Best OnPage SEO Tools are just a few clicks away. The on-page analysis tool offers added value when it comes to page optimization.
For a website to rank on Google, various technical, structural, and content-related aspects must be taken into account and implemented correctly. This applies to all measures that you can influence yourself since they take place on your own website, i.e. Onpage. You check the correct implementation of these ranking factors with an on-page analysis, which is considered the basis of professional search engine optimization. It is usually carried out at the beginning of the planned SEO measures and continued later.
Due to the complexity and scope of a technical page evaluation, an on-page analysis is difficult to perform without the support of an SEO tool. Our overview will help you to choose the right OnPage tool.
What a good on-page tool must be able to do?
A good OnPage tool supports you already at the beginning of a project to consider all important SEO-relevant technical criteria when building your website. On the other hand, it helps you to analyze changes regularly even in the growth phase, to eliminate errors quickly, and thus to optimize your website continuously. This increases the quality of your website and thus also contributes to improved rankings on Google search results pages.
The on-page analysis tool must support you, for example, in shortening your website’s loading times, building and maintaining a clean URL structure, adding missing meta descriptions, avoiding duplicate content, or structuring texts perfectly.
The range of functions that your on-page tool should offer depends to a large extent on your individual website or projects. So before purchasing a tool, you need to ask yourself how complex and large your website is going to be and what kind of website you are running. For example, an online store has different technical requirements than a simple blog. Depending on these aspects, you will determine which on-page features you need and which software can also provide them to you.
The functionality of Onpage tools
The majority of paid SEO tools available on the market already contain most of the relevant functionalities to perform a professional on-page analysis. However, these functions are often designed differently, so that not every tool meets all requirements in the same way.
In the following, we present the essential functionalities of an on-page tool in detail and explain what you should pay special attention to when making your selection.
Number of onpage analyses
Depending on the tool provider, the number of possible on-page analyses can vary significantly. The range goes from analyses for a few domains to an unlimited number of crawls.
The decision on which onpage tool you choose depends largely on how many individual projects you want to analyze. If you are an agency working for several clients, the number of feasible onpage analyses should not be limited. If, on the other hand, you only operate a few websites, for example, a content portal, it is sufficient to limit the number of domains or crawls.
Number of analyzable URLs
To ensure that all pages of a domain are really examined during an onpage analysis, the number of analyzable URLs must be selected accordingly. While some providers limit the total number of analyzable URLs per month, others limit the volume per analyzed domain.
Therefore, when choosing the appropriate onpage tool, make sure that the maximum number of analyzable URLs fits your project. Also, the software should cover the planned growth of your URLs.
Often you have the possibility to upgrade to a higher-priced package, which in turn provides a larger number of analyzable URLs. However, you can then also expect significantly higher costs, which is why it already makes sense to consider the planned URL growth when choosing the appropriate onpage tool.
Error reporting
The result of an onpage analysis is a comprehensive list of errors, the elimination of which can lead to improved rankings in Google search results pages. To ensure that these errors can be processed in a structured manner, most onpage tools have an error reporting function.
In the form of a checklist, on which the errors are prioritized according to topic and importance, these can be successively eliminated. Therefore, test the various onpage analysis tools in detail for the structure of the error reporting and its clarity.
Internal link structure and anchor texts
A very important ranking factor in the Google algorithm is links – both external backlinks and internal links within your own website. Therefore, the internal link structure of your website is very important for search engine optimization.
A good onpage tool provides you with a compact and understandable overview of the internal link structure of your site, i.e. which pages are linked how often, and what the source and target pages are. This way, important SEO pages that have fallen short in internal linking can be discovered and pushed in Google rankings through additional linking.
You also get important information about the anchor texts used for the respective links. An anchor text should briefly summarize the content of the linked page and ideally include the main keyword of the target page. Anchor texts that consist, for example, of the word groups “more information” or “read more here” are not suitable for internal linking.
External links
Incoming links, the so-called backlinks, play a major role in search engine optimization. But not only these but also outbound links Google attaches certain importance in the ranking algorithm.
Both the number of outbound links and the link target is important. Therefore, in an article the number of outbound links should be chosen moderately, moreover, the content of the target page must be relevant to your own content. It goes without saying that the linked page must be accessible and not throw a 404 error message.
Your onpage tool should therefore be able to track outgoing links of a domain and continuously monitor the accessibility of the target page.
Loading times
An important factor in Google’s algorithm is the loading time of a website. If, for example, you use image files that are too large, do not use compression, or have a server that is too slow, then the long loading times can harm the Google ranking of your website.
Your onpage tool should therefore have the functionality to measure and analyze page load times and identify optimization potential. This may involve CSS or JavaScript improvements, file compression, or effective caching, for example.
Duplicate content
If content appears several times in almost identical form on different websites on the Internet, this often leads to poorer rankings in Google searches.
But internal duplicate content is usually not ideal either. Onpage analysis analyzes duplicate content that appears multiple times on different pages of the same domain. You can then check whether the duplicate content is justified or whether it is an error, for example, due to incorrectly set canonical tags.
