The title people see in Google, how the page is structured, what it links to, and what it's actually about. Cheaper to fix than most things in SEO, and usually the first place we look.
SEO gets split three ways and the names overlap enough to confuse everyone. Here's the simplest version of the difference.
This page
Everything on a single page that you control: the title, the headings, how the content is organised, the links it contains, the images, and the URL.
Site level
Whether Google can reach and read your pages at all. Crawling, indexing, speed, and the things that can hold back an entire site rather than one page.
Off your site
What other websites say about you. Mostly links from other sites, plus mentions and reviews. The part you have the least direct control over.
Before anyone reaches your page they see three lines in a search result. If those three lines don't look like the answer, your ranking doesn't matter much.
How a page appears in search
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It's the line people click. Leading with your company name wastes the most valuable space you have, because nobody is searching for a company they haven't heard of.
Google shows a limited width and trims the rest. Anything important has to be near the front, which is another reason the brand name goes last.
Google may rewrite it, and often does. Writing a good one still matters, because when it is used it's the difference between being scrolled past and being chosen.
A readable URL tells people what they're about to open. One made of numbers and codes tells them nothing and quietly costs you clicks.
Headings tell Google what the page covers and in what order. On a lot of sites they've been chosen because of how big the text looked, which breaks the structure entirely.
One H1 per page, and it says what the page is. H2s are the sections. H3s sit inside an H2. That's the whole rule, and it also makes the page easier for a person to skim, which matters more than the search benefit.
Six areas per page. None of them are complicated on their own, and most sites have problems in four of them.
The page has to obviously be about one thing, and that thing has to be what people search for.
Links between your own pages. The most underused thing in on-page SEO by a wide margin.
Short, readable, and stable. Worth getting right early because changing them later costs you.
Mostly about speed and accessibility, with a search benefit alongside.
Code that tells Google what kind of page this is. It can earn you extra detail in the search result.
A page that ranks and converts nobody is a page that ranks. Easy to forget in an SEO project.
Page by page, in order of what each page is worth to you. Not all at once, and not alphabetically.
A crawl of the site plus your Search Console data, so we can see what each page currently gets and what it's missing.
Pages already getting seen but not clicked come first. They're the cheapest wins, because the traffic is already there.
Grouped so changes go live together and you can see what moved. Most of it doesn't need a developer.
Position and clicks per page, compared against before. If something dropped, we change it back.
The reason we work in batches is so results can be attributed. Change three hundred pages in one week and you'll never know which change did what, which makes the next decision a guess.
Faster than most SEO work. Title and description changes can affect clicks within a couple of weeks, because they change what people see rather than where you rank.
Changes to structure and internal links take longer, usually a month or two, since Google has to recrawl and reassess the pages.
Usually not. On WordPress and most modern platforms, titles, headings, links, and alt text are all editable without touching code.
Where a developer is needed is template-level changes and URL structure. We'll tell you clearly which is which before anything starts.
There's no number, and anyone giving you a percentage is working from advice that stopped being true a long time ago.
Use the term where it's natural: the title, a heading, and where the page genuinely refers to it. Repeating it beyond that reads badly to people and does nothing for Google.
No. Google rewrites descriptions when it thinks it can match the search better, and it often does that when the original one was vague or didn't match the page.
A specific, accurate description gets used more often than a generic one. When it isn't used, nothing is lost by having written it.
For a site with decent content in a market that isn't fiercely contested, it can get you a long way. It's often the highest return work available.
In competitive markets it isn't enough by itself. What's missing is usually either pages that don't exist yet or links from other sites, and we'd tell you which after looking.
Yes, and that's most of this work. We need access to edit pages, or we hand over the changes as a document your team applies.
If the site is on a platform that makes these things hard to edit, we'll tell you before starting rather than halfway through.
It usually runs alongside technical work rather than after it. Pricing sits on the main SEO page.
Other SEO services
Thirty minutes on what's holding them back and which fixes are worth doing first.
Or email hello@culmen.digital