Semrush SEO | How to Do a Website Audit With Semrush in 2024

Semrush SEO is your secret sauce to building a successful digital income that typically requires you to be on top of your SEO game. This is why we’re seeing SEO audits gain importance. With one of the best tools in the business, like Semrush, you can maintain your SEO digital health, ensuring you stay ahead of your competitors.

This article outlines a step-by-step guide on leveraging Semrush to conduct flawless SEO audits — from getting started to detailed report analysis. This will help you fix any technical issues and boost your page rankings. You can try Semrush for free with its 14-day free trial. Excited to know more? Read on.

What is An SEO Audit?

SEO audits are the method of assessing how well your web page is optimized for search engines. Businesses must analyze their web presence and identify issues affecting their search engine rankings. It’s the first step towards creating a plan to provide measurable results.

Conducting an audit regularly is important as it acts as a “health check” for your website. It should be comprehensive and cover structural and content components to ensure a successful SEO audit.

The recommendations given in the audit should be actionable and prioritized with projected impact and effort associated with each one. The output of the SEO audit should be an easy-to-follow roadmap to improve the website’s online visibility.

A technical SEO audit focuses on analyzing the technical aspects of a website related to search engine optimization. The auditor’s primary goal is to ensure search engines can crawl, index, and rank the website’s pages.

Regularly auditing a website can help identify and fix technical issues affecting its search engine performance. Doing so can improve the website’s visibility and ranking in search engines. So what does an audit cover? Let’s see.

What Does it Cover?

An SEO audit’s an essential process that helps you identify areas of improvement for your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) performance. It allows you to assess your website’s current status, strengths, and weaknesses regarding visibility, search engine ranking, user experience, and content quality.

A thorough SEO audit covers various factors that affect your website’s ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). Here are the different things they cover and how they contribute to improving your website’s SEO performance:

Crawlability

Crawlability is a crucial factor that affects your website’s visibility in search results. When search engine bots crawl your website, they search for relevant content and index it for search queries.

If your website needs help with crawlability, search engines may be unable to find and index your pages, leading to lower visibility in search results. During a comprehensive SEO audit, you can identify uncrawlable pages and optimize them for search engine bots.

This includes checking for broken links, fixing duplicate content, ensuring proper use of redirects, and optimizing your website’s sitemap. By improving your website’s crawlability, you can increase the chances of appearing in search results and drive more traffic to your website.

HTTPS

HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) is a secure version of the HTTP protocol that encrypts the data transmitted between a user’s browser and a web server. In recent years, HTTPS has become increasingly important for website security and SEO.

In short, it encrypts the data transmitted between a user’s browser and a web server, providing a secure connection that protects against interception and hacking attempts. During an SEO audit, you can check your website’s HTTPS status and ensure that your website is secure.

HTTPS is also important for SEO as search engines like Google have begun prioritizing secure websites in their search results. During an SEO audit, you can check your website’s HTTPS status and ensure that all pages are served securely.

This involves verifying that your website’s SSL certificate is valid and properly installed and that all internal links and resources are served over HTTPS. Ensuring your website is secure can improve your search engine ranking and build trust with your audience.

International SEO

International SEO is optimizing your website for multiple languages and locations. During an SEO audit, you can assess your website’s international SEO implementation and identify potential issues with the hreflang attribute, which signals to search engines what language and region the content is intended for.

This can help ensure your website appears in the right search results for users in different regions, leading to higher engagement, traffic, and conversions. Additionally, optimizing for international SEO can help your website establish a global presence and gain a competitive advantage in international markets.

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are critical performance indicators that evaluate the user experience provided by a website. The three primary KPIs are loading, interactivity, and visual stability, and they’re assessed by various metrics like:

• First Contentful Paint (FCP) — Measures how long it takes for the first content to appear on the user’s screen
• Time to Interactive (TTI) — Measures the time it takes for a website to become fully interactive
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) — Measures the time it takes for the largest content element on the screen to load
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) — Measures the website’s stability during the loading process

During an SEO audit, evaluating the Core Web Vitals performance is crucial to identify issues that can affect a website’s user experience and search engine ranking.

