Your One-Page Website Isn't Ranking Because of One of These 7 Mistakes

Multi-page websites distribute their SEO signals across dozens or hundreds of URLs. Each page can target a specific keyword, earn its own backlinks, carry its own title tag, and build topical authority in a narrow area. One-page sites have to accomplish all of that within a single document.

That constraint is not a death sentence for rankings. In our experience working with single-page sites, the ones that rank share a deliberate structural approach — they treat each section the way a traditional site treats a page. The ones that fail usually treat the page like a brochure: one blob of content with no internal architecture.

The seven mistakes below represent the patterns we see most consistently. None of them are obscure. Most are fixable without a rebuild. But leaving even two or three of them in place is usually enough to keep a one-page site buried past position 20 for anything competitive.

Who this guide is for: Business owners and web designers managing single-page websites who are getting little to no organic traffic despite having a live, indexed site. If you have not yet built your site, the one-page website SEO hub is a better starting point.

Mistake 1: Overloading the title tag. The title tag is the single strongest on-page signal Google uses to understand what a page is about. On a one-page site, many owners try to cram every service and location into one title — something like "Web Design | SEO | Branding | Consulting | New York | Chicago | Austin". Google does not reward this. It dilutes the relevance signal for every term you include.

The fix is to pick one primary keyword that represents the page's core purpose and write a clean, specific title around it. Supporting topics live in section headings and body copy — not the title tag.

Mistake 2: Using H2s as labels, not semantic anchors. On a multi-page site, each page has an H1 that signals its topic. On a one-page site, your H2 and H3 headings carry that same job for each section. If your section headings say things like "Our Services" or "About Us", you are throwing away valuable keyword real estate.

Rewrite section headings to include the actual phrase users search. "Our Services" becomes "Website Design for Small Businesses". "About Us" becomes something that reinforces your positioning. This is not keyword stuffing — it is using the heading hierarchy the way it was designed to work.

Together, these two mistakes account for a large share of the ranking failures we diagnose on one-page sites. They are also the fastest to fix — often a single afternoon of edits produces measurable improvements within weeks.

Mistake 3: No schema markup. Multi-page sites naturally accumulate structured data signals across URLs — a services page, an about page, a contact page each have distinct purposes Google can interpret. A single-page site has none of that separation. Schema markup is how you compensate.

At minimum, a one-page site should include:

• Organization or LocalBusiness schema — who you are, where you operate, how to contact you
• WebPage schema — signals the document type and primary topic
• FAQPage schema — if you have a FAQ section, this can generate rich results in search
• Service schema — for each distinct offering you describe on the page

Skipping schema does not prevent ranking, but it removes a layer of clarity that Google increasingly uses to serve rich results and understand entity relationships. On a competitive query, that clarity can be the difference between position 8 and position 3.

Mistake 4: Unoptimized assets slowing the entire page. On a traditional site, a slow blog post only affects that URL. On a one-page site, a 4MB hero image or an unminified JavaScript file slows the only URL you have. Core Web Vitals apply to the whole page, and a poor score here is a measurable ranking disadvantage.

Run your URL through Google's PageSpeed Insights. Look for image compression opportunities, render-blocking scripts, and unused CSS. Industry benchmarks suggest mobile load time under 2.5 seconds for Largest Contentful Paint is the threshold where rankings begin to stabilize — though this varies by niche and competition level.

Mistake 5: Thin content sections that drag down the whole page. Google evaluates page quality holistically. A one-page site with four strong sections and two thin ones does not get credit for the four — the thin sections reduce the overall quality signal for the entire document.

A section is thin when it describes a topic in two or three sentences without providing any real information. "We offer professional SEO services to help your business grow" is thin. It makes a claim without supporting it. Contrast that with a section that explains what the service involves, who it is for, and what a realistic outcome looks like — that section has depth.

Every section on your page should be able to answer a specific question a potential customer would type into Google. If it cannot, it is probably thin.

Mistake 6: Mismatching search intent across sections. On a multi-page site, if one page misses intent, only that page underperforms. On a one-page site, an intent mismatch in one section can confuse Google about the whole document's purpose.

The most common version of this: a page optimized for transactional intent ("hire a web designer") that also has a large informational blog-style section. Google sees conflicting signals and is less confident about where to rank the page.

The fix is not to remove informational content — it is to keep intent consistent across sections. If your primary keyword is transactional, every section should support that transaction: what you offer, why it works, who it is for, what the process looks like, how to start.

This is the mistake most one-page site owners never consider: internal linking. The common assumption is that internal links only matter when you have multiple pages. That assumption is wrong in two ways.

First, section anchors on a one-page site function as link targets. When another website links to yoursite.com/#services, that link carries PageRank to a specific section of your page. If you have not set up named anchors on each section, you lose the ability to receive or direct that link equity precisely.

Second, if you ever add a blog, a landing page, or a secondary URL — even a single one — your internal link strategy matters immediately. Sites that have been operating without any internal linking infrastructure take longer to propagate authority to new pages because there is no established linking pattern for Google to follow.

The practical fix has two parts:

• Add id attributes to every major section of your one-page site (e.g., id="services", id="about", id="contact")
• Use your navigation links to point to these anchors explicitly — this tells Google which sections are important enough to navigate to directly

This takes less than an hour to implement and creates the internal linking foundation every one-page site needs before it can scale.

Not every mistake on this list will affect your site equally. Before you spend time fixing all seven, run a quick triage:

1. Check Google Search Console impressions vs. clicks. High impressions with low clicks usually points to a title tag or meta description problem — Mistakes 1 and the related framing issue. Low impressions across all terms suggests Google does not understand what the page is about, which points to Mistakes 2, 3, or 6.
2. Run PageSpeed Insights on mobile. If your LCP score is poor, Mistake 4 is almost certainly a factor. Fix this before anything else — it affects every other signal.
3. Read each section out loud and ask: what question does this answer? If you cannot answer that question immediately, the section is thin (Mistake 5).
4. View your page source and search for schema markup. If you find nothing, Mistake 3 is unaddressed.
5. Check your H2 and H3 text. If they read like navigation labels rather than descriptive phrases, Mistake 2 needs attention.

In our experience, most one-page sites have three to four of these mistakes active simultaneously. Fixing the load speed and heading structure first tends to produce the fastest visible movement in rankings, typically within four to eight weeks depending on how often Google recrawls the site and how competitive the target keywords are.

If after addressing the obvious issues you are still not seeing movement, the problem may be more structural — keyword targeting, topical authority, or backlink gaps. That is when a full audit makes more sense than incremental fixes. Our professional 1-page site optimization service starts with exactly that diagnostic.