You can run a site audit on any website with the right tools, but some websites may be more challenging to audit than others.
The type of website and its complexity can affect the ease of a site audit. For example, a simple blog may be easier to audit than a complex e-commerce site with multiple integrations.
Many website owners and developers use site audit tools to identify and fix technical issues, improve user experience, and increase search engine rankings.
These tools can help you identify issues such as broken links, duplicate content, and slow page loading times.
What Is a Site Audit?
A site audit is a comprehensive examination of a website's visibility in search engines, analyzing its technical framework, on-page and off-page elements, and user experience to gauge its performance and identify areas for improvement.
It checks the efficacy of content in relation to targeted keywords and assesses backlink quality, ensuring the site is easily navigable and all web pages are secure and load effectively.
An SEO audit is crucial for digital marketers, web developers, and business owners to understand their website's strengths and weaknesses from an SEO perspective, paving the way for strategic enhancements and adjustments.
It's a meticulous evaluation that ensures a website is optimized to achieve the highest possible search engine rankings, maximizing organic traffic flow.
On-page SEO is a critical aspect of optimizing your website, involving optimizing content, structure, and other elements of each landing page.
SEOmator includes powerful on-page checks to identify issues and optimize landing pages for maximum visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Tools for Site Audit
You can run a site audit on any website using various tools, each with its own unique features and pricing.
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a popular choice, offering a free version that allows you to crawl 500 URLs, or a paid license for $259 per year to remove the limit and access advanced features.
Google Search Console and Google Chrome Developer Tools are also free options for auditing a website.
Ryte offers a freemium model, providing a range of features for free, including website audits, before requiring a paid upgrade.
HubSpot's Website Grader is another free tool that can help identify areas for improvement on a website.
SEOptimer is a tool that runs over 100 SEO checks in seconds, providing a customizable PDF report that can be white-labeled for clients.
Using the Spider Tool
You can use the Screaming Frog SEO Spider to crawl both small and large websites efficiently, allowing you to analyse the results in real-time.
The SEO Spider is a powerful and flexible site crawler that can gather key onsite data to help you make informed decisions.
To get started, you can download and crawl 500 URLs for free, but if you need to crawl more than that, you'll need to buy a licence for $259 per year.
With the SEO Spider, you can export key onsite SEO elements like URL, page title, meta description, headings, etc. to a spreadsheet, making it easy to use as a base for SEO recommendations.
You can also use the SEO Spider to crawl dynamic, JavaScript-rich websites and frameworks, such as Angular, React, and Vue.js, by rendering web pages using the integrated Chromium WRS.
Here are some key features of the SEO Spider:
- Fast and advanced SEO site audit tool
- Can be used to crawl small and large websites
- Allows you to view, analyse, and filter crawl data in real-time
- Can export key onsite SEO elements to a spreadsheet
- Can crawl dynamic, JavaScript-rich websites and frameworks
The SEO Spider is a valuable tool for any website audit, and can be used in conjunction with other tools to get a comprehensive analysis of a website's structure, content, technical issues, backlinks, and performance.
Crawl
When you run a site audit, you'll want to make sure you're crawling every nook and cranny of the site. This means analyzing page titles and meta data to identify any issues.
Analyzing page titles and meta descriptions can help you identify those that are too long, short, missing, or duplicated across your site. This is especially important for ensuring search engine optimization (SEO) best practices.
Crawling dynamic websites is also crucial, especially if they're built with JavaScript frameworks like Angular, React, or Vue.js. The integrated Chromium WRS can render web pages to crawl these sites effectively.
Identifying Issues
Identifying issues on a website is a crucial step in running a site audit. You can use automated tools like SEOmator, SEMrush, and Moz to perform a comprehensive analysis of the website's structure, content, technical issues, backlinks, and performance.
Broken links on a website can negatively impact search rankings, so it's essential to identify and fix them quickly. You can use tools like the Broken Link Checker Tool to search a site for any broken links.
A website's technical issues can be identified in several areas. Slow pages, too-large CSS or HTML, and missing or duplicate HTML tags are just a few examples. You can also check for issues with social tags, content quality, localization, and external pages.
Here are some common technical issues to look out for:
By identifying and fixing these technical issues, you can improve a website's performance, user experience, and search engine rankings.
Boost Your Performance!
You can run a site audit on any website to identify areas for improvement and boost its performance. A comprehensive site audit will give you a detailed analysis of your website's search engine optimization, including technical and on-page factors, content quality, and competitor analysis.
To perform an SEO audit, you'll need to work through crawling and indexing, identify indexing problems, and check your on-page elements. This will help you understand how search engines are crawling and indexing your website.
You can use tools like Google's PageSpeed Insights to analyze your page speed and identify opportunities to improve load times. Slow page speeds can negatively affect the user experience and result in lower numbers of traffic.
Here's a breakdown of the steps involved in a page speed test:
By following these steps and identifying areas for improvement, you can boost your website's performance and achieve better results in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Make Your Site Search Engine Friendly
To make your site search engine friendly, you need to optimize its content, structure, and other elements. This is known as on-page SEO, a critical aspect of optimizing your website for search engines.