For instance, a website with a slow loading time and poor interactivity can cause users to leave it quickly, increasing its bounce rate and hurting its ranking. Optimizing Core Web Vitals allows website owners to provide a better user experience and improve their search engine ranking.

Site Performance

Site performance is an important factor in SEO, directly impacting the user experience and search engine rankings. A slow-loading website can result in a poor user experience, leading to higher bounce rates and lower engagement.

During an SEO audit, you can evaluate your website’s page load time, server response time, and other performance factors that affect site speed and responsiveness. Some common factors impacting site performance include:

• Large image sizes
• Excessive use of plugins or scripts
• Server location and quality, and
• Caching

Optimizing these factors can help improve your website’s performance, resulting in better user experience and higher search engine rankings.

Internal Linking

Internal linking refers to linking to other pages within your website. During an SEO audit, you can evaluate the internal linking structure of your website and identify any issues that may impact your search engine ranking.

Some common internal linking issues include poor link placement, broken links, and links that lead to non-existent pages. Crawl depth is also an important consideration in internal linking.

The crawl depth of a page refers to how many clicks it takes for a user or a search engine bot to reach that page from the homepage. A shallow crawl depth indicates that a page is easily accessible and has a higher chance of being indexed by search engines. In contrast, a deep crawl depth may suggest a page is hidden or difficult to find, negatively impacting its visibility in search results.

Improving your internal linking structure can positively impact your website’s navigation, user experience, and search engine ranking. By creating a clear and effective internal linking structure, you can help search engines better understand the content of your website and improve your chances of ranking higher in search results.

Schema Markup

Schema markup is a type of structured data that provides additional context to search engines about a website’s content. It uses a specific vocabulary of tags to mark up various types of content on a website, such as products, reviews, events, and more.

By implementing schema markup on your website, you can help search engines understand the meaning and context of your content, improving your website’s visibility and search engine ranking.

During an SEO audit, you can evaluate your website’s schema markup implementation to identify any errors or missing tags that could affect your website’s search engine ranking.

We’d recommend using Semrush to analyze your schema markup and get recommendations for improvement. By fixing errors and implementing missing tags, you can help search engines better understand your content, increasing visibility in search results and potentially higher click-through rates.

How to Do a Website Audit With Semrush | Step-by-Step Guide

With the help of a leading website audit tool like Semrush, you can identify technical issues, optimize your website for search engines, and improve user experience.

In this step-by-step guide, we’ll walk you through conducting a website audit using Semrush. From creating an account to scheduling your audit, we’ll cover all the steps to ensure your website is optimized for search engines and ready to attract more visitors.

Create a Semrush Account

To start, create a Semrush account by visiting their website and following the registration process. Semrush offers a 14-day free trial for new users, giving you access to their suite of tools, including the Site Audit feature, which is essential for on-page and technical SEO fixes.

Create a New Project

Once logged into your Semrush account, navigate to the “On-Page & Tech SEO” section and select “Site Audit.” From there, click on “Create a new project.”

Site Audit Settings

Next, you’ll need to configure the settings for your site audit. Choose the “site audit settings” option, allowing you to set the domain/subdomain and limit of pages to be audited.

You can select to crawl 100 to 10,000+ pages per audit and choose your crawl source as your sitemaps on-site, website, or an uploaded file of select URLs.

Crawler Settings

In this step, you can choose a preferred crawler, such as Googlebot or Semrush bot. As mobile viewers are increasingly important to Google, choosing GoogleBot-Mobile or SiteAuditBot-Mobile as your default is recommended.

You can also crawl only on desktop or mobile, but crawling both is generally the best option.

Allow / Disallow URLs

This feature lets you specify the URLs you want Semrush to crawl instead of scanning your entire website. Additionally, you can selectively exclude certain website sections, including private, hidden, or dynamic pages or pages set to no-index.

This capability is beneficial in preventing unnecessary issues from being flagged for areas you don’t need to address for Google.

