▲ Now tracking visibility across Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini & AI Overviews
On-page SEO is the discipline of getting the right page to the right person at the right query. Intent first, keyword second, content third. Done well, it’s the single highest-leverage lever in organic growth.
Most SEO advice is keyword-first: pick the term, sprinkle it through the page, hope for the best. That hasn’t worked for a decade. Google ranks pages that match search intent, what the searcher actually wants, not just what they typed.
On-page SEO starts with reverse-engineering the SERP. What’s already ranking? Informational guides, product pages, forum posts, video carousels? That’s what intent looks like for that query, and that’s the shape of page you need to build.
From there it’s craft: a title and meta that earn the click, a heading hierarchy that frames the answer, content structured for both human scanners and AI passage retrieval, internal links that pass authority to where it’s most needed, and schema that makes the page legible to every crawler now feeding an answer engine.
This page is a primer. Read it, run the self-audit below, and if you want a second pair of eyes on a key page, we’ll review it free.
01
Every query has a shape: informational, commercial, transactional, navigational. The page that ranks is the one that fits the shape. Before keyword volume, before backlinks, we map intent.
02
Heading hierarchy isn’t decoration, it’s how search engines and AI models understand what your page is about. H1 sets the topic. H2s set the sub-topics. Passages under each become retrievable answers in AI Overviews and Perplexity.
03
Title tags, meta descriptions, schema markup, image alt text, internal anchor text. Each is a separate signal to a crawler about what this page is and why it deserves the ranking. Most sites optimise one or two. We optimise all of them, in sync.
04
Every internal link is a vote. Linking from your highest-authority pages to your highest-priority commercial pages is the cheapest, fastest ranking lever in SEO. It’s also the one most agencies forget about.
Search intent is what someone actually wants when they type a query, not just the words they used. ‘Best running shoes’ usually wants a comparison article. ‘Buy running shoes’ wants a product page. Mismatch the intent and you can be technically perfect and still not rank, the page just doesn’t fit what Google’s serving for that query.
As long as it needs to be to fully answer the query, and no longer. Look at what ranks today, if the top 10 are 800-word definitions, a 4,000-word essay won’t help. If they’re 3,000-word guides, 600 words won’t compete. Match the SERP first, optimise the depth second.
Yes, but differently. Search engines now understand topics and entities, not just exact-match strings. We do keyword research to map demand and intent, but the on-page craft is about covering the topic thoroughly, not hitting an exact phrase a specific number of times.
Three things. First, passage-level retrieval is now a thing, AI engines pull paragraphs, not pages, into answers. Structure matters more than ever. Second, citation-worthiness has become a ranking signal in itself. Third, schema markup is no longer optional, it’s how your page enters the knowledge graph that LLMs use to construct answers.
Top commercial pages: every 6 months as a baseline, sooner if rankings drop or competitors update. Evergreen content: yearly. New product launches, algorithm updates and AI surface changes all justify ad-hoc refreshes. The pages that rank longest are the ones that get maintained, not the ones that get launched.
Includes the on-page and content sections of our internal scorecard. Walks you through intent matching, page-level signal coverage, internal linking and content depth, then scores you against the same model we use on every audit.
A 60-point self-audit. Score your site the way our senior team does.
Paperstack · 2026
16pp
Pick three commercial pages, send us the URLs. We’ll come back within one business day with an intent fit assessment, the on-page gaps we’d close first, and rough revenue lift estimates.
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