Generating more traffic from Google is REALLY hard no matter what niche you’re in. SEO is becoming even harder day by day. So what’s the best way to sustain your current search traffic and attract even more traffic from Google? Conduct an in-depth website audit. How to do that as a beginner? In this post, we’ll talk about exactly that where you’ll discover important things like;
What a site audit is all about What are the benefits of site audits How to perform a DETAILED site audit using Semrush (we use the same) And many more
Are you ready? Let’s get started without much ado.
Site Audit for SEO: A Beginner’s Guide to Find And Fix Your Website Issues
What is an SEO site audit?
An SEO website audit is a process of analyzing how well your site ranks in search engines like Google. A site audit helps you identify and fix ALL the SEO issues on your website. There are many ways to perform an SEO site audit. One of the easiest ways to perform a detailed site audit is to use tools like the Semrush Site Audit tool. Did you know that Semrush Site Audit scans your website for over 130 technical and SEO issues? That means you’ll be able to find almost every issue that’s preventing your website from getting more search traffic.
What are the benefits of a site audit?
So why should even bother about auditing your website? Here are some of the major benefits of performing an in-depth website audit.
With a site audit, you can easily discover issues like duplicate content, broken links, and lengthy title tags You’ll be able to identify all the AMP pages with HTML issues Discover pages that couldn’t be crawled Find broke external images and internal images Identify duplicate meta descriptions on a page Find multiple canonical URLs and many more
All in all, performing a detailed site audit helps you discover all the problematic issues that are preventing your site from getting more traffic from Google. Before getting into the details, make sure to give a try to it by using the below link. Start your 30 days free trial with Semrush (worth $119.95)
How to Perform an In-depth Site Audit With Semrush in 10 Steps
Here’s a simple yet practical tutorial on how to use Semrush site audit to find and fix all your website issues. Step 1: Once you’ve signed up for Semrush, visit the Site Audit tool. Quick note: Here’s a FREE 30-day free trial of Semrush Pro account for you (which is worth $119.95!) Step 2: Once you’re on the Semrush Site Audit tool, click on “Add new project” (on top right) to add your website for SEO audit. Here’s how it looks like; Step 3: Now, simply enter your domain name and project name and click on the “Create project” button to proceed to the next step. Have a look; You don’t need to edit any settings except the limit of checked pages as it will depend upon the size of your site. Step 4: Click on the Start Site Audit button to start your website’s audit process. It will take some time to crawl your whole website (depending on the size of your site). Once the site crawl has finished, you will see a dashboard that looks like this; As you can see above, you’ll see an overall Site Health score of your site (the higher the score, the fewer problems your website has). The good thing about the Semrush site audit tool is that it shows you all the errors, warnings, and notices along with the pages. This way you can easily fix those issues to improve your site health. Step 5: Make sure to immediately fix the “Top Issues” of your website. Semrush site audit tool provides you the most important issues detected on your site based on their number and priority level. Here’s how it looks like; You can click on those links to find all the corresponding issues on your website. Here’s how the slow load speed issues on our website look like; As you can see above, we currently have four pages with slow loading time issues. The Semrush site audit tool shows you the loading time (in seconds) of those pages so you can easily optimize their speed. You can follow various strategies such as optimizing your images, using a CDN, enabling Lazy Load, etc to improve the overall loading times of your pages. Step 6: Check your website’s performance. You can also find the Performance report of your website from the Semrush Site Audit tool. Here’s how it looks like; As you can see above, you can find a lot of important things under the Site Performance report including;
Page (HTML) load speed The average page load speed of crawled pages Number of JavaScript and CSS Performance issues (along with errors, warnings, and notices)
A quick tip: You can use Google’s FREE PageSpeed Insights tool to quickly find suggestions to improve the overall speed and performance of your problematic pages. Step 7: Check crawlability issues of your website If you’re struggling to increase your search traffic even after publishing great content, your website might have “crawlability issues”. “Crawlable” simply means the links to and within your site can be discovered and followed by search engine bots to rank your site. Crawlability issues include;
Server errors Temporary redirects Non-indexable pages Redirect chains and loops and so on
