4 Steps to a Successful SEO Onpage Audit

1. This is the importance of an SEO Onpage audit for your website
2. These SEO tools assist you in SEO Onpage auditing
3. These 4 steps help you for a successful SEO Onpage audit
4. SEO Onpage audit: efficient steps for better ranking

Onpage SEO is the bedrock of your website's success. To achieve a sustainable good result in search engines, you should regularly ensure that your website is working without technical errors and that your content is well optimized. An SEO tool can assist you in conducting a successful technical inventory of your website and deriving the appropriate measures to optimize your content.

In this article, we show you how your SEO Onpage audit in four steps succeeds, and your site thus occupies top positions in search engines.

This is the importance of an SEO Onpage audit for your website

Onpage optimization helps search engines to crawl your site and index it. Using an SEO Onpage audit, you look at the areas of your site that are directly related to performance and ranking on Google. But a good experience for your website visitors is also in focus: They must like your content so that they come back. If your content is relevant, it will immediately affect your ranking position. And this, in turn, results in more people encountering your content when using search engines.

These SEO tools assist you in SEO Onpage auditing

It would be incredibly time-consuming to manually evaluate all the factors of an SEO Onpage audit. Luckily, that's not at all necessary, as there are many useful SEO tools that will do this work for you. These include, among others:

Seobility

Sistrix

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Ahrefs

Ryte

How an SEO tool can help you with SEO Onpage auditing, we explain to you the example of the Seobility software in a little more detail:

The all-in-one tool for search engine optimization crawls your website during the Onpage analysis and checks it for technical problems and optimization potentials. The results and hints of this analysis are then displayed to you in a clear list form directly in the browser.

By regularly crawling your website, you will be informed directly about new problems and can take appropriate measures quickly and purposefully.

Seobility also includes a Rank Tracking of your website, with which you can keep track of your rankings and those of your competitors. In addition, the tool offers you a backlink analysis to keep an eye on your backlink profile and gather new ideas for building backlinks. With the help of the Keyword Research tool, you can further optimize your pages and content.

On top Seobility has some free features like the Redirect Check for checking the redirects of your site or the SERP Snippet Generator. With it, you get the ability to optimize your website's title and preview text for search results.

Seobility is available in the three packages Basic, Premium, and Agency. Thus, the cloud-based tool has the right solutions for both individuals and professional SEO agencies.

These 4 steps help you for a successful SEO Onpage audit

Using the example of the SEO tool Seobility, we show you in the next step what an SEO Onpage audit can look like in detail and how the tool helps you. You can cover these four steps with Seobility:

• Step 1:Technical audit
• Step 2: Checking meta-information
• Step 3: Website structure analysis
• Step 4: Content quality audit and optimization

Step 1: Technical audit

In the first step, it is reasonable to deal with the technical issues of your website that can negatively impact the crawling, indexing, and performance of your website. The following factors, which you can easily check with Seobility, play a role:

Server or status code errors: An SEO tool like Seobility gives you an overview of which pages of your website deliver a problematic status code. Such status codes indicate, for example, that a requested page was not found on the website server, or the server does not respond. This can negatively impact the search engine ranking, because: such errors signal to search engines that a page, for example, no longer exists or the server is overloaded. This can lead to this page being removed from the index, it loses its ranking position, or is crawled much less frequently by Google. Therefore, check which of your pages have such HTTP error codes and how you can fix them.

Uncrawlable and unindexable pages: As part of your Onpage audit, you should also check which pages cannot be crawled or indexed by Google. If these are important pages that should actually be indexed, you should get to the root of the cause. Seobility shows you directly why a specific page could not be crawled or does not qualify for indexing.

URL structure: In order for Google to read your website's URL structure correctly, you should formulate it as clearly as possible. Seobility checks your URLs for various factors that make up an SEO-friendly URL structure, such as the number of subdirectories and the length of the URL. A readable URL does not automatically lead to a better ranking, but it can help to positively influence the path to it. In addition, a clear and meaningful URL also looks more appealing to users and is often easy to implement.

Correct redirect to a URL version: Many websites are accessible on the internet both with and without "www.". From the user's point of view, this sounds practical, but it also quickly leads to different URL variants, i.e., two domains, being put online. With the free Redirect Check from Seobility, you can easily test whether all different URL modifications correctly redirect to your preferred URL version. If this is not the case, you should set up or correct the corresponding 301 redirects.

The status code 301 instructs your browser and search engines that corresponding page calls should be permanently redirected without your website visitors noticing anything. In addition, canonical links can also point to the preferred URL version.

Set correct canonical link: A canonical link is important for your website. With its help, search engines index the correct version of a page if there are different versions of the same content (e.g., due to URL parameters). It is added to the HTML documents of each webpage in the head section. During your SEO Onpage audit, make sure that every page has a working canonical link that either refers to the "original" version of the page or to itself (if it's the original or there exists only one version of the page in general).

Redirect loops: Search engines can generally handle redirects well. Redirect loops, on the other hand, are a different matter. If page A redirects to page B and this redirects back to page A, search engines and users do not recognize a clear target and will rate the page as "not worth visiting."

