Best onpage SEO tools in 2021
The best onpage SEO tools will provide insights into how to improve your website and webpages for the purposes of search engine optimization and human user experience.
Onpage SEO tools are an essential part of ensuring that your website is search engine friendly, and that means being able to do a proper site analysis using the SEO tools available.
There are a number of site audit tools that will allow you do this, ensuring that your webpages follow a proper document structure, for example, such as the use of page titles, meta descriptions, and alt tags for images. Potential issues can be flagged, though it helps to have some idea of what is entailed by onpage SEO as some tools provide flags that are irrelevant, and are therefore best ignored.
However, ensuring a website is optimized for search engines also means you need to ensure it’s properly optimized for human users. After all, SEO originated from improving website accessibility whenever webdevelopers moved away from existing web standards, such as by not having unique page titles.
That means ensuring you optimize the user experience, and avoiding simple errors such as missing pages or images, broken links, and other issues that might make for a poor user experience. This is especially important as search engines such as Google have been tracking and using human user signals for ranking purposes for well over a decade now.
Overall, by using onpage SEO tools you can improve not just your website’s search engine optimization, but ultimately the human user experience with it. Here therefore are the best onpage SEO tools currently available.
Formerly known as Webmaster Tools, the Google Search Console is a great way to get automated feedback from Google on any particular issues your website mig
ht be experiencing. From a general overview you can drill down to potential issues with website performance, and there’s a feature to inspect individual URLs for problems.
The Coverage section is where you can look for specific errors and issues with your website, such as pages that are not being crawled or are otherwise blocked by your robots.txt, as well as issues with redirects, 404 error pages, and duplicate content. This section also provides the ability to submit a URL for a sitemap, and even make submission requests where individual URLs may have been removed by Google.
Google Search Console also lets you examine performance according to the device type used to connect to your website, specifically desktop or mobile, which should be a particular concern as Google favors content that is mobile-friendly rather than just being set-up for desktop users. There’s a special Mobile Usability link to help alert you to any issues you may need to address.
On top of all this there are additional tools for exploring your website’s link profile, both external and internal, as well as keywords users are actually finding your website with. There’s also an alert for security issues that have been detected, such as a hacked plugin that your CMS is using.
Overall, Google Search Console is a generous attempt by Google to help webmasters and website owners get to grip with the basics of their website and any SEO problems Google has detected. However, as a free tool it does have limitations by comparison to paid-for tools which will attempt to provide a more detailed analysis, for a price.
Woorank offers an excellent onpage SEO checker, and while it offers both a paid-for and free version, the free version actually covers a lot of important bases that it’s worth taking care of.
To use Woorank, simply enter your website or webpage URL in the provided search box, and Woorank will begin processing. For the onpage SEO, Woorank looks at issues such as title length, meta-description, and headings. It also analyses keywords on the page, alt tags for images, and how your links are set up.
An indexing section looks at
other issues, such as how your domain resolves – traditionally, search engines would treat www.domain.com and domain.com as separate entities, so it’s good to see that covered here. Additionally, Woorank also checks that you have a robots.txt file and whether your sitemaps are both present and valid.
Other checks include structured data, trust indicators, asset use for performance, as well as estimators for links and traffic. There is a tool for directly crawling your site for issues, as well as a keyword research tool, but these are only available for subscribers.
Overall Woorank provides a comprehensive range of information important for onpage SEO, including issues that could be easily overlooked, and the free version offers a great way to get started with this.
Screaming Frog providers a range of SEO tools, but one of their standout features is their log file analyzer. This is an important but easily overlooked part of SEO, because server logs offer core raw data to work with.
A lot of tools work with public APIs showing what Google and others have found on your site, but they won’t give so detailed a breakdown as you can do with your own website – and if there’s something important that wasn’t found, you will need to know this.
Screaming Frog allows you to upload your server log files and then analyze them according to various criteria. For example, you can identify which URLs have been crawled by which bots, and how they may have behaved on them. Additionally, if you find certain files are not being crawled then you’ve identified an important problem with the way your website links to its own content that general SEO tools would not be able to find.
It can also help you identify bad bots that may be chewing up your bandwidth and otherwise slowing your website performance, allowing you to block these directly with a .htaccess file based on the bad bot IPs.
Additionally, you can also find out more information about the different errors that may be e
ncountered. While many web users may have learned through experience that a 404 error means a missing page, there are numerous other errors based on time-outs and permissions issues that might not be so easily picked up by general site audit software.
Overall, while it’s great that other tools can provide data on your website, the Screaming Frog Log File Analyzer allows you to sift through your own raw data for clues as to how to better optimize for search engines and human users alike.
webconfs offers a wide range of different SEO tools, but one of its more unique offerings is the webconfs dead link finder.
A lot of big SEO tool providers offer to crawl or explore your website, but often their focus isn’t on dead links as much as general SEO issues. Additionally, some tools that do offer to find dead links require that each page to be checked be individually submitted as a URL. While you could upload a sitemap to one of the more powerful SEO tool providers out there, sometimes it’s good to be able to simply do a quick and easy check.
This is where the webconfs dead link finder comes into its own, crawling your site for HTTP status reports from all of the links that it finds. While the tool itself is relatively simple, it’s an invaluable way to look for errors that might otherwise be easily missed in all the mass of data from big SEO toolsets. Additionally, it’s a browser-based tool that lists the results in a clear and easy to see manner, so identifying broken links is an easy and painless process.
As with log file analyzers, a dead link finder is a good way to find obvious problems with your website navigation, because if you need to link into a main section of pages, but the only link to it is broken, then you can’t expect all search engines to find and crawl those pages, and even those that find them via a sitemap may devalue them as orphan content.
Overall, the webconfs dead link checker is a simple and easy to use tool, but is a great one to add to your general onsite SEO arsenal, and you can analyze your first 1,000 links for free.
Crazy Egg was one of the first companies to bring heat-mapping to the wider internet, and the company is still going strong. If you’re not familiar with heat-mapping, it’s a way of following the user experience of a website using eye-tracking to see where a user focus goes on the page.
While heat-mapping is not technically an SEO tool, it has generated a lot of interest in SEO circles precisely because of its overlap with onpage design and development for general SEO and marketing purposes. This means that when a SEO consultant or agency looks at onpage elements, heat-mapping has become an established part of general toolkit for optimizing client websites.
On the of most mentioned aspects of heat-mapping is that users are generally drawn to the top left section of the page content, possibly because we’re programmed to read from left to right in English, and therefore this is the area that marketers like to aim to place their CTAs. However, for SEO purposes it requires a more in-depth analysis, especially in terms of the optimum placement of navigation links to help with the user experience.
Crazy Egg offers one of the leading heat-mapping services, and provide heatmaps, scrollmaps, and click reports. This allows SEO’s to learn how to better apply content as well as CTAs, and allows for greater insights when it comes to website analytics tools.
Pricing is relatively cheap and there is also a 30-day trial available.
