Perform an on-page SEO audit

Contributors

@elise-dopson


Business Benefits

Discover and fix issues that can hinder your organic search visibility.


Crawl your website in Screaming Frog: click on Upload > Download XML sitemap, then type the URL of your sitemap.

If you have less than 10 links on your page, you can manually go through each one.

Check the title tags of each page and remove any duplicates, or use rel=canonical links in heading tags to point to one authoritative version.

For example: ``.

If you choose to delete the duplicates, add a 301 redirect from the deleted URLs to the URL you didn’t delete.

Look at the title tags on search engines to see if they are truncated, and edit any truncated titles to reduce the word count.

Screaming Frog shows you the SERP snippet and pixel width of each title tag. Google has a 600-pixel width limit, so decrease the length of any above that.

Analyze each page you crawled to see if the page’s target keyword is in the title tag, and if not, edit it to include the target keyword.

Look for duplicate meta descriptions between pages and edit any duplicates to make them unique.

Make sure the primary or secondary keywords for each page are included in the meta description.

Check for the presence of an indexable H1 tag on each page, and add a H1 heading to any pages missing one.

  • Your H1 should be in a prominent place above the other content on the page. It should be the same or slightly different from the page title.
  • On WordPress and platforms like Shopify, you can add an H1 to any section in the page editor. If it’s an HTML site, reach out to the web developer.
  • If Screaming Frog says your H1 isn’t indexable, reach out to your web developer to fix the code.

Check for H2 and H3 sub-headers, and whether your target keyword or a variation is present in any of them, and add it to one or two if it isn’t.

The keyword doesn’t need to be in all sub-headers, but should be in some.

Check the crawl results for duplicate or very short content that’s under 200 words.

  • Mark duplicate content for either rewriting or canonical update.
  • Check if low word count content needs more. Some pages with minimal content needs - like a contact page - might not need more words, but blog posts usually will.

Use a tool like Integrity or LinkChecker to check for broken links on each page and either replace or remove broken links.

  • Replace broken links with the correct link if you mistakenly typed it, or you changed the URL without doing a 301 redirect.
  • If the link doesn’t exist and there’s no related page or post on your website to replace it with, remove the broken link.

Scan your website with a tool like Clearscope, Page Optimizer Pro, or MarketMuse to find content that needs keyword optimization.

Edit the content using the suggestions from the tool. Suggestions usually include keywords and semantic phrases to add to your content.

Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T11:35:31Z

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