Fortunately, with the Semrush Site Audit tool, you can easily discover your website’s crawlability issues. Here’s how it looks like; As you can see above, you’ll find a crawlability score of your site (the higher the score, the fewer issues your website has). It will also check for the page crawl depth to give you an overview of your site’s crawlability depth. Step 8: Check your website’s internal linking Want to know how your links are distributed within your website? Then, you should keep an eye on your internal linking score from the Semrush site audit tool. It gives you a full overview of your internal link profile. Here’s how it looks like; As you can see above, you’ll be able to check your internal linking score along with internal link issues that include;
Broken internal links Malformed links Broken external links Too many on-page links Too long link URLs and more
Step 9: Check HTTPS implementation of your website HTTPS is a MUST for every website. In fact, it’s a ranking signal in Google. So if your site is not yet equipped with HTTPS, make sure to install it to improve your rankings. Even if you’ve enabled HTTPS, there might be issues with HTTPS implementation. Here’s where the Semrush Site Audit tool comes into handy. It gives you an overview of your site’s HTTPS implementation. Here’s how it looks like; As you can see above, under HTTPS implementation, you’ll find a score (the higher, the better). You’ll also find various things like;
Security certificate related things (shows you whether they are up to date) Server-side issues (if any) Website architecture issues (such as pages with mixed content, links that lead to HTTP non-secure page, etc)
Side note: Make sure to read our in-depth guide on installing SSL certificates to easily enable HTTPS on your website. Step 10: Keep an eye on your website’s site audit progress Website SEO audit is NOT a one-time process. You need to regularly audit your website to find and fix your site issues to improve your organic rankings. Also, you need to keep an eye on your site’s SEO audit progress. You don’t have to separately keep a track of your site audit progress as Semrush Site Audit tool will show you a “progress” report. You can easily see how the number of issues, as well as other site audit metrics, were changing from audit to audit. Here’s how the BloggersPassion site audit progress looks like; As you can see above, you’ll be able to see the historical chart of your website audits under the site audit “Progress” tab where you can easily find all the issues and errors of your website including;
Missing title tags Duplicate content Broken links Large HTML pages Pages not crawled and many more
So there you go. That’s how you can use the Semrush site audit tool to perform an in-depth audit of your website.
Few Tips to Perform Site Audits to Fix Your Website Issues Like A Pro
Here are a few tips to find and fix your site issues like an SEO expert. When you’re done with SEO audit with Semrush, here are a few things that you need to improve to increase your overall site score and on page SEO as well. Make sure to add meta descriptions for all those missing pages and then check how it impacts your site score. Using Rank Math SEO, add meta descriptions to all the pages. Now, after adding the meta description to all those missing pages, your site’s overall score increases even more.
HTML markup: If you are concerned about SEO then you should constantly monitor this key area. However, if you are using a quality theme, this should not be a problem. Titles: Title is the one that attracts readers first and search engines too. Make sure that your titles are unique, precise and relevant to the content. If you want to check for any title duplication, then you can do so with the help of Google Search Console. Go to Google search console, under that click on “Search Appearance”, under that you will find Screaming Frog’s Page Titles tab and HTML Improvements. Check with it to find whether that title is taken already or not. However, if yours is WordPress site, then Yoast plugin is enough. URLs: For every post you write, URLs you keep should be short, user friendly and has a keyword added into it. In WordPress, you will have the option of using permalinks and WordPress does this automatically. Meta description: You need to make description very unique relevant to the page content below 172 characters. But make sure that you add related keywords in it. You can also check description using Screaming Frog apart from the Yoast and other SEO plugins. Headings tags: To give proper format and structure to content and making it scannable, use H1 tags in titles. Precise Content: The WordPress Yoast plugin checks whether your content is unique, precise and value-added. It is the perfect plugin to optimize your blog’s content. Images: If you use any images in your content, then make sure that ALT tags, file titles, SEO markers for images contain keywords and are descriptive as well. WordPress has an image plugin to check this. However, Screaming Frog has its own section where you can reduce image size for it to load faster. Links: As the site grows, the chances of dead links will also increase. Although, there is a relatively good WordPress plugin to identify broken links, there are also some good dead link checkers available online. Keywords: WordPress Yoast plugin optimizes only one page per a focus keyword. If a repetition occurs, Yoast will point it out. Technical errors: Go to Google Search Console account to find out crawl errors. If there are any, correct the nonexistent pages with the 404 error. In other words, redirect the URLs of these pages to places with the necessary information. Duplicate content: To find duplicate content issues on your site, use Siteliner.com. Alternatively, you can use Google Search Console too. Check under HTML Improvements to make necessary changes.
