However, this means that crawlers are now unable to access that page. In order to allow access, you need to create a redirect leading them to moved page. Bear in mind that your XML sitemap needs to be properly formatted and submitted to webmaster tools account so that it can be accessed. First thing that you have to check is your robots.txt file and robots meta tags. These two are important as they restrict access to certain areas of your website. Sometimes, a webmaster might have inadvertently blocked certain pages disabling Google from accessing them.

Google Human Quality Rater Guidelines

• Here, you’ll see the list of pages containing broken links, along with the URL of each broken link and its corresponding anchor text.
• Subheader tags, also known as H2-H6 tags, are used to provide proper structure in the content for the subtopics to make it more readable for users and search engine crawlers.
• Download the free Google Quality Rater Tool and get the kinds of insights on your content that actually improve your rankings.
• As you can see above, it provides you a Site Health score out of 100 (the higher the better) and lists down all the issues and warnings that your website currently has.

You can click Rebuild Project right in the Visualization module and recollect the data for your project. While Google says that 404 errors are an inevitable part of web crawling, it’s still not advisable to have a lot of them. Especially if you prioritize reputation management or your content falls within the YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) category. To check this, review Pages with multiple canonical URLs in the Encoding and technical factors section. Second, consider implementing breadcrumbs to help users grasp your page hierarchy.

Before crawling a website, search engine crawlers will generally request the robots.txt file from a server. Once you‘ve addressed the three primary goals of a website audit, it’s time to loop in a developer or someone from your IT department for a technical evaluation. You could also hire an outside agency — just be sure to do your homework first.

This is now only essential for your users, since 2020 Google has been crawling the mobile versions of websites, so extra care should be taken. One of the most essential steps in any SEO audit is to complete a crawl of your website. There are a few high-quality website crawlers that work well for this purpose, but the one we have found to be the most useful is Screaming Frog.

Then it gives you a suite of tools for monitoring, analysis, optimization, and reporting so you can grow and protect organic search traffic, conversions, and revenue. Covering the foundations of technical SEO, the crawling and indexing section of the audit makes sure that search engines can find, crawl, and index your content without challenge. As we created the audit, we realized that SEOs also want to check other traffic-impacting site issues that aren’t necessarily technical. Hence, we ended up with a more complete Technical SEO and beyond site audit — one that covers nearly every important SEO area with the potential to impact traffic and rankings. To assist, we’ve reviewed five top SEO audit tools to help you improve your website’s search performance.

What is a technical SEO audit?

To determine whether it should be indexed and, if so, where it should rank. To help the algorithms understand which pages meet search intent. You can set crawl limits, choose different user agents, and schedule automatic site audits. Auditing your SEO performance should not be a one-time task but rather a regular practice. By continuously assessing and optimizing, you ensure your website remains competitive and resonates with your audience.

It automatically pulls information from your Google Search Console property. And provides you with a breakdown of keywords and phrases your website ranks for and gets clicks for. If your competitors rank for these keywords, you have a good chance to rank for them too. Based on factors like the quantity AND quality of your backlinks. And it’s something you need to prioritize as part of your SEO audit checklist.

Popular tools used in an SEO Audit

Site speed can be impacted when image files are too large or HTML BHS Links and CSS needs to be cleaned up. For those with more technical experience, Semrsh’s Site Audit Tool is a very thorough reporting option, but getting started for free does require jumping through a few hoops. Assessing both the content and technical aspects of your website will open up opportunities to drastically improve the traffic and conversions your website generates. As a result, an audit will give you a chance to inspect the robustness of your website’s technical framework and infrastructure.

Then click “Export to XLSX” or “Export to CSV” depending on the file format you prefer. Then, follow Semrush’s recommendations and fix the issues one by one to improve your SEO. Click the “Why and how to fix it” link next to the error you’d like to learn more about. You’ll get detailed information about why you should fix the specific issue and how to do it. This will take you to a list of all the errors Semrush found on your website.