There have been a lot of opinions expressed on the importance of Yext for local SEO you can read Mike Blumenthals and David Mihms, for instance. Step On Page SEO Checklist with FREE Automation TemplateLets face it Most on page SEO checklists are completely useless. Dont believe me Do a Google search for on page SEO checklist and take a look at the resultsYou get 3. And Most of them offer nothing more than a bullet list of incredibly basic advice. Include your keyword in the title tag. Make sure your site loads fast. And so onDont get me wrong, theres nothing inherently wrong with this advicePlot twist well be talking about site speed and meta tags later in this guide tooThe problem is these checklists fail to address two BIG issues Checking on page SEO elements across hundreds of pages is insanely boring It takes a crap load of time Luckily, theres a way to solve thisAutomation. In this 1. 9 step checklist, Ill be focusing on the top on page SEO ranking factors pulled from several reputable industry reports. Well look at supporting data, and provide action items for each checklist element. PLUS Im giving away a free Google Sheets template that automates most of the boring stuff for you. Heres taster NOTE Thanks to Joshua Hardwick from The SEO Project for creating this template Ill be walking you through template setup and the whole optimization process later in the guide but first, lets talk a bit more about on page optimization. Is on page SEO still important in 2. Let me begin by answering the first part of that question. YES On page SEO is definitely still important. But heres the problem It often gets overshadowed by other off page factors like backlinks and domain authority. I mean, take a look at this image from Ahrefs 2. Looking at this, youd be forgiven for thinking the on page factors listed here arent important at all. Cracked Seo Tools' title='Cracked Seo Tools' />A Collection of Free Responsive Blogger Templates, BloggerCSS3 Website Templates. Download High Quality and Latest Free Blogger Templates. They look negligible next to those other factors, right Im not disagreeing that backlink factors will probably always be more important than on page factorsBut, heres the thing Backlink factors take monthsyears and a lot of cash to build. Meanwhile, a keyword can easily be added to a title tag in lt 6. So While this study shows keyword in title as 4 5 times less important as referring domains, its important to remember it takes less than 4 5 times the effort to change Before you start investing loads of time and money in content product and link building campaigns, focus on the foundational elements. Cracked Seo Tools' title='Cracked Seo Tools' />On page SEO falls in this bucket because its what search engines like Google use to understand the context of content, determine relevancy for different search queries, and gauge user experience. Get this part wrong and youll be fighting an uphill battle. Arroyo Administration Programs on this page. Anyway, heres what the very same study found to be some key on page ranking factors Ill be tackling most of these on page ranking factors in this guide but first, I want to tackle the two seemingly most important factors according to the screenshot above, which are Keyword in domain name Age of the page. You have very little control over both of these things. Your keyword is either in your domain nameor it isnt. Your page is well agedor it isnt. Dont let this worry you everyone else is in the same boat. Focus on the factors you do have control over. Authors. Note The majority of on page SEO advice you see online centers on the strategic placement of exact match keywords within core page elements title tag, headings, URL etc. While keyword placement is important, more complex factors such as intent and overall relevancy of a pagepost are now being weighted heavily by search engines. Here is a simple example of this concept provided by the folks at Ahrefs Youll notice that the exact search term guest posting is only showing for one of the top ranking pages. Google sees articles about guest blogging sites and guide to guest blogging as relevant topics to that search query. The takeaway When youre looking at on site optimization dont fall into the trap of ONLY focusing on exact match keywords. Look for partial match, synonyms and semantic keyword variations more on this later. This will help boost keyword spread, and strengthen the overall topical relevancy of your page. Introducing the automated on page SEO template. Traffic-Travis.png' alt='Cracked Seo Tools' title='Cracked Seo Tools' />Before I walk you through exactly how the aforementioned on page SEO automation template works, here are a few things to note This template can be used for any website in any niche to scale keyword topic optimization at the page level It can be used to automate 1. It supports up to 1. Let me give you a quick tour if you prefer video, jump here This is the START HERE tab, which contains detailed instructions for each step of the process. The next two tabs are all data import tabs this is where youll important data from a few third party tools more on this laterNext, we have the Keyword mapping tab This is where youll assign a target keywordtopic for each page on your website. And finally, the DONE tab This is where youll see the results of the automated on page audit for EVERY page on your website. No need to open any pages manuallyNo need to view source and sift through the HTML for each pageIts all handled by the spreadsheet trust me, this saves an insane amount of timeWhile the spreadsheet automates most of the top on site SEO elements, there are still some factors that cant be checked automatically e. LSI evaluation. Ill cover these towards the end of the post. But first, lets get the spreadsheet set up1. SEO elements and automate the tedious stuff. First, youre going to want to make a copy of the spreadsheet template on your Google Drive To do this, click the link above to get access to the spreadsheet and go to File Make a Copy. You should now have an editable copy of the template on your own Google Drive. So, how does this template actually workFull instructions are provided in the spreadsheet itself Heres the basic process Import all the pages on your website this is done automatically you just have to paste your sitemap URL into the spreadsheet Import the required data into the sheet note youll need a SEMRush and URL Profiler for this Manually assign a target keyword to each page Check the DONE tab for SEO recommendations Authors. Note Youll need SEMRush and URL Profiler to pull all the data into the template. You can get free access to both tools below Heres a video showing how to set up the spreadsheet from start to finish All set up and ready to go Lets go through the checklist step by step starting with all the items the spreadsheet automates for you  1. Instantly boost traffic by removing misplaced noindex tags. Any page with the noindex tag applied to it WILL NOT be indexed by search engines. If you want a page to rank for anything, it MUST be indexed. If the spreadsheet kicks back a noindex tag for a page you want indexed, youll need to remove it. If the page shouldnt be indexed, no worries, you can leave the noindex tag where it is. Authors. Note It could be argued this is more of a technical SEO item, but one of the biggest mistakes I see when performing audits is people inadvertently restricting search engines from accessing key content. This typically occurs in two places 1. Setting a disallow directive in the robots. This can happen at the domain, page and sub folder level 2. Setting a no index tag at the page level.