Page load time: The loading time of your page is made up of several factors. One of them is the server response time, which you can automatically check with Seobility for each subpage. In addition, in the context of your Onpage audit, you can use the Google tool "PageSpeed Insights" that lets you check the complete loading time of a single page.

Step 2: Checking meta-information and important page elements

In the second step, you check whether you have optimized all important page elements so that Google and Co. can understand the content of your pages as best as possible and play it out to your potential visitors. These elements include:

Meta Titles and Descriptions: Make the title and description of your website as specific and interesting as possible. Since your page title is also the title of the SERP snippet and thus appears in search results, this also influences how well the Google snippet is clicked. Seobility checks for each of your pages whether the title and description have the correct length and are sufficiently optimized. The tool also shows you if the same title or description is used for several pages.

Headings: Use headings to structure your page. This allows your visitors to navigate better and get to the answers they are looking for faster. The same applies to search engines: to help them classify your content well, you should label your headings with tags from H1 to H6, with the number expressing the hierarchy level. Your H1 should only appear once per page, summarize the entire content, and contain your main keyword. It should also pique the curiosity of the website visitors, so they engage more closely with the content of your website. The other headlines should form a red thread through your page and logically build on each other. Do not skip any hierarchy level. A H1 is always followed by a H2 and not a H4. An SEO tool like Seobility helps you keep these specifications in mind.

Alt attributes of images: Alt attributes are alternative texts for images that you use on your site. They are particularly important for an accessible and disability-friendly use of your pages. Screen reading programs can read the alt texts of your images and give people with visual impairments an impression of what is shown. The same applies to search engines.

Seobility helps you find images with missing alt attributes, so you can add them. Add a suitable and equivalent alternative text for these images that provides an appropriate and full replacement for the graphically displayed content. Describe precisely to your website visitors what is shown in the picture.

Keyword optimization of your page content: The keyword relevant to your page should, of course, appear in your text. However, the motto here is not "the more the better," because this does not make your text any more relevant to Google or your visitors. Always write your content for the readers, not for the search engine. To succeed in this, an SEO tool like Seobility helps you with so-called WDF*IDF analyses. With them, you lay the foundation for search engine optimized texts. At the same time, always ask yourself whether your text also brings added value to your readers.

Step 3: Analysis of website structure

In this step, you focus on identifying problems in the structure of your site. This is important because search engines can more easily determine which topics your site covers and which subpages are most important through a clear website structure. Check your website with Seobility for the following factors:

Internal links: With the help of internal links, you refer website visitors to other pages within your own site. You also show Google which pages you think are the most important and which are less important. Seobility helps you become aware of typical problems with internal linking. These could be, for example, pages with many or few internal links, with link texts needing improvement, or identical link texts for different pages.

Link depth and page levels: Every subpage of your site should be reachable within a few clicks from the main site. Otherwise, it can happen that content linked too deep is not discovered by search engines. With Seobility, you can analyze the page level distribution and thus find out how many links the crawler has to follow in order to find the corresponding page.

Sitemaps: The XML sitemap is a list of your site's most relevant URLs. Many content management systems have a function for creating XML sitemaps and update them regularly. The sitemap can be uploaded to the Google Search Console, providing the search engine with essential information about the URLs present on your site. However, it is not visible for your visitors.

You upload the XML sitemap to the main directory of your domain, so that it can be read by crawlers. This can have a positive effect on the indexing of hard-to-reach content or new websites. Seobility shows you which URLs are listed in your sitemap and if they have any problems.

Step 4: Audit of content quality and optimization

The last step of your SEO Onpage audit with Seobility is to identify problems with the content of your site. With the help of this step, you check:

Thin Content or low-value content: Web content that does not provide adequately useful information on their stated topic is referred to as thin content. They are of low quality because they do not offer any added value to readers. This affects the user experience of your site negatively. The Google Bot also recognizes when your content does not provide any added value and ranks them correspondingly lower. In the worst case, the pages could even be classified as spam.

So, make sure to optimize your content for relevance and provide sufficient content on the topics that your visitors visit your website for. Seobility can help you identify thin content by, for example, showing you pages with very little or no text content. In this case, you should look at each case individually, as not every page with little written content is also thin content.

Duplicate Content: You should avoid duplicating your content on your site. Duplicate content predominantly results from technical factors, such as URL parameters. Seobility checks whether the same content exists on several pages. If you need to duplicate content for some reason, tag them with canonical links (see above) and make the original content clear.

Keyword cannibalization: Each page of your site should be optimized for a specific keyword. If you have several content pages for the same keyword, Google has to decide which one is more relevant and should appear in the search results. So, you are competing with yourself for the best search result positions. To avoid this, you can make individual pages more specific and thus optimize them for more specific keywords. Seobility shows you in reports if your pages are competing for the same keyword.

SEO Onpage audit: efficient steps for better ranking

Conducting an SEO audit on your site is very extensive and deals with both technical and content components of your page. Fortunately, appropriate SEO tools can take most of this work off you. Then you just have to take care of the subsequent optimizations to increase the visibility of your website on the SERPs.