Semrush Site Audit: A Comprehensive Guide to Improving Website Health

A Semrush site audit is a powerful tool for evaluating and improving your website's health. It scans your website for technical issues, content problems, and performance bottlenecks.

Semrush site audit checks for broken links, which can harm your website's credibility and search engine rankings. Broken links can be a major issue, with 1 in 5 links on a typical website being dead.

To start a Semrush site audit, you need to have a Semrush account and a website to audit. The audit process typically takes a few minutes to complete, depending on the size of your website.

A comprehensive Semrush site audit can help you identify and fix issues that might be holding back your website's performance. By addressing these issues, you can improve your website's user experience, search engine rankings, and overall health.

A site audit is a thorough examination of your website's performance, and it's a crucial step in understanding where you stand in the online world. You can conduct a site audit using SEMrush's SEO Audit tool.

To start an audit, you'll need to set up a SEMrush account, which is a powerful tool that helps you analyze your website's strengths and weaknesses. This process is straightforward and takes just a few minutes.

Once you're in the SEO Audit tool, you'll need to enter your website URL and choose the location you want to target, which is an important step in understanding your website's performance in a specific region. This information will help you tailor your audit to your specific needs.

The audit process is initiated by clicking the "Start Audit" button, which begins the website audit process and gives you a detailed report on your website's performance.

Crawlability refers to how easy it is for Googlebot and other 'spiders' to crawl your website, and if Google can't crawl some pages, they won't be indexed in search engines.

Fixing technical issues is crucial for improving your website's crawlability and user experience. You can identify technical issues by running a thorough technical SEO audit using the Semrush Site Audit tool. This will help Semrush identify critical technical SEO issues and offer recommendations on improving your site's overall SEO health.

To ensure a comprehensive audit, configure your crawler settings by selecting a preferred crawler, such as Googlebot or Semrush bot, and choose a crawl source, like "Website". You can also block specific folders on your website from crawling and enter URL parameters to ignore while crawling.

Here are some common technical issues to look out for:

By fixing these technical issues, you can improve your website's crawlability, user experience, and ultimately, its search engine rankings.

A cover is essentially the visible part of a web page that users can see and interact with. It's the portion of the page that's accessible to search engines and users alike.

The cover is typically defined by the HTML element that contains the content, which can be a header, footer, or main section of the page. In the article section, we mentioned that the HTML element is used to define the cover, which is essential for crawlability.

The cover should be crawlable by search engines, meaning that it should be easily accessible and indexable. This is crucial for search engines to understand the structure and content of your web page.

A well-structured cover can improve crawlability and make it easier for search engines to understand your page's content. As mentioned earlier, a clear and concise header is essential for defining the cover and improving crawlability.

In addition to being crawlable, the cover should also be visually appealing and user-friendly. This means that it should be easy to read and understand, with clear headings and concise content.

A comprehensive website crawling is essential for identifying technical issues that may hinder your SEO efforts. SEMrush's SEO Audit tool performs a thorough crawl of your entire website, examining every page, link, and piece of content.

This feature ensures that no aspect of your site is left unchecked, helping you identify issues like broken links, duplicate content, and slow page load times. These issues can negatively impact your website's crawlability and user experience.

The SEMrush Site Audit tool can crawl up to 500 pages per audit, and you can choose to crawl more pages if needed. You can also select the crawl source as "Website" to crawl your entire website.

To configure your crawler settings, you can choose a preferred crawler like Googlebot or Semrush bot. This can help you focus on mobile users, which is increasingly important for search engines.

You can also block specific folders on your website from crawling and enter URL parameters that you'd like SiteAuditBot to ignore while crawling. This can help you avoid crawling unnecessary pages and reduce the crawl budget waste.

Here are some examples of URLs you may not want to crawl:

By allowing or disallowing specific URLs, you can control which pages are crawled and indexed by search engines. This can help you avoid crawling unnecessary pages and reduce the crawl budget waste.

Having a secure website is crucial for success, and one way to ensure that is by having HTTPS enabled. HTTPS stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, which protects your website and users by using an added layer of encryption.

Browsers like Google Chrome will warn visitors that a website is not secure, which can be scary for users. In addition, search engines like Google will rank you higher with HTTPS than without it.

To fix HTTPS implementation mistakes, you'll want to check the HTTPS Implementation report within Semrush's Site Audit tool. This report detects all errors related to the SSL certificate on your site and will show you issues like HTTPS pages with internal links to HTTP pages, mixed content issues, expired SSL certificates, non-secure pages, and issues with incorrect certificate names.

