The five on-page SEO fixes worth doing first.

What you actually control

SEO gets sold as a dark art because that makes it easier to charge a retainer for. Most of it, for a local business, is not mysterious. It splits into three buckets:

• On-page. What your pages say, how they're structured, and how fast they load. Entirely yours.
• Local. Your Google Business Profile and whether your name, address and phone number agree everywhere they appear. Mostly yours.
• Off-page. Who links to you and what people say about you. Barely yours at all.

Anyone guaranteeing you a position is claiming control over the third bucket and over Google's ranking systems, which nobody outside Google has. Be careful with them. The five fixes below are all in the first bucket, they're all free apart from your time, and on a neglected site they're the ones that move something.

Page titles

The single most important string of text on any page. It's the blue link in the search result, the label on the browser tab, and the text that gets used when someone shares the page.

Every page needs its own. The most common failure we find on tune-ups isn't a bad title, it's the same title on all eleven pages, usually the business name, because the theme filled it in once and nobody changed it.

The pattern that works for local businesses: what you do, where you do it, then the business name. Keep it under about sixty characters or search results will cut it off mid-word. Write it for the person scanning ten blue links, not for a keyword tool. If it reads like a robot wrote it, it will be skipped by humans regardless of where it ranks.

Meta descriptions

The grey paragraph under the blue link. It's worth being precise about what this does: it is not a ranking factor. Google will happily rewrite it, and often does.

It's still worth writing, because when it is used it's your one chance at an advert on a page full of competitors. A description that answers "why this one" earns clicks that a truncated sentence from the middle of your homepage doesn't.

Around 150 characters. Put the specifics in: the towns, the services, the thing that makes you the safe choice. "Family owned since 1998" is on every competitor's page too, so it distinguishes nothing.

Heading structure

Headings are the skeleton. They tell search engines, screen readers and skim-reading humans what the page is about and how it's organised, in that order of forgiveness.

One H1 per page, stating what the page is. H2s for the main sections. H3s underneath those. The rule that matters: headings are structure, not styling. If you've picked H3 because you wanted smaller text, you've broken the outline to change a font size.

This is also the fix that most improves the site for people using a screen reader, who navigate by heading. And increasingly it's what an AI assistant reads when someone asks it who to call for a plumber in Bedford. A clean outline is what lets it quote you accurately instead of guessing.

Image alt text

Alt text describes an image to someone who can't see it. That's the job. It helps search engines too, but if you write it for search engines first you'll write something useless for the actual purpose.

Keyword-stuffed alt text is worse than no alt text: it reads as gibberish to anyone using a screen reader, and it's an old trick that search engines have discounted for a very long time.

One exception worth knowing: purely decorative images, such as a background texture or a divider, should have an empty alt attribute, alt="". That tells a screen reader to skip it rather than announcing a filename. Leaving the attribute off entirely is not the same thing.

Internal links

The most under-used of the five. Links between your own pages tell search engines which of your pages matter and what they're about, and they keep a visitor moving through the site instead of leaving from wherever they landed.

Two rules. First, no orphan pages: every page should be reachable from somewhere other than the sitemap. Second, the link text should describe the destination.

"Click here" tells a search engine nothing about the target page, and it tells someone tabbing through your links with a screen reader even less, they hear "click here, click here, click here."

What comes after the five

Once those are done and the site is genuinely fast on a phone, the on-page bucket is mostly empty. The next moves are elsewhere:

• Google Business Profile. For a local trade or shop this drives more calls than the website does. Categories, service area, hours and photos, all filled in and matching what your site says.
• Consistent details. Your name, address and phone number identical everywhere they appear online. Two versions of your address is a small, quiet, ongoing tax.
• Reviews. Ask, every time, right after the job. It's the highest-leverage thing on this page and it isn't technical at all.
• Pages worth ranking. A real page per service and per town you cover, each written properly. Not eleven near-identical pages with the town name swapped, which is a pattern search engines have been penalising for years.