How to Perform an On-Page SEO Audit of a Website?

Where on-page SEO helps in improving visibility, ranking, and driving organic traffic from search engines —- SEO audit allows you to analyze the site for different checkpoints to improve your SEO strategy.

What is SEO audit?

SEO audit is a process of in-depth analysis of the site to evaluate different factors that are affecting site performance and determine which specific measures must be taken in order to secure higher ranks and drive organic traffic to the site. Likewise, when it comes to an On-page SEO audit then it is the optimization analysis of different on-page elements that contributes to the overall performance of the website.

SEO Tools to Conduct Comprehensive On-Page SEO Audit:

• Google Search Console: To analyze the sitemap of your site and see if all pages of your site are indexed properly
• Google Analytics: To track and measure the performance of your website
• ETTVI Website Speed Checker: To analyze and measure your website speed
• ETTVI Crawlability Test: To check the indexability and crawlability of your site
• ETTVI Google Index Checker: To see if all pages of your websites are indexed in Google or not.
• ETTVI Redirect Checker: To track URL redirection and Status codes
• ETTVI Broken Link Checker: To analyze dead or broken links on site
• ETTVI Keyword Position Checker: To track the position of your website on specific focused keywords.

Different checkpoints in on-page SEO audit:

• Check Indexed URLs of your Site

Indexing is one of the crucial components of SEO — if you’re not indexed, how your targeted audience is likely to reach you? So, it's important to see how many pages are already indexed in SERPs.

To find out indexed URLs in SERPs, search “site:www.yourdomain.com” and you will get a number of URLs indexed in Google. Here you may find some indexed URLs that you want a search engine to index. In the same way, maybe your important pages are not indexed yet — the reason could be anything that you need to analyze while auditing your site because sometimes a site is not even crawlable so you need to see this issue critically and fix it as soon as possible.

Note: You can also use ETTVI’s Google Index Checker tool to evaluate indexed URLs in search engines.

• Analyze Page Performance – Check Web Load Speed

Website speed is an important ranking factor - the faster a website loads improved user experience and the chances of acquiring high positions. According to some updates, a website load time should not be more than 2 seconds.

You can analyze your website speed with different tools like Google Pagespeed Insights, GTMatrix, and ETTVI Website Speed Checker. Leveraging these tools, you will not only be able to measure current website speed but also a comprehensive report of issues and errors that need to be fixed in order to improve website speed.

• Analyze Site for Structure, Canonical, Broken Links & Redirects

If you don’t fix redirect issues, broken links & 404 errors, you are wasting the crawl budget of your site while giving a negative user experience to a visitor who clicked your site.

to find out broken & redirecting links? Run a quick SEO audit using ETTVI’s Redirect Checker & 404 Checker!

- It allows you to check the redirect status of multiple pages at once

- You can check if those specific pages have canonical tags

- Provides you with a complete list of broken & dead links (both external & internal) harming your SEO performance.

Once you get the required list of links (to be fixed), it's time to do the required fixing and get back to your SEO race.

• Check Site for Indexability, Crawlability & Browsability

Is your site indexable, crawlable, and browseable? If you don’t know - it's time to run a test to check a specific website for crawlability and indexability.

To check whether your site is indexable or not - check Robot.txt and see which pages you have put in the *disallow* directory (Note: If you put pages in Disallow, Google bots will not crawl or index those pages). Sometimes, mistakenly, you put pages there that can cause result in major problems like no crawlability and indexing.

Alternatively, you can use the Google URL Inspection tool or ETTVI Crawlability Test SEO tool to run an indexability & crawlability test.

• Analyze Sitemap

An XML sitemap is an important file that shows important pages to Search Engines for indexing. The bots use the sitemap to find and crawl different pages — so it's important to analyze and clean up your sitemap (if required).

• Check Meta Titles & Descriptions

Meta title & description is an important element of on-page SEO strategy – it gives the user information about the content of a page. Moreover, it's equally important for search engines too. It allows Google to display your page on SERPs for relevant search queries.

There are a few things to analyze:

1. Do all pages have unique meta titles & descriptions?
2. Is it optimized well for search queries or keywords?
3. Do they have optimal character length?
4. Are these compelling enough to drive clicks?

Also, analyze SERPs to see how your meta title & description appear to the web traffic. Moreover, if you have duplicate meta, optimize it well otherwise it will affect your SEO ranking.

• Check for Duplicate or Thin Content on the Site

Duplicate content on a site can lead to a Google penalty and obviously a negative impact on rankings. Similarly, a thin content (that may be generated by a tool or creates no value to the user) results in a Google thin-content penalty.

So, analyze your site critically for duplicate or thin content and improve your website or pages by adding valuable, unique, and engaging content — Because in SEO, CONTENT IS THE KING!

• Run Mobile Responsiveness Test

With an increasing number of mobile users, it's important to have a responsive site. If a site is not rendering correctly on all devices, it means it's not delivering a quality user experience. Moreover, a Mobile-friendly site is a ranking factor too and with the Google page experience update, it has become more important to have a mobile-ready website.

Run a mobile responsiveness test of your site, analyze issues, and fix them quickly to improve its overall performance all across the devices.

• Analyze Already Ranked Keywords & Pages

Analyze your already ranked pages and see which keywords they are ranked - It will help you to decide which measures you must take to improve your ranks on the SERPs. Use ETTVI Keyword Position Checker to check your position on specific keywords.

• Evaluate Site for Major CRO Points

No matter how successful you are — either in the physical business, online, or on SERPs, if your website is not able to convert your potential visitors, you’re just missing opportunities to make revenue.

Do a comprehensive CRO analysis to see:

- Are users able to create an account?

- Is your checkout process is simple (if E-commerce store)

- Are all the USPs of your brand mentioned?

- Do you have a simple category structure