Search Engine Optimisation
On-Page SEO
The least glamorous and most reliably profitable work in search. Most sites have thirty pages sitting between positions eight and twenty-five that nobody has touched since publication.
On-page SEO is the work done on a page itself to make it rank: title, headings, content depth, internal links and structured data. The Nexclick starts with pages already ranking on page two, because improving those is several times cheaper than creating new ones.
Is this you?
What usually prompts the call
- You have pages stuck on page two that have not moved in a year.
- Your titles were written by the CMS and read "Home | Company Name" or "Services - Untitled".
- Two of your pages target the same phrase and Google keeps alternating between them.
- The content is genuinely good and it still is not ranking, so something structural is wrong.
What we do
The actual deliverables
Things that appear on an invoice, not adjectives.
- Title and meta rewrite on commercial pages
- Front-loaded with the differentiator rather than the brand, within length, and written to be clicked. Titles are the highest-leverage single change on most sites and the most commonly automated.
- Heading structure and content architecture
- One H1, logical H2 and H3 nesting, and sections ordered so the answer arrives before the preamble. This also decides whether a page can win a featured snippet.
- Content depth against what is actually ranking
- Not a word-count target. We look at what the pages currently ranking cover that yours does not, and add the substance that is genuinely missing rather than padding.
- Internal linking with descriptive anchors
- Links from your strongest pages into the ones you want to lift, with anchor text that describes the destination. Never "click here", never "read more".
- Cannibalisation resolution
- Where two of your pages compete, one is strengthened and the other merged or redirected into it. Consolidating two page-two pages routinely produces one page-one page.
- Structured data on page templates
- Schema that validates and describes content genuinely visible on the page, so it can earn rich results rather than a manual action.
- Answer-first restructuring
- A direct answer within the first sixty words. This is what featured snippets and AI answer engines lift, and it is a formatting decision rather than a writing one.
Checklist
The page-two rescue checklist
Run this on any page ranking between eight and twenty-five. It is ordered by return on effort, so working top to bottom is the cheapest route to page one. Most pages fail four or five of these.
- 01Does the title contain the primary phrase, front-loaded rather than after the brand name?
- 02Is the title under 60 characters, so it is not truncated in the results?
- 03Does the page answer the query within the first 60 words, before any preamble?
- 04Is there exactly one H1, and does it match what the page is actually about?
- 05Do the H2s cover the sub-questions the top five results cover?
- 06Does any other page on your site target this same phrase?
- 07Do at least three internal links point at this page with descriptive anchor text?
- 08Do those links come from your strongest pages, or only from the footer?
- 09Does the page cover the specific angle the top results share and yours omits?
- 10Is the search intent right — informational content for an informational query?
- 11Is there a table, list or comparison a snippet could be extracted from?
- 12Does the page have relevant schema, and does it validate?
- 13Has the content been updated in the last 18 months, and does it say so?
- 14Is the page reachable within three clicks of the homepage?
- 15Does the URL still match the topic, or is it a legacy slug from a previous version?
How it works
Step by step, with timeframes
Timeframes are typical rather than guaranteed, and they assume we get account access and approvals when we ask.
- 01Week 1
Find the near-misses
Search Console export filtered to pages ranking between eight and twenty-five with real impression volume. This list is where the fastest returns almost always are.
- 02Week 1–2
Compare against what ranks
For each target page, what the current top five cover, how they structure it, and what intent they are serving that yours is not.
- 03Week 2–6
Rewrite and restructure
Changes made in batches of five to ten pages, so movement can be attributed. Rewriting eighty pages simultaneously tells you nothing about what worked.
- 04Week 6–12
Measure and iterate
Position and click-through tracked per batch. Pages that did not move get a second look rather than being quietly forgotten.
What you get
Reporting and ownership
- A page-by-page change log recording what was altered and when, so movement can be attributed.
- Rewritten titles and descriptions supplied as a spreadsheet you own.
- An internal linking map showing which pages should link to which, and with what anchor.
- A cannibalisation report naming pages to merge or retire, with the redirect targets.
- Before-and-after position and click-through data per batch.
Tools and platforms
- Google Search Console
- Screaming Frog (custom extraction)
- Ahrefs or Semrush
- Manual SERP analysis
- Schema.org validator
- Looker Studio
Timeline
How long this actually takes
Title and meta changes can affect click-through within days of recrawl, which is unusually fast for SEO. Position movement from content and structural work typically shows across weeks four to twelve. Pages already ranking on page two move fastest — often within a month — because the page has already been judged relevant and is being held back by execution rather than by authority. Pages ranking beyond position fifty rarely respond to on-page work alone; those usually need links or a different target phrase, and we will say so rather than rewriting them repeatedly.
Pricing model
Project, then retainer
A defined batch of pages is a fixed-price project. Ongoing on-page work across a growing site sits within an SEO retainer.
Questions
On-Page SEO questions
How long should a page be?
As long as it takes to answer the question properly and no longer. Word count is not a ranking factor; covering the subject is. Where longer pages rank, it is usually because they cover more ground, not because of length itself. Padding a 600-word page to 2,000 makes it worse, not better.
Does keyword density matter?
No. It has not meaningfully mattered for over a decade, and tools that score it are measuring something Google stopped weighting that way. Write the phrase where it naturally belongs — title, an early heading, the opening paragraph — and then write for the reader.
Should we update old content or write new pages?
Update, in most cases. A page that already ranks has accumulated links, age and behavioural signals a new page starts without. Improving something at position twelve is usually a fraction of the cost of getting a new page there, and it is the first thing we look at.
How many internal links should a page have?
There is no correct number, but the pattern matters more than the count. Links from genuinely relevant, high-authority pages on your site do the work; a block of twenty links in a footer does very little. Three to five contextual links from strong pages beats thirty from a sidebar.
Do we need to add a publish or updated date?
For anything time-sensitive, yes — and only if it is honest. Changing a date without changing the content is a well-known tactic and it is detectable through content comparison. Update the page properly, then update the date.
Will rewriting a ranking page lose us the ranking?
It can, temporarily, which is why we work in batches and keep the previous version. The risk is real when a rewrite changes what the page is about; it is small when the topic stays fixed and the execution improves. If a page falls after a change, reverting is straightforward because we kept the original.
Last reviewed 28 July 2026.
Tell us what you are trying to fix
A 20-minute call, no pitch deck. The Nexclick will tell you what we would do, roughly what it costs, and whether we are the right people for it.