On-Page Website Optimization

What On-Page Work Actually Covers

On-page optimisation is everything inside a single page that you control and that affects how the page is understood and acted on: the title element, the headings, the opening paragraph, the body copy, the internal links pointing in and out, the images and their alt text, the URL, and any structured data. It is bounded by two neighbouring disciplines. Off-page covers links and mentions you do not own. Technical covers crawling, rendering, indexing and speed, which are site-wide properties a single page inherits.

It is routinely confused with both. A team told to improve on-page optimisation frequently produces a keyword audit, or a performance ticket, and neither is the job.

The thing to understand about the current state of this discipline is that the mechanical part is small and the editorial part is large. Getting the title element right takes ten minutes. Working out what a procurement analyst comparing three suppliers actually needs to read, and then writing it, takes a week. The second is where the ranking difference lives, which is inconvenient for anybody hoping on-page optimisation is a checklist.

Why a B2B Page Behaves Differently

Query volumes are small and individual visits are valuable. A page attracting ninety impressions a month can be worth more than one attracting nine thousand, which changes what optimisation is for: not traffic, but being present and persuasive on the handful of queries a buying committee actually runs.

Vocabulary is the recurring problem. Engineers describe the product one way, marketing another, and buyers search in a third — often by abbreviation, part number, standard, or the name of the problem rather than the category. Pages written in internal language miss every phrasing the market uses. The fix is not synonym stuffing but finding the words: Search Console queries, site search logs, inbound enquiry subject lines, recorded sales calls.

One page also serves several readers: the technical evaluator wants specifications and integration detail, the economic buyer wants the business case, procurement wants terms and security. A page serving only the first ranks without converting; one serving only the second converts the rare visitor and never ranks, having nothing specific enough to match a real query.

The Elements That Still Do Work

In rough order of return:

• The title element. Unique per page, the primary phrasing near the front, the brand at the end. Google documents that the title link shown in results may be generated from other content on the page, so treat your title as a strong hint rather than a guarantee.
• The opening paragraph. Answer the query in the first two sentences, in the words the query used — the most-skipped step, and more important now that answers are extracted and summarised by machines.
• Headings that describe structure. One H1, then H2s that name the sections a reader would look for. Headings are a table of contents, not keyword slots.
• Body copy that covers the sub-questions. Compatibility, limits, lead times, what it does not do: the follow-ups are the substance that makes a page worth ranking.
• Internal links. Descriptive anchor text from related pages tells search engines what the page is about and gives readers somewhere sensible to go. A page with no internal links pointing at it is an orphan and behaves like one.
• Images. Descriptive file names, alt text that conveys content or function, empty alt for decoration, and explicit width and height so layout does not shift. The hero image is usually the element measured by LCP, so it must not be lazy-loaded.

Meta descriptions belong on a shorter list: they influence whether a listing is clicked, Google frequently generates its own snippet instead, and they are not a ranking factor.

One Topic, Many Phrasings — and When You Need Another Page

One topic, many phrasings. That is the honest answer to how many keywords a page can target, and it is not a number.

A page that covers a topic properly commonly earns impressions for dozens or hundreds of distinct queries in Search Console, most of which nobody thought about while writing. They are variants of one intent: the same question with different words and different levels of prior knowledge. The paid equivalent is instructive — Google documents that all keyword match types match close variants, its own paraphrases and synonyms of your keyword, with no way to opt out. Both systems treat phrasings as interchangeable, so the unit of planning is the topic: group phrasings by intent, give each intent one page, and write to cover the topic rather than to hit a phrase.

Keyword density belongs in the history section. There is no documented target and no threshold to hit, and text written to a ratio reads like text written to a ratio. What replaced it is duller: covering the questions a real buyer has, using the vocabulary they use because it is accurate, and matching the depth and format that already succeed for the query.

Sometimes the right fix is a different page rather than a better one. If the results for a query are all comparison articles and buying guides, a product page will not win it, because it answers a different question. And where two of your own pages chase one intent, both stay mediocre while Google decides which to show — Google documents that a canonical preference is a hint, not a rule. Consolidate into the stronger page and redirect the other, keeping the redirect for at least a year.

Structured Data: What It Still Does, Precisely

Structured data describes a page in a machine-readable format. It is not a ranking factor; it makes a page eligible for specific search features, so the only question worth asking is whether the feature you want still exists. For most of what B2B sites were told to add, it does not.

• FAQPage. FAQ rich results stopped appearing in Google Search on 7 May 2026. The search appearance, the rich result report and Rich Results Test support were dropped in June 2026, and Search Console API support is removed in August 2026. Google does not document the markup as harmful, but it produces no Google Search feature. Claims that it helps AI Overviews or AI Mode are unverified — Google's generative-AI guidance says structured data is not required and there is no special markup to add.
• HowTo. Gone entirely, on desktop and mobile, with the documentation removed on 14 September 2023. No eligibility carve-out survives.
• Also retired: practice problems in January 2026, and, in the 2025 results-page simplification, book actions, course info, estimated salary, ClaimReview, learning video, special announcement and vehicle listing. The sitelinks search box went in 2024.

What remains useful to a B2B site is short and worth doing properly: Organization on the homepage or a single about page rather than on every page, Breadcrumb, Article on editorial content — which has no required properties, so add the ones that apply — plus Video, Event, Job posting and, where relevant, Product or Software app.

When a Page Ranks but Does Not Convert, and the Reverse

These are different faults with different fixes, and diagnosing them takes ten minutes in Search Console.

Ranks, does not convert. Read the queries the page actually receives. If they are informational and the page asks for a demo, the visitor is not being difficult — they arrived to learn something and were sold to. Add the next step that fits their stage: a specification, a comparison, a calculator. If the queries are right and the page still does not convert, the usual culprits are missing specifics, unverifiable proof, and no statement of what happens after the form.

Converts, does not rank. Usually thin content, no internal links, an orphan page, a competing page of your own, or a query whose results are dominated by a format you have not produced. Sales pages convert precisely because they are short and directive, which is also why they lose to a 2,000-word guide.

Finally, the honest limit of this discipline. Some pages exist to be sent to someone, not found: a page written for one procurement process, a page nobody searches for. Optimising those for search is wasted effort. Judge them as sales collateral, make sure they load and read well, and spend the optimisation budget where there is demand to compete for.

Frequently Asked Questions