When reviewing a website, an Onsite Search specialist will identify the company's goals and understand who the target audience is. He or she will then put in place strategies to maximize traffic and improve search engine page rankings. This may be done by adding content that includes specific keywords or phrases, rewriting HTML title tags, fixing structural issues, obtaining quality in-bound links, testing website layouts, and experimenting with marketing and advertising techniques.

It is critical to the success of a business that the website conforms to the latest standards for SEO. Maintaining an understanding of what the search engines (especially Google) are using as criteria for SERP (the 'search engine results page') decides all of the design choices that are made.

An Onsite Search specialist needs to understand:
- marketing
- human psychology
- the social media landscape
- web design and development
- web analytics
- business models
- culture
- viral marketing
- content
- product