Metadata
In onpage optimization, the meta description and the website title are of great importance, because they are displayed as a snippet in the search results pages. A well-worded title with a suitable short description in the description leads to higher click-through rates and thus to more visitors to the website.
Therefore, check regularly with the help of your onpage tool that title and meta description are available in the appropriate number of characters for all important subpages. Also missing meta descriptions or website titles with the same content can usually be identified by tools and then corrected by you.
Indexing
If a URL is not indexed, it will not appear in Google’s search results pages. Then all the effort that went into creating and optimizing that page was for nothing.
This situation can occur, for example, if the page
- redirects to another URL
- is on Noindex or
- a canonical tag has been set incorrectly.
Your onpage tool should therefore be able to query the status of all URLs of a domain and display erroneous, i.e. non-indexed pages. This will give you an overview of pages with an incorrect status code such as 403, 404, or 503 and allow you to fix the errors on time.
Headlines
Clearly structured texts on your pages increase on the one hand the clarity for your visitors, on the other hand, they also improve the readability for Google. This includes, among other things, a clear heading structure.
Headings are identified by so-called heading tags. In principle, each page should ideally have exactly one main heading, which is located in the H1 tag and contains the main keyword of the page. You can achieve a further logical structuring of the page with subheadings, which are marked with the tags H2 to H6.
SEO audit of page headlines is an important aspect and should also be part of the onpage tool.
Images
The use of images on websites is an important SEO factor. On the one hand, images visually enhance the content, and on the other hand, they can generate additional traffic via Google Image Search. The number of images per individual page must be balanced. While no images at all can be detrimental to the content, too many images may harm loading times.
Embedded images are provided with an ALT text, where the ALT stands for “alternative”. This text is displayed if the actual image cannot be loaded. Google in turn uses the ALT texts to get additional information about the image. Therefore, choose an ALT text that describes the image briefly and concisely.
Especially if you run an image-heavy website and image SEO is one of your crucial success factors, your onpage tool should be able to analyze the existing images of your website.
Structured data
Structured data provides the search engine with additional information that allows it to better understand the content of a website. This data is located in the source code, i.e. it is not visible to website visitors.
For example, structured data can be enriched with the following content:
- Reviews
- Events
- Product prices
- Recipes
- FAQs
In addition to their increasing importance for search engine ranking, structured data can also be used to adjust and optimize your own snippets in search results, which can lead to increased click-through rates (CTR). So, if you use structured data, the onpage tool should also be able to recognize and analyze it and point out existing errors.
Multilingualism
If you offer the information on your website in multiple languages, the different language versions should be identified by a hreflang attribute. This ensures that the respective language version references the correct URL. This tells the search engine which language version to deliver to the user when displaying the search result.
An onpage tool can help you to ensure that when the hreflang attribute is used, the correct target URL is targeted and the correct country and language information is provided or existing errors are identified.
Page architecture
Important for the page architecture of a domain is a clear and concise structure. This way, both visitors to your website and Google will quickly find exactly the content they are looking for. This leads to improved user behavior for the website visitor, and for Google, it increases the relevance in the search results pages.
Therefore, a regular review of the page architecture, as well as the URL structure, is mandatory for every site operator, professionally supported by the used onpage tool.
Single page analysis
If you want to examine and optimize a specific URL of your domain for SEO-relevant facts, your onpage tool should have a single page analysis.
A single page analysis provides you with concrete information about the indexability of the page, the focus keyword as well as other relevant keywords, information about the metadata, internal and external links, technical aspects of the page performance.
JavaScript rendering
More and more JavaScript frameworks are being used in the creation of websites. These pages can only be captured by search engines if they are crawlable.
If you use JavaScript frameworks on your website, the onpage tool must also be able to execute JavaScript during onpage analysis. Only then you will get usable data for your optimization purposes also for the pages with JavaScript.
JavaScript rendering is a rather resource-intensive functionality and is therefore offered by some onpage tools only in the higher-priced packages. The function is not a must but plays an increasingly important role for onpage analysis in the context of the increasing relevance of JavaScript.
Onpage tools with top ratings
- XOVI
- SEOCrawler
- Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider
- Google Developers PageSpeed Insight
What free onpage tools can do?
The search for free onpage tools yields numerous offers that advertise free website analyses. However, you will quickly find out that they are often only a first rudimentary website check, covering SEO basics at best and providing only superficial optimization suggestions.
Also, many free tools only offer individual functionalities from the overall set of onpage functionalities, so you have to combine several different tools for a more comprehensive analysis result. This is time-consuming, complicated, and does not allow for a complete onpage analysis. Often only the analysis of single subpages is possible, the crawling of the whole website is not even offered by most free onpage tools.
Therefore, free tools are only suitable for small projects, where you only want to get information about individual subpages, query page load times, or check the presence of metadata, for example.