With this, you can be aware of a site’s SEO weak spots. You can then prioritize each flaw and rectify over time and you could see how each alteration has a positive impact on your website. You will need to use lots of tools and plugins if you are manually doing an SEO audit for any website. But with Semrush, you can find out and fix all of the technical SEO issues from your website with ease using their Site Audit feature.
Here’s how you can grab Semrush 30 days FREE trail worth $119.95
Let’s now quickly talk about how you can get access to Semrush Pro account which is worth $119.95. Step 1: Click this VIP link to grab your 30 days Semrush account for free (which is worth $119.95). You’ll now have to register by entering your email and any password. Step 2: This is where you will need to enter your billing details. You’ll get a 30 days free trial of Semrush Pro here. Step 3: Enter your payment to instantly grab your Semrush Pro account free for next 30 days. Let’s now talk about how you can conduct an in-depth site audit using the Semrush Site Audit tool.
Pricing of Semrush
Semrush offers 3 pricing packages that are listed below: Let’s now quickly talk about each one of them to find out the best fit for your blogging needs. Semrush Pro: With Semrush Pro account, you can get the following things.
Results per report: 10,000 Reports per day: 3000 Projects: 5 Keywords to track: 500 Pages to crawl: 100,000 Social media profiles: 50 Scheduled PDF reports: 5
Cost: $119.95 monthly Semrush Guru: With Semrush Guru account, you can get the following things.
Results per report: 30,000 Reports per day: 5000 Projects: 50 Keywords to track: 1500 Pages to crawl: 300,000 Social media profiles: 100 Scheduled PDF reports: 20 Branded PDF reports Get access to Historical data
Cost: $229.95 monthly Semrush business: With Semrush Business account, you can get the following things.
Results per report: 50,000 Reports per day: 10,000 Projects: 40 Keywords to track: 6000 Pages to crawl: 1,000,000 Social media profiles: 300 Scheduled PDF reports: 50 Branded PDF reports Historical data Product Listing Ads Multi-user management
Cost: $449.95 monthly
5 Benefits of Using Semrush Site Audit Tool
If you’re still having questions about why you need the Semrush site audit tool over other site audit tools, here are some of the major benefits of using it.
- Check your site’s health With the Semrush Site Audit tool’s report, you can analyze your website and make it more accessible for search engine robots. If you want to conduct an SEO-test with Semrush Site Audit reports, then set up an audit campaign. Once you set up it, you can:
Add tags where they are missing. Optimize your internal and external links. Make titles, meta descriptions, and other HTML tags unique and comprehensible for users and search engines. Correct broken images and provide them all with an alt attribute. Detect and erase error pages. Find duplicate content pages. And fix other problems that are blocking your SEO progress.
