On-Page SEO: What Actually Moves Rankings

Most on-page advice is a checklist of things that no longer matter. Here is what still does, and roughly in what order.

Intent is the whole game

Before optimising anything, work out what the searcher wants. Someone typing “SEO agency Cork” wants to compare providers. Someone typing “what is local SEO” wants an explanation. Serving the wrong one is why well-written pages fail.

The fastest check: search the term and look at what ranks. If the first page is all comparison articles and you have written a sales page, you are not competing — you are in the wrong category entirely.

Title tags, written for a human

The title tag is still the single most valuable on-page element, because it is both a ranking signal and the thing people decide to click. Keep it under about 60 characters, put the distinctive part first, and make it specific.

“Home” tells nobody anything. “Local SEO Cork | Google Map Pack Visibility” tells them what the page is and what they would get.

Headings should form an outline, not a decoration

One H1 per page, describing the page. H2s for the major sections, H3s underneath them. Read the headings alone — if they summarise the page, the structure is right.

This matters more than it used to, because it is how AI systems parse a page into extractable chunks. A page whose headings are used for font size rather than hierarchy is much harder to quote, which now costs you something real. That overlap is why AI SEO and on-page work keep landing on the same fixes.

Internal linking is the most underused tool you have

Internal links tell Google which of your pages matter and what they are about. They are entirely within your control, cost nothing, and most sites do them badly or not at all.

Three rules that cover most of it:

• Link from strong pages to the ones you want to rank, not the reverse
• Use descriptive anchor text — “local SEO in Cork”, not “click here”
• Make sure every page is reachable from somewhere. An orphan page is invisible no matter how good it is.

Depth, and knowing when to stop

Cover the question properly, including the follow-up questions. That usually means more words than a thin page, but length is a symptom of completeness, not a cause of ranking.

The test is whether a reader leaves satisfied or goes back to the results to look for something better. Padding a page to hit a word count achieves the opposite of what it is meant to.