Costs of an onpage tool
If your own website is not only a “nice to have”, but your company’s success depends on its performance, then you should not do without a professional onpage tool. This tool must provide all the important functionalities of the onpage analysis, such as checking
- all technical aspects of the page (e.g. loading times, mobile display, JavaScript rendering) as well as
- the structural setup and page architecture (internal links) and all points are relevant to the creation and presentation of content (headlines, images, metadata, etc.).
Further very important for the tool selection are existing reporting functionalities as well as the complete crawlability of the entire domain. Besides, the number of feasible analyses, as well as analyzable URLs, must fit the own projects.
Almost all onpage tools are a module or component of a much larger SEO tool, which has many other search engine optimization functionalities, such as keyword research, ranking and backlink analyses, or numerous reporting and interface functions. You can get a very good overview of our comparison of SEO tools.
Due to these extended functionalities of SEO tools, a price comparison exclusively for onpage tools is difficult. For a pure onpage tool, you have to expect monthly costs starting at about 30 Euros/Dollars. For the all-rounders among the SEO tools, the monthly prices start at about 50 Euros/Dollars and can rise to several hundred euros as the range of functions increases.
The best free onpage tools
If a free onpage tool is sufficient for you in the beginning to perform a first small analysis, then we have picked out the four best programs in our opinion for you, with which you can get started immediately. For example, to test the page speed or to check the internal link structure.
For each tool, we have summarized the most important functions as well as any limitations in the range of functions.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog at a glance:
Free crawling tool for up to 500 subpages.
Download and local installation of the software required
Screaming Frog is a popular crawling tool that allows you to crawl and examine up to 500 subpages (URLs) in the “Free Version”. To use Screaming Frog, you need to download the tool and install it locally on the computer.
After starting and entering the URL or domain to be analyzed, Screaming Frog examines all subpages of the entered domain/subdomain, similar to Googlebot. The user subsequently receives valuable information for carrying out his SEO activities. These are for example:
- Detection of server or browser errors
- Display of redirect forwardings
- Display of broken links
- Display of duplicate pages or content
- Checking page titles and metadata
- Checking of headings
- Analysis of canonical tags
- Checking incoming and outgoing links
- Also, Screaming Frog can be used to create XML sitemaps.
If you want to use Screaming Frog for larger projects with more than 500 subpages, you can buy the “Paid Version” for the annual price of 149 GBP.
Seobility
Seobility at a glance:
- Free onpage analysis for one URL
- Specification of an SEO score for the analyzed URL
- The output of a to-do list for SEO optimizations
- After registration, free website analysis for up to 1,000 subpages
With the SEO Check, the SEO tool provider Seobility offers beginners the opportunity to perform an onpage analysis for exactly one URL. The tool is therefore suitable for very small projects where one or very few pages need to be analyzed. If, for example, a project consists of a total of five pages, the analysis must be performed five times in succession and the results then merged accordingly.
After the query for the selected individual page, the user receives a to-do list with suggestions for SEO optimization, including from the areas of page response time, metadata, page quality, page structure, or links.
Those who want to analyze more pages of a project can opt for the “Basic Package”. This is free for a website with up to max. 1,000 crawled pages, max. 200 checked external links and the monitoring of up to 10 keywords. All that is required is registration with Seobility.
SEO Spider from SEORCH
SEO-Spider at a glance:
- Free onpage analysis for up to 10,000 pages of a domain
- Email address required to retrieve results
- Download of detailed results as CSV file possible
- With the SEO-Spider from SEARCH, you can check up to 10,000 pages of a domain for important onpage SEO factors.
To use the SEO-Spider, you first have to enter the domain to be analyzed and then your email address. To this address, you will then receive the message about the completion of the analysis as well as the link through which you can retrieve the result.
The results of the onpage analysis are very comprehensive and are displayed in the form of a dashboard, separated into the areas of content analysis and technical analysis. Besides, the results include a detailed overview of all individual results, which can also be downloaded as a CSV file.
Dareboost
Dareboost at a glance:
- Free onpage analysis for one URL
- Indication of an SEO score for the analyzed URL
- The output of a to-do list for SEO optimizations
- Only one onpage analysis possible without registration
Exactly one analysis for one URL can be performed at the provider Dareboost. The result is a rather extensive analysis of important SEO factors such as page performance, page compression, heading structure, link structure, or metadata. The results are presented clearly in list form and contain detailed information on weak points for possible improvements, including examples.
However, if you want to perform more analyses, you have to register with the provider. Then up to five queries per month are possible free of charge.
Conclusion Onpage Tools: Free software only for small projects
A professional onpage tool has become indispensable if you want to be successful with your own website. This is the only way to correctly implement and continuously improve the increasingly complex technical, structural, and content-related requirements of a website from the very beginning.
Although there are numerous free onpage tools on the market, they usually only offer partial functionalities of an onpage analysis. Also, the query options are often limited to only a few URLs, which makes them unsuitable for larger sites or projects. Therefore, you should use a paid tool for the onpage analysis of large Internet projects, which offers the required range of functions. The monthly costs for this, starting at 30 euros, are usually amortized very quickly through successful SEO measures.