Audit your website

Technical SEO errors can hold back your site and negatively impact rankings, overall visibility, and conversions. To identify and fix such issues quickly, use the Semrush Site Audit Tool. It crawls a domain and creates a report to show where there are potential problems and suggests recommendations on how to improve your website’s technical health. Site Audit offers a range of thematic reports covering crawlability, HTTPS, site performance, Core Web Vitals, and more.

We’ve put together this workflow to show how you can organize your work in Site Audit in an efficient way. Follow these steps to quickly discover a website’s gaps you need to focus on first to improve its technical health and as a result enhance its visibility.

1. Launch Site Audit

If you haven’t set up any project in Semrush yet, you will see the following screen when clicking on Site Audit.

To start, enter a domain that you would like to scan for technical issues and click on Start Audit. The next step is to configure your audit campaign.

An example of Site Audit starting page that shows up if no projects have been created yet. Two red arrows are present - one is pointing at the name of the tool in the list on the left side to make it easier to find, and the second one is pointing at the search bar, prompting to enter a website and start a new project.

In case you’ve already created a project on the platform, navigate to Site Audit to Set up the tool under an existing project or create a new one with the "Create project" button in the upper right corner.

An example of Site Audit starting page for those who already have projects set up. One red arrow is pointing at the blue button on top of the project list, called Create project; the second red arrow is pointing at the Set up button available for the third example project. Set up button only appears if a project has been created but has no Site Audit campaign yet.

To start, you can run an audit with default settings. If necessary, you can customize the crawl by using the advanced configuration options.

Click Start Audit and wait for the tool to scan your website’s pages. The time of crawling varies depending on your crawl-delay setting and the size of your audit.

Site Audit settings wizard displayed, showing a 5-step process for configuring a Site Audit campaign.

Note: If your Site Audit is not running properly, check out this Troubleshooting guide.

2. Prioritize Your Work

Once you’ve set up your audit campaign, you can start working through the issues identified by the tool. A technical SEO audit isn’t easy. The first time you face an audit, it can seem like there’s just too much to do. Let's see how you can organize your work in Site Audit to quickly improve your site’s health and visibility.

Errors / Warnings / Notices

When Semrush finishes auditing your website, you get a Site Health score representing how healthy the website is. The Site Health Score is based on the number of your total errors and total warnings that were found on the pages crawled on your site.

Errors are the most important problems on the website that need attention first. Errors have more weight on your Health Score compared to warnings and notices.

So, the best way to start making changes on your site that will significantly improve its health and visibility would be to work on all of the Errors. Next, move to Warnings and Notices to improve your website’s health further.

An example of the Overview report in Site Audit. The screenshot is demonstrating what the following widgets look like: Site Health, Errors, Warnings, and Notices.

Use the Site Audit tooltips “why and how to fix it” to learn more about each issue and how to resolve it.

Top Issues

The second way to prioritize your work is to fix what’s on your list of Top Issues. You will find the list on the Overview tab under the Thematic Reports. Top Issues are the most important issues detected on your website based on their repetition and priority level. For quick wins, you can start working on this list first.

An Overview report in Site Audit is opened, and a red arrow is pointing at the name of this tab; another red arrow is pointing at the Top Issues widget below.

Connect Google Analytics

Another way to achieve a quick win is to connect your Google Analytics Account to see the pages with a higher number of visits and fix their problems first, so you do not lose this important traffic.

The Google Analytics integration settings on the Crawled Pages report. Providing an example of what Google Analytics data looks like in Semrush. Two red arrows are pointing at the special metrics: Unique Pageviews and Issues; a settings list is opened via the gear icon on the right with the "Google Analytics: connected" text being highlighted.

Thematic Reports

Thematic reports on the Overview tab dive into specific aspects of a website where common issues are found. This is where you can quickly assess if you have any issues related to a website’s transition from HTTP to HTTPS, hreflang and structured data implementation, crawlability, Internal linking between pages, or Site performance.

Core Web Vitals is our latest addition to the Thematic reports. It contains a set of metrics that measure the loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of a website. These metrics are confirmed to be a ranking factor by Google, so fixing those issues can be a great way to improve your pages’ positions on SERP.

Log File Analyzer

You can use our Log File Analyzer tool, which analyzes your access logs and presents a report about how GoogleBot crawled your website, and if there are any errors to fix and crawl budget to save. All you have to do is upload the access log file of your website and let the tool do its job.

An example of Log File Analyzer interface. Above the Googlebot Activity graph, a red arrow is pointing at the dropdown menu setting, switched to "All Google Bots".

We have covered a few ways of grouping and prioritizing issues that can help you adjust the workflow to your needs. The next step would be to share the tasks with your team or webmaster.

3. Send Issues to Task Trackers

Stay organized and keep your team updated on the technical audit. The more you work together to keep your website running smoothly, the better your technical SEO audits will go.

If your team is using a task tracker like Trello, you can send issues directly to your team’s board by integrating Semrush with this tool. Other task managers like Asana, Monday, or Jira can be connected to Site Audit via Zapier (an online automation tool that connects various apps). Learn more about this integration in the manual How To Integrate Site Audit with Zapier.

A red arrow points to the Send to button, which has opened a dropdown menu with two options: Trello (send a task to a Trello board) and Zapier (send a task to any task manager). A tooltip below the list advises: To send tasks, set up Zapier.

If you’re not using a task manager, you can simply export the list of pages with the issue and send the file to your webmaster.

Issues report from Site Audit, demonstrating where to find the Export feature. Above the report, a red arrow is pointing at the Export button in the top right corner. Clicking on this button opens a dropdown menu with a desired report type, "Relative URLs instead of absolute" checkbox, and two buttons - Export to XLSX and Export to CSV.

4. Track Changes in the Progress Tab

After fixing the critical issues on your site, you can re-run your campaign to check how the changes affected your website’s Health Score.

Red arrow pointing at the blue "Rerun campaign" button on the top right within the Site Audit tool interface.

The Progress report is the best way to measure the success of your efforts.

An example of the Progress report from Site Audit. A red arrow is pointing at the name of this report to make it easier to find within the Site Audit tool.

This report features an interactive line graph that lets you visualize how the number of issues or other metrics have changed over time with your audits.

Schedule Site Audit on a regular basis, so you’ll be able to timely notice all important issues that should be fixed.

An example of the Site Audit Overview report. A red arrow is pointing at the gear icon in the top right corner. Underneath the icon, a dropdown menu is opened where another red arrow is pointing at the Schedule settings. In this example, schedule is set to Weekly, Every Friday. A text under the second red arrow says: scroll down to find this setting.

5. Monitor Visibility Progress in Position Tracking

Once you see your Site Health Score improve, you can track how the changes affect the rankings of your website’s pages with our Position Tracking tool. Set up a tracking campaign and add a note each time you fixed or optimized something on your website.

Using the menu to track and create notes in Position Tracking.

A pop-up window for a new note that appears in Position Tracking.

This tool allows you to monitor how changes and fixes affect your visibility with automatic daily updates.

An example of Visibility report from Position Tracking. A Visibility graph is displayed for the time period from May 6 to Jun 3.

Technical SEO is a very important step in the whole SEO process. It’s a best practice to regularly perform an in-depth technical SEO audit on your website to make sure that search engines are able to crawl and index your pages without a hitch.

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