Make sure that you don’t exceed your crawled pages limit then you can crawl your website at any time to get reports with the most fresh results. 2. You can prioritize SEO issues and fix them Semrush Site Audit tool checks issues that are related to crawlability, content, images, links, accessibility and coding. And the report shows you the most frequently found problems on your website. If you want to fix a particular issue throughout your entire website, then check out SEO analysis report. It displays the URLs of all webpages affected by the issue also lists all issues found on a landing page. 3. Track your SEO progress You can regularly monitor your website’s health using Semrush SEO analysis report. Schedule a weekly technical SEO audit and it will automatically start crawling your website. Once finished, you will get a notification. By running website SEO audits on a regular basis, you are tracking the progress of your website’s health. Position Tracking tool helps you to look at your site’s positions too. 4. Fix hreflang mistakes When it comes to International SEO, hreflang are a cornerstone. It tells Google which page should be shown to visitors depending on their language and location. So, if you wrongly implement hreflang tags, it damages the user experience as well as SEO of your website. To find and fix hreflang errors, use Semrush SEO Audit feature. 5. Detect security issues Having HTTPS on your website is an important ranking factor for search engines. It is a sign to users that you care about their privacy and security. Site Audit came up with a new HTTPS report that quickly detect security issues on your website. It warns when your SSL certificate is expired or if it’s registered to an incorrect domain name. It also alerts you about internal links to non-secure pages, missing redirects from HTTP to HTTPS versions of the same page, HTTP URLs in your sitemap and usage of HTTP on pages with password fields. You can also export .pdf file of site audit report. If you offer SEO services, then this feature helps in converting a prospect into a client.
4 factors to consider while doing site audit
It doesn’t matter which tool you’re using for site audit (Moz or Semrush or any other tool), here are some important factors you need to keep in mind to get the most out of site audits.
- Site speed One of the main things that search engine cares about is user-experience. If your website doesn’t load instantly then the end-user won’t come to your website again. So, checking site speed is very important. There are several free online tools you can use. But it is recommended to use Google’s pagespeed insights tool to match with its expectation.
- Indexing and accessibility User interaction with your website is recorded only when your website is assessed by its usability which means whether your visitors and search engine crawlers are able to access your webpages or not. For this, your website has to be properly indexed. If not properly indexed, it shows 4xx or 5xx server errors or 3xx redirect errors. However, these SEO audits are easy to perform with Semrush.
- Mobile-friendly test Google has already upgraded to a mobile-first index to publish search results which clearly means online businesses need a responsive website that performs well on mobile devices too. You can also use Google’s mobile friendly testing tools to perform a quick test.
- Content Without content, there is no point in talking about SEO as content is the driving force behind SEO. Focus on publishing high-quality content that provides great value to your readers. If you write In-depth content, then you will automatically outrank your competitors. By doing content audit, you can determine the strengths and weaknesses of your website like which pages are driving traffic and conversions and which pages are redundant. Search engines don’t rank websites. They rank pages. The first task of a content audit is to identify which pages are ranking and which are not. So that you will know which pages to improve. When optimizing your content, make sure you keep the most relevant keywords in these sections:
Page Title and URL Opening paragraph First 100 words At least one subheading Alt tags in images Metatags Meta description
If you want to perform a quick audit on your website with a few tests to increase SEO rankings, these corrections will have the most impact. In order to ensure that your website is not missing out any valuable traffic then conduct audit checks at least every three months. Here are some of the frequently asked questions around the Semrush site audit. Browse more Semrush Posts:
- Pro plan costs you $119.95 per month which is great for freelancers and startups2. Guru plan costs you $229.95 per month which is great for a small business where you’ll get all the features from the Pro plan along with extended limits and historical data3. Business plan costs you $449.95 per month which is great for agencies where you’ll get all the features from the Guru plan along with API access and extended limits – Finding your website linking issues– Organizing your site’s link structure– Ensuring your site’s link distribution properly and more – Semrush site audit– SEOptimer (free to use but NOT as comprehensive as Semrush)– SEO site audit tool by Ahrefs– Ubersuggest SEO analyzer (free to use but not as good as Semrush) Click here to get a 16% instant discount on Semrush
How to find traffic generating blog post ideas using Semrush?
Final Thoughts
Finding and fixing all your website SEO related issues is the most important step. If you want to bring more search traffic to your sites, make sure to conduct site audits frequently (at least once a month). Here’s where tools like Semrush come into handy. Not only Semrush helps you find great keywords, analyse competition, find link building opportunities but it also helpful in doing in-depth SEO site audit for any site to bring more search traffic. So did you like this tutorial on doing site audit using Semrush tool? Do you have any questions? Share your thoughts in the comments.
