If your website has any SEO issues, it may reduce your search engine ranking and traffic. So we need to find out what they are and find a solution as soon as possible.
These are some common SEO mistakes that may affect your domain authority and organic traffic negatively,
- Duplicate title and content
- Broken links (internal and external)
- Missing meta description
- Not found pages
- Robot.txt file formatting errors
- Sitemap issues
- Crawling issues
- Page speed issues
As you know, it is not possible to find and fix these kinds of issues manually. You should use an intelligent SEO tool to analyze websites and uncover all SEO mistakes. It will also monitor your pages and send you weekly email reports with additional steps you can take to improve performance.
Today, I will tell you how to run a technical SEO audit on your website with Semrush.
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Table of Contents
What is Semrush?
Semrush is an all-in-one solution for SEO, marketing, and competitor analysis. It helps you find out profitable keywords in any niche and prepare SEO-friendly content through an SEO content template and on-page SEO checker.
From link building to keyword tracking to marketing, Semrush can do several things to grow your traffic and expand the market. Find what keywords drive maximum traffic to your competitor’s pages and how they build backlinks to boost rankings. Create more comprehensive guides on similar topics and contact referring domains to replace competitor’s links with yours.
Semrush tracks your keyword ranking positions every day and provides updates on new, improved, and declined positions. Optimize your content to regain your lost positions and improve traffic. It also allows you to detect competitors’ top money-making keywords, top-performing posts, SERP rankings, and much more.
An SEO site audit is a major part of Semrush’s SEO toolkit. It scans your websites at regular intervals to find all kinds of issues that may affect your search engine performance, indexing, Schema markup, and many others. The results will come with step-by-step instructions to fix them. So you can address those issues in quick moments without seeking advice from an SEO expert.
Semrush is a great choice for businesses, agencies, and bloggers to discover new growth possibilities and market content.
Click here to visit Semrush and choose a subscription plan to bring your business to the next level (7-days free trial)
How to Run a Site Audit with Semrush? (Step-by-step)
Creating and running an SEO site audit with Semrush is relatively easy. It requires less than 5 minutes to set up your website project.
Let us check how it works,
Step 1. Sign in to your Semrush account and open the SEO toolkit. Scroll down to locate the ‘On-Page & Tech SEO’ menu. Click on ‘Site Audit’.
Step 2. A new page will open. Tap the ‘Add New Project’ button from the top-right side.
A pop-up box will appear. Enter your website address and name to create a new project. Tap the green color button to proceed.
Step 3. Next, configure your project.
Set how many pages you want to check in this project. Free users can check up to 100 pages per audit. It is 20,000 for Pro and Guru plan customers. Business plan users can crawl up to 1,00,000 pages per month. These limits will reset 1st of every month.
Choose a crawl source from the next drop-down box. By default, it is ‘Website’. But you can change it to Sitemaps and URLs if necessary.
On the left side, it will show multiple tabs to manage advanced settings. Leave it as it is. Click on the last tab, Schedule, to run an SEO site audit on your site daily or weekly basis. Choose daily or a day from the drop-down list to schedule your audit.
Click ‘Start SEO audit’ to begin.
Semrush will start auditing your site instantly. It may take some time depends on your website size and number of pages.
Step 4. When finished, you will see results like this.
Click on the project title to view more details.
Semrush checks everything that will affect your organic search performance and ranking. On the left side, it will display your site’s overall health score along with the number of crawled pages. Since they come with tags (healthy, broken, have issues, redirects, blocked) finding relevant pages will be easy for you.
The most critical issues that require your immediate attention will list as errors. The issues with medium-level importance will appear as warnings. Notices cannot be considered as serious SEO issues. But make efforts to fix them to create a Google-friendly website.
The trend graph, under each section, indicates how your site is performed over the last seven site audits. So you can quickly know whether it is improved or worsened during this period.
Step 5. Click errors to view your critical SEO mistakes. Alternatively, you can open a thematic report to access relevant insights directly.
The site audit’s errors section covers the following issues,
- Internal broken images
- Pages with 4xx, 5xx error codes
- Internal broken links
- Pages without title tags
- Duplicate title tags
- Duplicate content
- Crawling issues
- Robots.txt file issues
- Sitemap issues
- AMP related issues
- Canonical URL/tag issues
- Non-secure pages
- HTTPS certificate issues
- Broken internal JavaScript and CSS files
- Invalid schema markup
- Slow speed pages
The following mistakes come under warnings,
- Pages having a low text-HTML ratio
- Internal links with Nofollow attribute
- Uncompressed JavaScript and CSS files
- Pages without H1 heading
- Duplicate H1 and title tags
- Pages without meta descriptions
- External broken links
- External broken images
- Pages with too many on-page links
- Images without alt attributes
- Uncompressed pages
- More
Notices contain the following SEO mistakes
- External links with nofollow attributes
- URLs with permanent redirections
- Pages blocked from crawling
- Links having no anchor texts
- Pages having multiple redirections
- Orphaned pages in sitemaps and Analytics
- Pages with fewer incoming links
- More
Click an error to view affected pages and the date when this issue was first detected. For instance, I clicked on the first error message- 10 internal images are broken. It served a report like this,
I recently updated these blog posts with added information and a new image. That’s why I am getting a broken image warning on them.
Open a page URL in a new tab.
It will list all SEO mistakes on the corresponding page. Click the ‘broken internal image’ message to view and copy the image link.
Open your page in a new tab and convert it to the editing mode. On the post editor, click on Text to view the HTML editor.
Press Ctrl+F on your keyboard to open a find box. Paste the image link you collected from the site audit report and hit enter.
It will highlight your broken image on the content screen. Select the image link with covering scripts and press the delete button. Follow the same method to find and fix broken/redirected links, nofollow attributes, etc.
Go back to your Semrush site audit report and open issues one by one. It will display URLs where you are facing this issue. Open them in the editor to fix things. If you need any clarifications, contact Semrush support by email and they will guide you in the right way.
Conclusion
Semrush‘s site audit is a powerful tool to monitor and analyze your website mistakes. It can detect any kind of SEO issues that prevent search engines from crawling or listing in SERPs.
If you are facing sudden traffic drops, don’t think that it is just because of a Google algorithm change. Sometimes a mistake you made, knowingly or unknowingly, may affect your page indexing and search performance. If there is a regular site audit, you can know and fix those things before affecting your business.
Semrush runs over 120 SEO checks to analyze the health of your website. It covers issues relating to duplicate content, indexing, AMP, Core Web Vitals, and many others. It is very flexible to point out problems not only in the main domain but also in the subdomain, subfolders, and from the desktop or mobile versions.
Moreover, Semrush allows you to schedule the site audit at regular intervals. It will run automatically, and the report will be sent to you by email. You can either check it out and take action directly or send it to your SEO developer and ask them to fix it. So we can say that Semrush’s site audit is beneficial for all website types including businesses, eCommerce stores, and blogs.
Click here to visit Semrush and choose a subscription plan to skyrocket your search engine rankings (7-days free trial)
