On Page SEO Company: What On-Page Work Should Cover Before You Hire

Hiring an on page SEO company sounds simple: someone improves your pages so search engines and visitors understand them better. In practice, “on-page SEO” can mean anything from rewriting a few title tags to rebuilding every service page, and two proposals with the same name can cover very different work. Before you compare prices, it helps to know what the work should include.

I have worked in SEO and digital marketing for more than 16 years, and on-page work is part of almost every project I take on. In this article I use Google’s own documentation to set out what on-page work covers, what you should receive for each page, and how to check it yourself. It is written for business owners and marketing managers deciding whether to hire an on page SEO agency, or whether to do some of the work in-house.

What an on page SEO company actually works on

On-page SEO is the work done on the page itself: its words, its structure and the signals in its HTML. It sits between technical SEO (crawling, indexing, speed, site-wide set-up) and off-page work (links and mentions from other sites). The three overlap, and a good company says clearly which parts it covers.

A plain list of what else organic SEO can include is in my article on what organic SEO services should cover. Here I stay on the page itself.

Title links and meta descriptions

Titles are the first thing most on-page work touches, and the first thing searchers see. Google’s guide to title links gives the basics: “Make sure every page on your site has a title specified in the <title> element”, “Write descriptive and concise text for your <title> elements”, “Avoid keyword stuffing”, “Avoid repeated or boilerplate text in <title> elements” and “Brand your titles concisely.”

The same page lists where Google may take a title link from, and the title element is only one of the sources. It also uses the “Main visual title shown on the page”, “Heading elements, such as <h1> elements”, other prominent text and even “Text within links that point to the page”. In other words, if the title tag says one thing and the page’s main heading says another, Google may choose the heading. Good on-page work makes them agree.

Snippets work the same way. Google’s snippet documentation says “Snippets are primarily created from the page content itself”, and the meta description is used when it describes the page better. It adds that “Identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site aren’t helpful”, and that “There’s no limit on how long a meta description can be”, although the snippet is shortened in results to fit the device.

What I would expect from an on page SEO company here:

• One title per page, written for the search that page should answer, with the brand short and at the end.
• A matching main heading, so the page and its title tell the same story.
• A unique description for the pages that matter, written as a summary a person would want to read.
• No promise that Google will show exactly what was written. It may not, and an honest company says so.

A title tag that disagrees with the page is a suggestion Google is free to ignore; a title that matches the page usually sticks.

Headings and content that answer the search

This is where on-page work becomes writing, and where weak proposals tend to fall back on formulas. Google’s SEO Starter Guide removes several of them. It says “The length of the content alone doesn’t matter for ranking purposes”, that there is “no magical word count target, minimum or maximum”, and that for headings “There’s also no magical, ideal amount of headings a given page should have.” It even notes that, from Google Search’s point of view, “it doesn’t matter if you’re using them out of order.”

So what should content work include? In my experience, the useful changes are these:

1. Match the page to the search. If people searching for a service want prices, process and areas covered, the page should answer those, in that order of importance.
2. Use headings to help the reader scan. Headings are for people first. A clear structure also helps Google understand the page, but there is no required pattern.
3. Remove repetition. The Starter Guide warns that “Excessively repeating the same words over and over (even in variations) is tiring for users.” Keyword density targets have no place in a modern brief.
4. Show who is behind the page. For services, that means real details about the business and the people doing the work.
5. Merge pages that compete. Two thin pages chasing the same search are usually better as one strong page.

The Starter Guide also says Google “doesn’t use the keywords meta tag”. If a proposal lists “meta keywords optimisation” as a deliverable, ask why.

Internal links and anchor text

In my experience, internal links are one of the most underused parts of on-page work, and one of the easiest to check. Google’s guide to crawlable links is precise: generally, “Google can only crawl your link if it’s an <a> HTML element” with an href attribute, and “Every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site.”

On anchor text, the same guide says: “Good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page that it’s on and to the page it links to.” Its test is simple: “Try reading only the anchor text (out of context) and check if it’s specific enough to make sense by itself.” Generic anchors such as “Read more” are listed among the bad examples.

What the deliverable should look like: a list of links added or changed, each with the source page, the target page and the anchor. Links should sit in the text where they help a reader, not in a block of keyword links at the bottom of the page. If the site’s navigation and structure are the real problem, that is wider than on-page work; my SEO website structure service covers it.

Images and alt text

Images are part of the page, and Google’s image SEO best practices give clear rules. Alt text should describe the image in the context of the page, and Google says to “Avoid filling alt attributes with keywords”. File names should be “short, but descriptive”. Images should be “placed near relevant text”, and “Using standard HTML image elements helps crawlers find and process images”, because Google does not index images set as CSS backgrounds.

For most business sites, image work is modest: alt text for the images that carry meaning (team photos, product shots, diagrams), descriptive file names for new uploads and a check that important images are real image elements. Decorative images need no keyword-laden alt text at all.

Structured data belongs in on-page work too, because it describes what is visible on the page. It is a topic of its own; my article on structured data SEO covers what good agencies do with it.

How to check an on page SEO company’s work, page by page

You do not need tools to check most on-page work. You need the before-and-after list and a browser.

Two warning signs in reports: a single “on-page score” with no list of changes, and the same title or description pattern pasted across many pages. If you want an outside view of a whole site before hiring anyone, an SEO audit agency should be able to show you which pages need on-page work first.

FAQ

What does an on page SEO agency do?

It improves the parts of each page that search engines and visitors read: titles, snippets, headings and content, internal links, images and structured data. The output should be a page-by-page list of changes with reasons.

Is on-page SEO the same as technical SEO?

No, though they overlap. Technical SEO covers crawling, indexing, speed and site-wide set-up; on-page SEO covers what each page says and how it is marked up. Many projects need both.

Will Google always show the titles and descriptions an on page SEO company writes?

No. Google may build title links from headings or other text and creates snippets mainly from page content. Titles and descriptions that match the page are more likely to be used.

How long should on-page content be?

As long as it needs to be to answer the search. Google says the length of the content alone does not matter for ranking and that there is no minimum or maximum word count.