How to Do an On-Page SEO Audit

The good thing is that you don’t have to be a technical SEO guru in order to carry out an audit. You will discover how to perform on-site SEO audit in this tutorial step by step.

What is an audit of on-page SEO? 

On-page SEO audit refers to the assessment of the HTML components of a particular web page, mostly concerned with the meta tags in the web page < head > section, that matters in the process of perception of the content by search engines and social networks.

While a full technical SEO audit provides a broader understanding of such aspects as website speed, crawlability, backlinks and structure, on-page audit refers mainly to:

• Title tags

• Meta description

• Open Graph and Twitter Card tags

• Robots

• Canonical URLs

• Viewport and charset settings.

Correct applications of the above-mentioned aspects facilitate successful optimization. 

There is the constant need for making on-page audits of your website 

Search engines are continually updating their norms and rules, while websites are constantly on the move. Websites are modified and improved by introducing new pages and redesigning the existing ones. Thus, the page you were certain was perfectly optimized last year can have:

• A title tag that is too long because of the change of title

• A meta description that is duplicated from somewhere else

• An Open Graph image that is not working anymore

• A noindex tag that was forgotten from a prototype of the site

All cases mentioned above are not visible in the page itself. That is why it is better to use free SEO audit software instead of relying on guesswork or your memory. 

Step-by-Step: How to Do an On-Page SEO Audit

Step 1: Analyze your title tag 

One of the most important components of your title tag is that it serves as one of the strongest signals of on-page ranking to Google and is the first thing that the people see in the search results. 

What to review: 

• Your title needs to be between 50–60 characters long.

• The primary keyword should be placed right at the beginning of the title.

• The brand's name should appear at the end of the title.

• You should avoid using duplicate titles on your website. 

Step 2: Analyze your meta description 

Meta descriptions may not be a ranking factor directly, but they have a significant influence on the CTR. 

What to review: 

• The length should be between 150–160 characters.

• It should provide a clear and appealing summary of the page.

• Use the keywords naturally.

• Make sure you are not using the same description on several pages. 

Step 3: Check Open Graph Tags

Open Graph tags govern the appearance of your page when shared on Facebook, LinkedIn, Discord, or Slack. Most common yet damaging on-page SEO errors is missing or non-working og:image, which gives shared links a sense of incompleteness and unreliability.

The essential tags to verify include: og:title, og:description, og:image, og:url, og:type.

Step 4: Check Twitter Card Tags

Like Open Graph Tags, Twitter (X) Cards shape the appearance of your links when shared on X. The usage of twitter:card with the value summary_large_image allows you to take advantage of generous visual space on the feed.

Step 5: Verify Robots Directives

You need to check whether it is set to index, follow (accessible to search engines) or mistakenly set to noindex, the error that can eliminate your page from Google’s results without you knowing.

Step 6: Check Canonical Tags

Canonical tags inform search engines which version of the page is the original, thus preventing duplicate content problem. Make sure that your canonical URL is self-referenced, uses HTTPS, and does not address the wrong page.

Step 7: Verify Viewport and Charset Settings

Lastly, ensure that your page has the correct viewport meta tag to ensure that it is mobile-responsive and that it has the UTF-8 charset so that characters don’t get lost in translation.

The Manual Way versus The Smart Way

While you could manually check for all of this by opening “View Source” or DevTools on each page, that’s not very feasible for a site that has-dozens or hundreds of URLs. Plus, manually scanning raw HTML can also lead to oversight in important areas.

This is where a dedicated SEO checker Chrome extension can make life easier. It provides a full on-page SEO audit in one click via the device you are using, whether it is on a specific page, a localhost, or a staging environment.

The Important Factors a Good SEO Analyzer Should Analyze

When you are looking into some software programs that will conduct on-site audit, choose an SEO analyzer that does at least these tasks incl.:

• 📝 Length, optimal use of keywords and width of title tags

• 📋 Length and readability of the meta description

• 📱 Open Graph tag validation and social media preview

• 🐦 Twitter cards validation

• 🤖 Robots and indexation checks

• 🔗 Canonical tag verification

• 📐 Checking of the viewport and charset

• 🎨 Checking of the favicon, theme color and language.

Frequent Mistakes to Look Out For 

How to Conduct Your Audit in Less Than a Minute

If you prefer to forego the whole manual process, here’s the quickest way to do it: 

• Add the free SEO audit extension on your browser. 

• Navigate to the site you want to audit.

• Press the extension icon.

• Get your complete on-page SEO report that covers the title tags, meta tags, Open Graph, Twitter cards, robots, canonical tags within minutes

• You won’t even have to register, verify websites, and crawl pages. This amazing tool is indeed a useful site SEO checker be it for your own site or for someone else’s.

Conclusions

Performing an on-page SEO audit does not need to be a time-consuming process.

Just by regularly checking your title tags, meta descriptions, Open Graph, robots and canonical URLs you ensure that the tiny mistakes do not aggregate and start affecting your rankings. 

Performing the audit manually is not very hard at all if you wish to use the checklist above.