Remove URL Parameters

In this optional step, you can remove URL parameters to group pages with similar content. For example, adding “page” to eliminate parameter values like page=1 or page=2 would make /clothes and /clothes?page=1 appear like one URL when crawling.

Schedule Your Audit

You can schedule a one-time, daily, or weekly audit on a specific day of the week. Keeping up with website errors through regular scans is recommended if you’re serving clients. Once you’ve set the schedule and finalized your audit settings, start your Semrush audit.

Review Your Site Audit Report

After completing the audit, you’ll receive a comprehensive report listing all the issues that must be addressed. The report is categorized into errors, warnings, and high, medium, and low-priority notices to make fixing errors in your Semrush Site Audit easier.

You can use this report to prioritize your fixes and enhance your website’s SEO and performance.

Semrush Audit Report | What to Do Next

One of the most important features of Semrush is its site audit tool, which allows you to scan your website and identify any errors that may negatively impact your website’s SEO performance. Here are some of the most common errors that Semrush can pick up and how to fix them.

Crawlability Errors

Crawlability errors occur when search engine bots can’t access your website, so your pages won’t be indexed or ranked in search results. These can significantly impact your website’s search engine ranking if it encounters crawling errors.

Semrush’s site audit tool is designed to detect crawlability errors and help you fix them quickly and easily. One of the most common issues it can detect is broken links, which occur when a link on your website leads to a page that doesn’t exist.

This can happen if you delete a page or change its URL without updating the links on your website. Semrush can identify broken links and suggest fixing them, such as redirecting the broken link to a working page on your website.

On-Page SEO Errors

If your website has on-page SEO errors, search engines will likely be unable to index and rank your pages correctly. Missing meta descriptions, for example, can negatively impact search results’ click-through rates as they summarize what the page is about.

Duplicate content, on the other hand, can confuse search engines about which page to rank for a particular query.

To fix on-page SEO errors, it’s important to thoroughly analyze your website’s content and ensure that it’s optimized for search engines and users. You can use Semrush’s on-page SEO checker to identify specific issues and then take action to fix them.

This may include adding missing meta descriptions and H1 tags, rewriting duplicate content, and ensuring your content includes relevant and targeted keywords. By fixing on-page SEO errors, you can improve the visibility and ranking of your website in search engine results.

Technical SEO Errors

Technical SEO errors occur when your website’s technical elements need to be optimized for search engines, affecting your website’s ranking. Semrush’s technical SEO analysis can help you identify and fix these errors.

Some of the most common technical SEO errors that Semrush can detect include the following:

• Page speed — Slow-loading pages can negatively impact user experience and search engine ranking. Semrush can analyze your website’s page speed and identify any issues slowing down your site.
• Mobile-friendliness — With more and more users accessing websites on their mobile devices, it’s crucial to have a website optimized for mobile devices. Semrush can detect any mobile usability issues on your website and provide suggestions for improvement.
• Schema markup — Implementing schema markup will help search engines better understand your website’s content, improving your website’s visibility in search results. Semrush can identify if your website lacks schema markup or needs optimization.

You must optimize your website’s technical elements to fix technical SEO errors. This can include optimizing images, compressing code, and implementing schema markup.

Backlinking Errors

Backlinking errors occur when your website has low-quality or spammy backlinks, which can negatively affect your website’s ranking. Semrush can identify backlinking errors such as broken links, low-quality backlinks, and anchor text issues.

To fix backlinking errors, you must conduct a backlink audit to identify low-quality backlinks and disavow them using Google’s Disavow Tool.

While disavowing low-quality backlinks is an important step in fixing backlinking errors, it’s equally important to focus on building high-quality backlinks.

Semrush will help you identify opportunities to build quality backlinks by analyzing your competitors’ backlink profiles and suggesting relevant link-building opportunities.

You can also improve your backlink profile by creating high-quality content that naturally attracts backlinks from authoritative websites in your niche.

HTTPS Errors 

HTTPS errors occur when your website doesn’t have a valid SSL certificate or isn’t secure, which can negatively impact your website’s ranking and security.