Here are some common HTTPS issues you may need to fix:

Once you've fixed these errors, run another site audit to ensure they don't show up in the HTTPS implementation report again.

The errors, warnings, and notices section of your SEMrush audit report is where you'll find the most pressing issues that need attention. This is where you'll find the errors that have the most weight on your Site Health score.

Errors are the most important problems on the website that need attention first. They have more weight on your Health Score compared to warnings and notices. To start making changes on your site that will significantly improve its health and visibility, work on all of the Errors first.

Warnings and notices are also important, but they don't have as much of an impact on your Site Health score. However, addressing them can still improve your website's health further.

Use the Site Audit tooltips “why and how to fix it” to learn more about each issue and how to resolve it. This will provide you with detailed instructions on how to fix each error, warning, or notice.

Here's a breakdown of the three categories:

By prioritizing and addressing these errors, warnings, and notices, you'll be well on your way to improving your website's crawlability and overall health.

Internal linking is often overlooked, but it's an incredibly important part of your Semrush SEO audit. It helps you organize your site's current link structure and get a better PageRank distribution.

Internal linking problems can be shown in your Semrush SEO audit, so you can fix them and improve your site's indexing and user navigation. You should be trying to make sure that each of your pages have more than one internal link pointing to them.

To analyze your internal links on Semrush, open the Site Audit overview report and navigate to the "Internal Linking" section under "Thematic Reports." This will show you a list of issues related to internal links on your site, along with recommendations on how to fix them.

Here are some ways to improve your internal linking:

To set up a Semrush site audit, you can follow a few simple steps.

You'll need to choose "site audit settings" from the available options. This will allow you to customize the audit to your specific needs.

The Semrush site audit settings involve choosing the "domains/subdomains" option. This is a crucial step in identifying areas for improvement on your website.

Page load time is an important factor for both search engines and user experience. If your page loads too slow, users will likely leave your site.

You can choose a preferred crawler, like Googlebot or Semrush bot, to crawl your website. This will help you identify issues that are specific to mobile users.

Focusing on mobile users is a good idea, especially since search engines are increasingly prioritizing mobile-friendly websites.

International optimization is crucial for multilingual sites. A Semrush website audit can check the hreflang attribute, which tells search engines what language the content is in.

Producing the best, most informative piece of content on a subject is a general rule for ranking content, and Google will reward you for it.

Creating content worth 1,000+ words is a good starting point for creating, optimizing, and ranking content.

International SEO requires careful consideration of how Google is showing the correct version of your pages to different users.

Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics that Google uses to measure your page speed and user experience. They're now a ranking factor, so it's essential to check them periodically for all your key pages.

Google checks for six metrics when determining your page speed: First Contentful Paint, Time to Interactive, Speed Index, Total Blocking Time, Largest Contentful Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift. These metrics measure how quickly your page content appears, how long it takes for the page to be fully interactive, and how much the visible elements move within the viewport.

The more images and videos you add to your website, the more you'll impact your score negatively. A great visual is important, but don't overload your site too much to avoid a poor user experience.

Here are the three main CWV metrics:

To improve your Core Web Vitals, focus on reducing the time it takes for your largest content elements to appear, minimizing the delay between user interaction and browser response, and reducing layout shifts.

Internal linking is often overlooked, but it's an incredibly important part of your website's overall optimization. It helps search engines figure out the structure of your site and how all of your content relates to each other.

You should be trying to make sure that each of your pages have more than one internal link pointing to them. This will help search engines understand the relationships between your content and improve your site's indexing.

Analyzing your internal links is a crucial step in optimizing your website. To do this, you can use tools like Semrush, which will show you a list of issues related to internal links on your site, along with recommendations on how to fix them.

Internal LinkRank (ILR) is a metric that measures how well interlinked a page is. The higher the ILR, the better your page is linked to other pages on your site.

Here are some ways to improve your internal linking:

To get a clear picture of where your website stands in the competition, you need to know how you measure up to your rivals. This is where competitor benchmarking comes in.

You can use the SEMrush SEO Audit tool to compare your website's audit results with those of your competitors. This gives you valuable insights into areas where you may be lagging or excelling in SEO.

To do this, select "Domain Overview" from the SEO dashboard and enter your domain in the search box. Next, enter four of your main competitors and hit the "Compare" button.

SEMrush will provide all the key SEO metrics on the competing domains, including Authority Score, Organic Traffic, Organic Keywords, Referring Domains, and Backlinks.

Here's a breakdown of the key metrics to look out for:

An overview of these key metrics will help you determine where you stand when compared to your top competitors.