What is on-page SEO? Six fixes you can make right on your landing page

Your page is on Google, but when someone types “head spa in District 3”, your competitor sits on page one and you sit on page four. Often the reason isn’t some deep technical problem — it’s the words on the page itself: Google reads it and still can’t tell what you sell, where, or for whom. Fixing that is called on-page SEO — the things you can adjust right on the page, with no ad budget and no extra tools. Here are the six fixes that matter most, ordered by impact, each with a before and after.

What is on-page SEO?

On-page SEO is everything sitting right on your page that you fully control and can tune so Google understands the content — and so a searcher wants to click: the page title, the description, the headings, the text, the images, the page’s address. The rest of SEO lives off the page — other sites mentioning you, linking to you — valuable, but hard to control. On-page is the opposite: fix it today, done today.

One thing first. Before ranking you, Google has to find your page at all — I covered that indexing story in a separate post, so I won’t repeat it here. This one is for pages Google has already seen but keeps buried, because it read them without understanding them. And let’s clear up a common myth while we’re at it: a one-page landing page supposedly can’t do SEO. It can. A single page ranks fine as long as it aims at one search phrase — more on that at the end.

1. The page title: the exact phrase customers type

The page title is the big blue line on a Google result, and the text on your browser tab. It’s not the big headline inside the page — that’s the H1, coming up in point 3. To Google, the title is the strongest signal on the page: whatever phrase you want to be found by belongs here.

Yet most landing pages I audit have “Home” or “Trang chủ” as the title, or just the bare brand name. A hungry customer types “bún chả delivery in Hoan Kiem” — and Google stares at a title that says “Home”, with nothing to match.

Before: “Home – Bun Cha Hang Manh”. After: “Bun Cha Hang Manh – fast delivery in Hoan Kiem”. Same restaurant, but the title now carries the dish and the district people actually type. Two small tips: put the important phrase first, and keep the title around 60 characters so Google doesn’t cut off the tail.

2. The description: a two-line invitation on Google

Right under the title on Google sit two lines of small text — the meta description. It doesn’t directly add ranking points, but it decides something just as valuable: out of five results on the screen, which one gets the click. Write it as an invitation, not a mission statement.

Before: “We proudly deliver a premium relaxation experience with dedicated customer care.” After reading it you still don’t know where the place is, what it costs, or why to pick it. After: “Herbal head spa in District 3, 90 minutes for 189,000 dong. Open 9am–9pm daily, motorbike parking available. Book on Zalo in a minute.” Location, price, hours, and a reason to click — all inside roughly 150–160 characters.

3. One H1 that says what you sell, and where

On the page itself, the biggest heading is the H1 and the smaller section headings are H2s. Google reads a page the way you read a book’s table of contents: the H1 is the book title, the H2s are chapters. So each page should have exactly one H1, and it should state plainly what you sell and where — don’t spend your book title on a greeting.

Drag-and-drop builders make this mistake easy: any text you want big gets set to Heading 1, and suddenly the page has four H1s — “Summer deal!”, “About us”, “What our guests say”… Google can’t tell which one is the point.

Before: the H1 says “Welcome to our little corner”. After: the H1 says “Sea-view homestay in Quy Nhon, five minutes’ walk to the beach”, with H2s underneath for “Rooms and rates”, “Amenities”, “Getting here”, “Booking”. You can keep the poetic greeting — just move it to a smaller subline.

4. Answer the questions every customer asks

Customers of a restaurant, spa, or homestay ask the same handful of questions: how much, what hours, where exactly, is there parking, can I book ahead. They type those same questions into Google — “spa district 3 open until”, “homestay quy nhon car parking”. The page that already answers them in plain text is the page that gets matched with the person asking.

The trap: many pages do answer everything… inside an image. The menu is a photo, the price list is a pretty graphic exported from a design tool. People can read it; Google, for practical purposes, cannot read text inside images. Before: the price list is one image. After: the prices are typed as real text on the page — keep the pretty image if you like, but the text version must exist. Same with the address: write it out through district and city, not just a street number.

Google doesn’t need your page to be eloquent. It needs to finish reading and know what you sell, where, and for whom.

5. Images: meaningful file names and alt text

Google doesn’t see photos the way people do. It leans on two things: the file name and the alt text — the short description that shows when an image fails to load, and that screen readers speak aloud for blind visitors. Leave both empty and your best food photo is invisible to Google.

Before: a file called “IMG_9027-final-final.jpg” with an empty alt. After: a file called bun-cha-grilled-over-charcoal.jpg with alt text “Bún chả grilled over charcoal, full set at the restaurant”. More people than you’d think find food and rooms through Google’s Images tab — every properly named photo is one more door in. Just describe what’s actually in the picture; don’t stuff keywords into it.

6. A short page address that explains itself

The URL is the line in the browser’s address bar. For a one-page landing page it’s simply your domain — nothing to tune. But once you add sub-pages — a price list, a menu, each room type — the path should say where it leads.

Before: “yourdomain.vn/p?id=7823” or “yourdomain.vn/final-new-2”. After: “yourdomain.vn/bang-gia”, “yourdomain.vn/thuc-don”, “yourdomain.vn/phong-doi-view-bien”. The whole rule in one line: lowercase, no accents, words joined with hyphens, the shorter the better. A customer receiving the link on Zalo can tell at a glance what they’re about to open, and taps with more confidence. One caution: if an old page already gets visitors, don’t change its URL just to make it prettier — a changed address starts from zero with Google. Naming it right the first time beats renaming.

One page, one search phrase — and no stuffing

Now the part that matters most for a one-page site: picking the phrase to aim at. A single page should target one main phrase — one customers actually type, like “herbal head spa district 3”, not a slogan like “paradise of relaxation”. Then place that phrase, once per spot, in the positions we just walked through: the page title, the H1, the opening paragraph, one H2, the alt text of the main photo. Add a few natural variations — “herbal hair wash”, “spa in district 3” — and you’re set.

Aim at six phrases on one page and Google can’t decide which shelf you belong on, so you rank halfway for all of them — want another phrase, give it its own page. And repeating one phrase twenty times is worse: Google treats it as a trick and pushes you down, and customers smell it two sentences in — they walk away long before any penalty lands. Write for the reader first and the keywords settle into place on their own.

You can check all six of these in one evening, no agency required. The other big on-page factor is loading speed — that one deserves a post of its own, and I’ve written it: see the Core Web Vitals piece in the related posts below.