Search engines prioritize secure websites, so having a valid SSL certificate and a secure website can improve your website’s visibility and credibility. Semrush can identify HTTPS errors, including mixed content, invalid certificates, and insecure protocols.

Mixed content occurs when your website includes secure and insecure elements, such as images, scripts, or stylesheets, which can compromise security. Invalid certificates can also threaten your website’s security, as they indicate that your website’s encryption is unreliable.

Secure protocols, such as outdated SSL protocols or HTTP connections, can make your website vulnerable to security breaches. Fixing HTTPS errors can improve your website’s security and ranking but requires technical expertise.

Semrush provides actionable insights and recommendations to help you fix these errors quickly and effectively, ensuring your website remains secure and visible in search results.

Mobile Optimization Errors 

Mobile optimization errors occur when your website isn’t optimized for mobile devices, negatively impacting your website’s ranking in mobile search results. Semrush analyzes your website’s mobile version and highlights any mobile optimization issues.

These errors include slow loading speed, unresponsive design, and mobile usability issues. Semrush provides a comprehensive report that identifies these issues, giving you actionable insights to optimize your website for mobile.

To solve mobile optimization errors, you need to optimize your website by using responsive design, compressing images, and improving your website’s loading speed.

Responsive design ensures that your website automatically adjusts to fit the screen size of different mobile devices, providing a better user experience.

Compressing images reduces the size of your website’s images, improving its loading speed on mobile devices. Finally, improving your website’s loading speed on mobile devices can be achieved by optimizing code, caching, and using a content delivery network.

Site Structure Errors 

Site structure errors are crucial issues that can affect the overall user experience of your website. If your website isn’t organized or easily navigable, users and search engines will have trouble finding the information they need, resulting in high bounce rates and poor ranking.

Semrush can help identify site structure errors such as missing pages, 404 errors, and pages with no internal links, providing you with a comprehensive report on how to fix them.

To fix site structure errors, you must ensure your website’s structure is well-organized and easily navigable. You can start by creating a clear and concise navigation menu that makes it easy for users to find what they want.

Additionally, you should ensure that your website’s URL structure is straightforward and descriptive, using clear and concise keywords to help search engines understand what your website is about.

Fixing broken links or duplicate content is also crucial, as these issues can negatively impact your website’s search engine ranking and overall user experience.

Content Optimization Errors

Content optimization errors occur when your website’s content needs to be optimized for search engines. Semrush will skim and find optimization errors such as:

• Keyword stuffing
• Thin content
• Missing alt tags
• Improper use of header tags
• Excessive use of passive voice
• Poor readability

To fix these errors, you must ensure your content is well-structured and easy to read. This can be achieved using proper header tags (H1, H2, H3), active voice writing, and shorter sentences and paragraphs.

Why is Semrush Best for a Site Audit?

Semrush is a leading digital and content marketing tool that offers a comprehensive suite of features to help businesses improve their online visibility, track their competitors, and optimize their website performance. Check out Semrush’s State of Content Marketing Report for the year.

Regarding site audits, Semrush stands out as one of the best tools in the market. Here are some reasons why:

Wide Range of Auditing Features

Semrush is an all-in-one SEO tool that provides a wide range of auditing features to analyze and optimize different aspects of your website. Its auditing features cover various areas, including on-page SEO, technical SEO, content quality, and backlinks.

One of the benefits of using Semrush for a site audit’s its ability to scan your website and provide you with a detailed report of all the technical and SEO issues it’s identified.

This report includes actionable recommendations that you can use to improve your website’s performance and fix any issues that may be impacting its visibility and search engine ranking.

Moreover, Semrush also provides a competitor analysis feature that allows you to compare your website’s performance with your competitors. This enables you to identify areas where your competitors outperform you and develop strategies to improve your website’s performance.

In-Depth Analysis of Website Performance

Semrush provides an in-depth analysis of website performance, which helps you understand how your website performs in search engine rankings. With it, you can analyze your website’s organic search traffic, backlink profile, and overall online visibility.