A powerful on-page check can help you identify any issues and optimize your landing pages for maximum visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). You can use tools like SEOmator to perform a comprehensive analysis of your website's structure, content, and technical issues.
Analyzing page titles and meta data is also crucial. SEOmator's powerful on-page checks can identify page titles and meta descriptions that are too long, short, missing, or duplicated across your site. This information can help you make necessary adjustments to improve your website's visibility.
To ensure your website is mobile-friendly, check Google's mobile friendliness score for every page. This is especially important, as Google prioritizes mobile-friendly websites in its search results. You can use tools like Google's Mobile-Friendly Test to evaluate your website's mobile-friendliness.
Here are some key areas to focus on to make your site search engine friendly:
- Optimize your page titles and meta descriptions
- Ensure your website is mobile-friendly
- Use tools like SEOmator to identify and fix technical issues
- Analyze your website's content and structure to improve visibility
Design and Accessibility
A website audit can be a comprehensive process, covering various aspects of a website's functionality and user experience. You'll want to ensure that your audit includes design and accessibility checks.
To conduct a design and user experience website audit, you'll focus on the visuals, navigation, functionality, and perception of the website. This means examining all pages, with a special emphasis on main navigation pages and frequently visited pages, also known as red routes.
Here's a quick rundown of the tools you'll need for this audit:
- CMS (Content Management System)
- Eyes (your own, to assess visual aspects)
- A mobile device (to test mobile compatibility)
For website accessibility, you'll want to make sure the information on your website can be consumed and understood by individuals with disabilities. This includes visual and auditory accessibility, which can be tested using tools like WAVE or webaccessibility.com.
Design and Accessibility
Broken links can negatively impact a client's search rankings, so it's essential to identify and fix them quickly. Use the free Broken Link Checker Tool to search a site for any broken links.
You can copy and paste URLs to check multiple pages all at once. This can save time and ensure that all broken links are found and fixed.
Temporary and permanent redirects can also impact a site's functionality, so it's crucial to audit them. Find temporary and permanent redirects, identify redirect chains and loops, or upload a list of URLs to audit in a site migration.
Design & UX
Design & UX is a crucial aspect of any website. It encompasses the visuals, navigation, functionality, and perception of your site. You should audit all pages, with a focus on main navigation pages and critical activities.
A website audit involves using a CMS, your own eyes, and a mobile device to get a feel for how your site functions. This is essential for identifying areas of improvement.
Pages to audit include your main navigation pages and those along your "red routes" – the paths users take when performing frequent and critical activities. These are the areas where users are most likely to get stuck or frustrated.
Here are some key areas to focus on during your design & UX audit:
- Visuals: Ensure your website's visuals are consistent and appealing.
- Navigation: Make sure your navigation is intuitive and easy to use.
- Functionality: Test all functions and features to ensure they work as expected.
- Perception: Consider how users perceive your website and identify areas for improvement.
By following these guidelines, you'll be able to create a better user experience and improve your website's overall design.
Accessibility
Accessibility is a crucial aspect of website design. It ensures that information on your website can be consumed and understood by individuals with disabilities.
A website accessibility audit is a great place to start. This involves making sure your website is accessible to people with visual and hearing impairments. A full accessibility audit should cover more than just visual and auditory accessibility.
The focus of a website accessibility audit is on visual and auditory accessibility. This means checking that your website is usable by people with visual and hearing impairments.
The pages to audit are the whole website. This includes every page, from the homepage to the contact page.
You can use tools like WAVE or webaccessibility.com to help with the audit. A mobile device is also a useful tool for testing accessibility.
Here's what to check during a website accessibility audit:
- Visual accessibility: Ensure that text can be read by screen readers, and that images have alternative text.
- Auditory accessibility: Ensure that videos have captions, and that audio files have transcripts.
3rd Party Technologies
3rd Party Technologies can significantly impact your website's performance.
Using the free Find the Technology a Website is Built With Tool can help you identify all the 3rd party plugins and tools on your site.
A slow website will negatively affect search rankings, so it's essential to review and remove any redundant or unused plugins from the source code of the site.
Removing unnecessary plugins can really help improve page load speed.
Competitor Analysis
To run a site audit on any website, you'll need to do a competitor analysis. This involves benchmarking the metrics from the audit against those of your competitors.
The White Label Audit Reports allows you to benchmark websites against competitors by simply inputting their URLs. This will give you a comprehensive view of all website checks run across your site and competitor sites.
For ongoing tracking of competitor website changes, use a tool like Competeshark. This tool automatically monitors competitor websites and alerts you when changes are made by competitors.
Schedule
Scheduling a site audit can be a breeze, especially with the right tools. You can run schedule crawls at chosen intervals, which is super helpful for keeping your audit data up to date.
With this feature, you can also auto-export crawl data to any location, including Google Sheets. This makes it easy to analyze and visualize your data.
Automating your site audit entirely via command line is also an option. This can save you a ton of time and effort, especially if you have a large website.
This feature is particularly useful if you have a team of people working on your website. You can set up the schedule crawl to run automatically, and everyone will have access to the latest data.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the limit of site audit in Semrush?
The site audit limit in Semrush varies by plan: 100 pages for the Free plan and 20,000 pages for the Pro plan. Learn more about our audit capabilities and choose the plan that suits your needs.
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