audit-on-page-seo

Audit On-Page SEO

Systematically evaluate all on-page SEO factors for a given URL to surface ranking blockers and improvement opportunities.

Why This Is Best Practice

Adopted by: Moz, Ahrefs, Semrush audit methodologies; Google Search Console recommendations Impact: Moz's 2023 On-Page Ranking Factors study found content relevance and page experience signals account for over 40% of ranking variance

Why best: On-page audits catch issues invisible to casual review — thin content, duplicate tags, poor Core Web Vitals — that silently suppress rankings. Structured checklists prevent omission of any factor class. Regular audits track regressions after site changes.

Steps

1. Crawl the URL — Use Screaming Frog or Ahrefs Site Audit to extract title, meta description, headings, canonical, and status codes in one pass.
2. Audit title tag — Verify primary keyword appears in first 60 characters; check for duplicates across site.
3. Audit heading hierarchy — Confirm single H1 containing target keyword; H2s cover topical subtopics; no skipped heading levels.
4. Evaluate content depth — Compare word count and topical coverage against top-5 SERP competitors; identify missing entities and subtopics.
5. Check Core Web Vitals — Run PageSpeed Insights for LCP (<2.5s), INP (<200ms), CLS (<0.1); flag failures as critical blockers.
6. Audit internal linking — Verify target page receives contextual links from relevant hub pages; anchor text is descriptive.
7. Check structured data — Validate Schema markup with Google's Rich Results Test; add missing applicable types (Article, FAQ, Product).
8. Compile prioritized issue list — Rank issues by estimated impact (critical / high / medium / low) and assign owners.

Rules

• Always audit mobile and desktop separately — Core Web Vitals scores differ by device.
• Never ignore canonical tags; a misconfigured canonical silently splits link equity.
• Flag keyword stuffing (>3% density) as a risk, not an optimization.
• Treat a missing or duplicate title tag as a P0 issue — fix before content work.
• Do not conflate word count with quality; topical coverage matters more than length.

Examples

A product page ranks #8 for "noise-cancelling headphones under $100." Audit reveals: title tag missing price qualifier, LCP of 4.1s on mobile, no FAQ schema despite competitors using it, and zero internal links from the blog. Fix order: LCP → title → internal links → schema. After fixes, page moves to #4 within 6 weeks.

Common Mistakes

• Auditing desktop-only — mobile Core Web Vitals are the ranking signal, not desktop.
• Fixing meta tags without addressing content gaps — rankings require relevance, not just technical hygiene.
• Ignoring cannibalization — two pages targeting the same keyword split signals and suppress both.
• Running a one-time audit — on-page SEO degrades with CMS updates and content edits; schedule quarterly reviews.

When NOT to Use

• Do not perform an on-page SEO audit on URLs that are intentionally noindexed (login pages, thank-you pages, internal tools) — these pages are excluded from search indexing and on-page optimization has no ranking effect.
• Do not use this audit process as the primary diagnostic for a site experiencing a sudden traffic drop — a manual penalty, algorithm update, or domain-level issue requires a site-wide audit and backlink analysis, not a page-level on-page review.
• Do not apply on-page SEO optimization to pages targeting informational keywords when the core problem is insufficient domain authority — technical hygiene cannot overcome a domain rating gap against established competitors in high-competition SERPs.