As much as having great content, a sound technical foundation (i.e. having a mobile friendly website) and link building can get your site on the right track for SEO dominance, sometimes, it’s the little things that can make the biggest difference…
I’ve over a decade of experience in the SEO experience, and I understand the importance of optimizing on-page SEO elements for achieving search engine dominance.
Therefore, I’ve created the ultimate On Page SEO Checklist so that you can ensure that the primary elements of your site pages are well-optimized.
Quick Summary
On-Page SEO involves optimizing the core elements of a page such as the page titles, headings, meta descriptions, and images for the primary keyword that you want to rank for. These factors can significantly improve your site’s ability to rank and lead to more organic traffic.- An On-Page SEO Audit is crucial as it identifies issues with your content that could hurt user engagement and confuse the crawlers. Elements like page titles, URLs, headings, image alt texts, and internal linking need to be optimized to improve both user experience and search engine visibility.
- While On-Page SEO is important, it should be complemented with a sound off page SEO, technical SEO foundation, and high-quality content. Other factors like structured data, identifying crawl errors, and content optimization also play a significant role in improving your site’s SEO performance.
What is an On Page SEO Audit?
Let’s get one thing straight, when I’m referring to “On Page SEO”, I’m not talking about optimizing content for reader retention or writing content to meet search intent – that’s for another article altogether.
Instead, I’m talking about optimizing the core elements of a web page such as the page titles, headings, meta descriptions and images on your website for the primary keyword that you want to rank for.
These are individual factors that can help improve your site’s ability to rank and lead to more organic traffic. For example, get your title and headings wrong, and it doesn’t matter if you’ve written the best piece of content, it’ll simply struggle to rank.
Why?
Because, an On Page SEO Audit also makes it easier for crawlers and human visitors to understand what the content is about without much effort.
Why are On Page SEO Audits Important?
An On Page SEO Audit is important because it can identify issues with your content that could hurt user engagement and confuse the crawlers. For example, unclear page titles that don’t include your primary keyword will decrease click-through rates, while also making it harder for the search engine bots to understand the purpose of your content.
Poorly-optimized URLs or the lack of headings will make your pages harder to navigate for both internet users and crawlers. If there are a lot of images on your website, but they lack the alt attribute, search engines won’t know what they depict.
Interlinking is another essential part of SEO that should be examined during an On Page SEO Audit. It is a way of showing Google which pages are to be considered the most valuable on your website. This can also help boost the rankings of individual pages and can make your website easier to navigate and improve user experience.
I’ll go through each of these elements in the On Page SEO checklist below.
On Page SEO Checklist
In order to make the most of this On Page SEO checklist, I highly recommend performing keyword research for your core landing pages.
Taking this step will help make the next steps much easier to do as you’ll be able to identify the target keyword (or other search terms) for your pages.
Here are the SEO tools that you’ll need to complete your On Page SEO checklist:
ScreamingFrog – Use ScreamingFrog (one of the best On Page SEO tools on the market) to crawl your website’s content and quickly generate reports for the below On Page elements.- On Page SEO Checklist Template
- Ahrefs – This is one of the best SEO tools around. Ahrefs is a great tool for finding out how your competitors have optimized their on page SEO elements. Alternatively, you can use a simple Google search console for your primary keyword (or other search terms) to quickly see what the competition is doing with their on page elements.
Page Title Optimization
What is a Page Title?
A page title (or title tag) is the HTML element that defines what the title of a web page is.
Here’s the title for The Search Initiative homepage in its raw HTML form:
<title>The Search Initiative - SEO Agency</title>Here’s how it appears in the search results:
And here’s how it appears in a browser’s tab:
Why Audit Your Page Titles?
Page titles are one of the Three Kings of On Page SEO with the other two being the URL and H1 heading. I’ll go into detail about URL optimization and H1 headings later on in this article, but for now, let’s take a look at why page titles are so important.
Page titles are a very important part of search engine optimization for both users and robots.
The title tag of your web pages is one of the first elements that users look at when deciding whether or not to click through to a page from their search. Well-written, engaging titles are known to increase click through rate (CTR) and engagement.
The main purpose of auditing your title tags is to ensure that they inform the audience (and search engines) what they can expect to find on your web page. They’re essentially a precursor for the main content on your site.
Page Title Audit Checklist
When auditing the page titles, you should ensure that they are:
- Compelling and engaging – Page titles should grab the searcher’s attention and compel them to click through, but using ALL CAPS isn’t advised as it takes up too much space.
- Short, sweet, and descriptive – According to Google, page titles should provide a “quick insight into the content of a result and why it’s relevant to their query”.
- Unique – You should have “distinct, descriptive titles for each page on your site”.
- Not too long – Google has a maximum width of 600 pixels for page titles. Page titles that exceed this will not be displayed in full. You should “avoid unnecessarily long or verbose titles”.
- Optimized for your primary keyword – Whilst it’s not essential for page titles to include an exact-match for your target keywords, it’s good practice to do so. Just make sure that the title tag makes sense, is written in plain English with the end-user in mind as opposed to search engines, and doesn’t include keyword stuffing.
