On-Page SEO Company: Eight Things You Can Check on Your Own Page Tonight, Before You Hire One

Sep 29

6 min read

On-page SEO is the part of the work that happens on your own pages, which makes it the one part you can see for yourself. This page turns it into eight checks you can run on your own site tonight, with your phone, your editor and your own Search Console, which is free, and nothing else. Each one says how to check it and what a visitor would notice if it is wrong. If someone at your business can fix what you find, do that; you may not need to hire anyone. If nobody can, you will at least know what an on-page SEO company should be doing, and whether they did it.

What on-page SEO does

It makes a page easier for a visitor to use and easier for a search engine to read, and those two overlap more than the trade lets on. The words on the page, the way pages link to each other, how fast the page loads on a phone, whether the links go anywhere, whether Google can reach the page at all: that is the whole of it. Off-page work, which mostly means links from other sites, is a different job and this page does not cover it.

The eight checks, from what is on the page outward

Open your own site on your phone, on mobile data rather than wifi, and start with your home page or the page for your main service, whichever a stranger is likelier to land on. Work through the eight in order and write down what you find, because that list is what you would be paying someone to produce.

The eight on-page checks as a checklist, in the post's order.

1. Can a stranger tell what you do and where, before scrolling?

How to check: open the page on your phone and do not scroll. Read only what is on the first screen. Can you tell what you do from it, and where you work, if that matters to your customers? What a visitor notices: if the answer is no, they leave, and nothing lower on the page gets read. This is the cheapest fix on the list, and it is one the page itself has to make, not a setting.

Check one as a card: how to check it and what a visitor notices if it is wrong.

2. Does each page have one job?

How to check: list your pages in a column and write beside each the one question it answers. If two pages answer the same question, they compete for the same search and a search engine has to choose which one to show first. What a visitor notices: they land on the weaker of the two and cannot find the one you wanted them to see. Decide which page owns the question and point the other at it.

3. Do your pages link to each other with words that say where the link goes?

How to check: on each page, find every link to another page on your site and read the words that carry it, then tap it and see whether it goes where the words said. What a visitor notices: a link that says click here tells them nothing, and a link that promises one page and opens another costs them a tap and some trust. Words that describe the page they open are right for the visitor and the search engine at once.

Check three as a card: how to check internal link wording and what a visitor notices.

4. Do your images have words behind them?

How to check: in your editor, open an image and find the field for the text that describes it; on Wix, click the image, open its settings, and the field asks what is in the image. What a visitor notices: someone using a screen reader hears that text or hears nothing, and anyone on a slow connection sees it while the image loads or sees a gap. A one-line description of what the picture shows is the whole job. A list of search terms in that field is the wrong answer.

5. Does the page load quickly on a phone away from wifi?

How to check: switch wifi off, open the page fresh, and count. If you want a number rather than a feeling, your own Search Console has a Core Web Vitals report showing how your pages perform for real visitors, and it is free. If it says there is not enough data, that is normal for a small site and not a fault; the count on your phone is the test that matters. What a visitor notices: a page still assembling itself after a few seconds gets closed. Big images are the first thing to check, because you can shrink them yourself in the editor.

Check five as a card: how to check page speed on a phone and what a visitor notices.

6. Do all the links go somewhere?

How to check: on your key pages, tap every link, including the footer and the buttons. What a visitor notices: a page that says it cannot be found, which reads as a business not paying attention. Re-run this whenever you rename or remove a page.

7. Can Google reach the page at all?

How to check: search Google for a distinctive sentence from the page, in quotation marks. If the page comes back, it is indexed. If it does not, that is not yet proof: open the page in Search Console's URL Inspection tool, which says whether Google has it and whether something on the page is telling Google not to list it. If Google does not have it, nothing else on this list matters yet for that page. What a visitor notices: nothing, because they never arrive.

Check seven as a card: how to check whether a page is indexed and what a visitor notices.

8. Then, and only then: what does your search result say?

How to check: search your business name and read your own result, the blue line and the grey text under it. The blue line is your page title, or a version of it Google chose; the grey text is the description you wrote or one Google wrote for you. What a visitor notices: whether your result looks like a business they want to call, before they visit. This is deliberately last. A provider who opens with your titles and descriptions has opened with the item that is easiest to see from outside, and not with the seven you have just run.

Can I do this myself?

Every check on the list, yes. If you found three things wrong and can fix them in an hour, fix them and stop reading. What people end up paying for is not the ability to run the checks. It is somebody running them again next month, and the month after, on every page, and deciding which of the things found is worth fixing first. That is the part that quietly stops when it is nobody's job.

Can ChatGPT do on-page SEO?

It can draft a title, rewrite a paragraph and list what it would change on a page you paste in. That is real and useful. What it cannot do is open your site on a phone away from wifi, tap the links, read the page as a stranger arriving from a search, or come back a week later to see whether the change took. We say that with some standing: we use these tools in our own work, and we have tested which Wix SEO settings actually reach a live page and which do not. A tool produces the list. The looking and the deciding are still somebody's job.

Two columns: what a chat tool can do for on-page SEO and what it cannot.

What an on-page SEO company adds, and how to tell whether they did

A company doing this work should be running the eight checks on your pages, making the fixes in your editor, and telling you which page changed and what changed on it, in writing. Because every item is visible on the page, you can verify each one the way you just did, and that is the standard to hold any provider to, us included. The wider set of questions to put to a provider is in our page on how to choose an SEO agency. And if you ran the eight checks and want a second pair of eyes on what you found, you can bring your list to a free SEO consultation and we will go through it with you.

How much does on-page SEO cost?

Ask for the list of what is included before you compare numbers. What we sell is a fixed number of changes made to one website every week, and the list above is close to what those changes are: page titles, headings and descriptions, keyword mapping so two pages do not compete, links between your own pages and the text behind your images, improving existing copy, speed, broken links, and making sure Google can reach every page. What that costs is on our pricing page, with what is not included written beside it.

A six-item card listing what the weekly changes cover, with the price left to the pricing page.

Why the list does not stay fixed

A page that passes all eight tonight will not pass all eight in a year. You will add a page, rename one, upload a big photo, and a search you rank for will start being asked a different way. On-page work is a routine, not a repair, and what the routine looks like month to month is set out in our guide to ongoing SEO.

The short version: a fixed number of changes to your site every week, each one visible on the page, so the checks above work on our work too. What that costs is on our pricing page. It is one number for one website.

And if you would like somebody to run the eight checks on your site with you and say which one is actually costing you customers, book a free SEO consultation. You will speak to the person who does the work.

Written by Spencer Capron at Capron Media, in collaboration with our AI agents. The same way we do the work for clients. Spencer reviews everything published here.