Search changes often enough that advice ages badly. The parts that have not changed much are the least exciting ones, which is probably why they get skipped.
Crawlability and indexing come first
If a search engine cannot reach a page, or has been told not to index it, nothing else about that page matters. That sounds obvious, and it is still one of the most common problems on a site that has recently been rebuilt or moved — a noindex left in place from a staging environment, a robots rule blocking a directory, a sitemap that still lists retired URLs.
This is worth checking directly rather than assuming. Google Search Console will tell you which pages are indexed and which are excluded, and why.
One page per intent
Several thin pages competing for the same topic tend to do worse than one page that covers it properly. It also makes the site easier to explain to a visitor, which is usually a good sign. When we structure a web design project, the page map and the search structure are the same conversation, not two.
Internal links are the part people forget
Internal links do two jobs: they help search engines understand which pages you consider important, and they help a visitor get from an article to the thing it relates to. A page with no links pointing at it from within your own site is telling search engines something you probably did not intend.
Titles, descriptions and headings still do work
A page title should say what the page is about in a way that reads well in a results list. Google says search snippets are created mainly from the page content itself, and that it sometimes uses the meta description instead when that describes the page more accurately — so a good description is worth writing, even though Google does not list it as a ranking signal. Headings should describe the section they sit above, in the order a reader would expect. None of this is clever; all of it is regularly missing.
Speed and stability are part of it
Google’s Core Web Vitals are three specific metrics — Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift. They are worth knowing by name because they are measurable rather than subjective: how quickly the main content appears, how quickly the page responds when someone interacts with it, and whether the layout jumps while it loads.
Then the ongoing part
Foundations get you findable. Staying found is a longer conversation about content and relevance, which is what SEO work covers month to month. But it is worth doing in that order — there is little point publishing steadily onto a structure that search engines find hard to read. If you want the foundations checked, get in touch.
