't ship a slow, layout-shifting page. Field data lives in GSC's Core Web Vitals report.
4. Mobile — the index is mobile-first. If it's broken on a phone, it's broken.
5. HTTPS + clean redirects — no mixed content, no redirect chains.

Run a crawler (Screaming Frog's free tier covers up to 500 URLs) once a quarter to catch broken links, missing titles, and duplicate content. That's enough for most sites.

What you can mostly ignore

A lot of "technical SEO" is anxiety dressed as strategy. Keyword-density tools, obsessive schema for everything, llms.txt, meta keywords — low or zero impact. Add structured data where it earns a real result (Article, Breadcrumb, Product, FAQ where appropriate) and move on. Don't let technical perfectionism become procrastination from the two things that actually move rankings: better pages and better links.

Tooling that earns its place

• Google Search Console — free, essential (see Chapter 2).
• Bing Webmaster Tools — free, and Bing's index feeds Copilot/ChatGPT, so it's worth submitting to.
• Screaming Frog — free up to 500 URLs for technical crawls.
• GA4 — to see what organic traffic actually does once it lands.

Set these up once. Then spend your time on content and links — because that's where rankings are actually won.