Avoid page titles like this that are over-optimized:
Cheap Holidays and Cheap Trips to New York | Book Cheap Flights Today
Instead, aim for page titles like this:
Book Cheap Holidays & Flights to New York Today | Tripster
- Add your primary keyword towards the front – Adding your primary keyword phrase in a string at the front of your page title is recommended as users tend to skim through the search results to find what they’re looking for. It also helps build topical relevance in Google’s eyes.
Heading Optimization
What is a Heading?
Headings (aka header tags) are used to convey the hierarchy and structural outline of the content on a page to search engines and users.
There are six kinds of HTML Header levels where the H1 tag is the largest and the H6 tag is the smallest.
Here’s an example of a heading hierarchy
<h1> This is a H1 heading </h1>
<h2> This a H2 heading </h2>
<h2> This a H2 heading </h2>
<h3> This a H3 heading </h3>
<h2> This a H2 heading </h2>Here’s what the headings would look like:
Why Should You Audit Your Headings?
Breaking up your content with headings makes it much easier for users to navigate through your page and find what they’re looking for.
Likewise, from an On Page SEO point of view, headings provide better context for search engines as they’re able to understand the hierarchy and structure.
Aside from this, they may also aid your chances of appearing in the Featured Snippets.
Here’s an example for the keyword “how is vanilla extract made”.
Let’s see where the featured snippet text is taken from…
Importantly, notice that the heading is exactly the same as our search intent query.
H1 Heading Audit Checklist
When auditing the H1 headings on your site, ensure that:
- You only have one H1 tag – Although John Mueller says you can use “as many as you want”, I recommend using just the one H1 heading that is unique from the title tag as its primary purpose is to encapsulate what the page is about.
- Your heading describes what your page is about – This should come as no surprise, but it’s important that your H1 heading summarizes the topics that you cover in the rest of the content on the page.
- They aren’t too long – There’s no limit to how long an H1 heading should be, but it’s important to keep an eye on length as H1s that are excessively long become difficult to read. As a general rule of thumb, keep your heading shorter than 65 characters.
- They aren’t too short either – H1 headings that are too short aren’t advised as they don’t offer as much value in terms of conveying what the user can expect from the page. As a general rule of thumb, keep your heading long enough to make sense.
- They grab the user’s attention – The H1 tag will likely be what the user sees first, so it needs to grab the user’s attention and compel them to stay on your page.
- Address the user’s search intent – If the heading doesn’t align with what the user is searching for from their query, they’ll simply leave.
- Try to include the primary keyword you want to target – Although it’s not essential that your H1 heading include your target keywords, it’s good practice to do so as Google uses the H1 tag to understand the page’s topical relevance.
H2-H6 Heading Audit Checklist
When auditing the remaining headings on your website (primarily H2 headings), ensure that they:
- Are meaningful – Google recommends using headers sparingly as having too many makes it difficult for users to scan the content.
- Include long-tail keywords – Again, not all headings have to be optimized for your primary keyword, but sneaking long-tail terms into your headings can further improve Google’s understanding of the page’s context.
- Answer subtopics required to answer the main search query – For example, it’s likely that users searching for a broad topic like “how to lose belly fat” will also want to know about things like “avoid trans fat” or “get exercise” etc. You can spot which subheadings to use by looking at your competition on page one of the search results.
Meta Description Optimization
What is are Meta Descriptions?
The meta descriptions summarizes the main content on your web pages is about in one or two sentences.
Here’s an example:
<meta name="description" content="This is a meta description">Why Should You Audit Your Meta Descriptions?
Despite the fact that they are not a ranking factor, meta descriptions should still be given importance because Google often displays them as part of the search results.
If you’re still not convinced, take it from Google, who say that they should “generally inform and interest users with a short, relevant summary of what a particular page is about. They are like a pitch that convinces the user that the page is exactly what they’re looking for”.
Essentially, this means that well-written descriptions may be the deciding factor as to whether or not a user clicks through to your website or not.
Moreover, if you include your primary keyword or other search terms within your descriptions, then Google will bold any words from the keyword within the search results.
For example, if our target keyword is “ruby chocolate”, then you can see that Google highlights all instances of the term within the results.
Meta Description Audit Checklist
During the auditing process, you should ensure that your descriptions:
- Accurately summarizes your content – Your descriptions should encapsulate what the end-user will find on the page.
- Are unique – “Identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site aren’t helpful when individual pages appear in the web results”, according to Google.
- Are optimized with your primary keyword – Keywords from the user’s search may be highlighted in bold by Google in the search results which can help improve the click through rate (CTR) and reduce the bounce rate.
- Are engaging – Your descriptions should engage the user but shouldn’t come across as clickbait.
- Aren’t too long – As with pages titles, Google truncates descriptions that are too long in the search results. A general rule of thumb is to make sure that your descriptions are between 50–160 characters.
URL Optimization
What is a URL?
A URL (Uniform Resource Locator), is the unique address of any resource on the Web.
Why Should You Audit & Optimize Your URLs?
You should audit and optimize your URLs because this is one of the things Google recommends you do in their SEO Starter Kit.