Using the SEMrush Site Audit Tool SEMrush's Site Audit
Using the SEMrush Site Audit Tool SEMrush's Site Audit
tool is built to help you find and fix SEO errors on the page and drive more traffic to your website. Read below for a step-by-step explanation of how to use the tool and see how it compares to alternatives.
Website auditing is a fundamental SEO process. There are tons of software tools you can use to check your website and fix the major errors on the page. A subscription to SEMrush includes access to the Site Audit tool, a top option for websites with hundreds or thousands of pages.
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For a full breakdown of SEMrush and its main features, check out our SEMrush Review.
What is a site audit?
A site audit is an evaluation of the quality of a website based specifically on the factors that result in strong SEO performance. Site audits test websites for a variety of factors, including on-page HTML elements, mobile friendliness, page speed, internal links, and page status code. Site audits are performed by SEO software that crawls the pages of the website by following the links on each page. The results are reported by the software and can be prioritized to determine the greatest odds of improving the site's search engine search (SERP) ranking.
How often should I perform a site audit?
The ideal frequency of site audits depends on the size of your website and how actively you are making changes to it. For a smaller website with a few hundred pages and few updates, we recommend performing an audit once a quarter. For larger sites with thousands of pages and regular updates, it's best to do a site audit once a month. Checking your website regularly ensures that you are aware of any new SEO issues and that your SEO improvements are being implemented correctly.
SEMrush Site Audit Tool vs. alternatives
The SEMrush Site Audit tool works well for small to medium sized websites. It's thorough, tests for all major SEO mistakes, and synthesizes results into easy-to-digest reports. At the same time, its analysis is not as in-depth as alternatives built for large websites.
Here are the most popular site audit tools, and who they work best for:
Ahrefs: Ahrefs is SEMrush's biggest competitor. The site audit tool is similar and provides a little more detailed information on the SEO performance of each website.
Botify: Botify is a business SEO solution ideal for large websites. It combines site audits with log file analysis to uncover deep insights on how to improve SEO performance.
Deepcrawl: Deepcrawl is a special tool that is specifically aimed at site audits. It's deeper than SEMrush and ideal for larger sites and SEO experts.
Screaming Frog: Screaming Frog is another special tool that focuses on site auditing. As with Deepcrawl, it is best for larger sites and SEO experts.
WooRank: WooRank is a great option for smaller websites. At $ 59 per month, the cheapest plan is cheaper than Ahrefs and SEMrush, but it only crawls 2,500 pages.
How to Use the SEMrush Site Audit Tool
You can use the SEMrush Site Audit tool to get a thorough review of your website in less than 30 minutes. The results are summarized in a prioritized list of SEO mistakes that your team can fix. Here's a step-by-step overview of how to use the SEMrush Site Audit tool.
SEMrush Crawler Settings Site Audit
Before you begin, it is important that your crawler has the correct settings. SEMrush has an installation wizard that walks you through each of the six steps below.
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Site Audit Dashboard
Once you start the audit, it will take a few minutes to a few hours to complete. When completed, SEMrush returns the results in the site audit dashboard. It is helpful to review the statistics in this overview before delving into specific reports.
There are tons of statistics on this dashboard. Some of the most important are:
General site status
Number of SEO errors, warnings and notices
Number of crawled pages grouped by SEO health
Main issues
Robots.txt errors
HTTPS usage
Site audit errors
The next report to visit is the error report. Here, SEMrush ranks your SEO mistakes in order of severity. This is super helpful for those with less experience with SEO - other tools just return your mistakes, they don't rank them.
As you can see in the image above, SEMrush recommends that this website start fixing the broken internal links, incorrect pages in the sitemap.xml file, and the pages with duplicate meta descriptions.
Individual page results
The error report provides the most important information - the errors that your team should prioritize when solving your SEO performance. Once you've processed that information, you can view the crawled pages report to see the performance of your best individual pages.
For each individual page, you can see the main errors, warnings and notices, as well as the page's backlinks. This is a quick way to make sure your most important pages are healthy.
Site Audit Statistics
The Error Report and Top Page Reports are all you need to identify the SEO errors you need to fix. SEMrush also provides a site control statistics report that shares summary information you can use to better understand your website.
As you can see above, this report gives you a bird's-eye view of useful statistics, such as the percentage of your pages with the correct formatting, returning the correct status codes, and having canonical tags. These are many of the metrics that determine your overall SEMrush health score. Fixing SEO issues should improve these metrics.
Compare crawlSEMrushcrawls
reportThe last report in the Site Audit tool of the comparereport. The crawl comparison report displays the results of your first crawl next to your last crawl. This report makes it extremely easy to see the progress you are making in solving SEO issues, and is another example of why the SEMrush Site Audit tool is valuable to SMBs.
Bottom Line
The SEMrush Site Audit tool works well for small to medium sized websites. In six steps and less than an hour, you can use it to get a thorough understanding of the SEO health of your website. The tool also prioritizes the best solutions for you, which is valuable for people who are not SEO experts.
If you are looking for a new software tool that can support your online search efforts in many ways, including site audits, we highly recommend SEMrush.
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