You can see how your website compares to competitors and identify areas where you need to improve your online presence.

Semrush’s in-depth website performance analysis is powered by advanced algorithms and machine learning models that provide accurate and actionable insights into your website’s performance.

The Site Audit tool, for instance, can scan your website for technical SEO issues, such as broken links, duplicate content, and crawlability issues, and provide you with a detailed report of all the errors and warnings found.

Easy-to-Use Interface

The Semrush interface is user-friendly, intuitive, and easy to navigate. With just a few clicks, you can start a site audit and get a detailed report of all the issues on your website.

The platform also provides actionable insights and recommendations, making it easy to understand what needs to be done to improve your website’s performance.

Furthermore, the interface offers customizable reports that allow you to prioritize and focus on specific areas of your website that require attention. This feature is handy for businesses with limited resources and time, allowing them to address the most critical issues first.

It also allows you to track your progress and monitor your website’s performance over time, giving you a clear idea of how your SEO efforts impact your website’s ranking and visibility.

Regular Updates and Improvements

Semrush is a constantly evolving tool that keeps up with the latest trends and updates in the digital marketing industry. Regular updates and improvements are crucial in keeping up with the changing landscape of digital marketing.

Search engine algorithms, for instance, are constantly changing, and what worked a few months ago may no longer be effective. With Semrush’s regular updates, you can stay on top of these changes and adjust your strategies accordingly.

The platform also frequently adds new features to enhance its site audit capabilities, making it even more valuable to users.

Advanced Customization Options

Semrush provides advanced customization options, allowing you to tailor your site audit to your needs. You can choose the number of pages to crawl, the crawl source, and the type of crawler to use.

Semrush also offers customization options for the issues you want to focus on during your site audit. This allows you to prioritize certain issues over others and ensures that you address the most important issues first.

You can also customize the frequency and scope of your audits to fit your website’s specific needs and goals. This level of flexibility and customization allows you to optimize your website more efficiently and effectively.

Competitive Analysis

Semrush also offers competitive analysis features that allow you to see how your website stacks up against competitors in your industry. The competitive analysis tools will enable you to better understand your competitors’ online strategies.

You can analyze their backlink profiles, keyword rankings, and content strategies to see where they are succeeding and where you can improve. This information can inform your SEO and digital marketing strategy to help you stay competitive.

Integration With Other Tools 

Semrush’s integration with other digital marketing tools is an incredibly powerful feature that enhances the platform’s functionality.

By connecting it with other popular SEO tools, such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console, you can gain valuable insights into your website’s performance and quickly identify areas that require attention.

This integration also makes it easier to manage your workflow, saving you time and effort in the process. Instead of switching between multiple tools and platforms, you can access all your data and insights in one place.

This helps you to identify trends and patterns across different platforms, allowing you to optimize your marketing strategy and maximize your ROI. Furthermore, Semrush’s integration capabilities extend beyond SEO and digital marketing tools.

You can also connect it with other platforms, such as social media management tools, CRM systems, and advertising platforms. This integration level helps you comprehensively view your marketing efforts and identify areas to improve and optimize your campaigns.

Helpful Customer Support 

Semrush offers top-notch customer support, which is essential when using any digital marketing tool. Their support team is available 24/7 through email, chat, and phone to assist with any questions or issues that may arise while using the tool.

The support team is highly knowledgeable, responsive, and willing to help you resolve any problems quickly.

Furthermore, Semrush provides a comprehensive knowledge base and online community to help users learn more about the tool’s features and capabilities. The knowledge base offers articles, tutorials, and FAQs to help users quickly find the necessary information.

The online community is also an excellent resource for getting advice, tips, and tricks from other Semrush users.

How Much is Semrush?

With a range of pricing tiers, billing options, add-ons, and custom plans, Semrush offers a comprehensive solution for businesses of all sizes looking to improve their online presence.

The pricing varies based on the type of subscription you choose. Here is a breakdown of the Semrush pricing structure:

Semrush Plans and Pricing Tiers

The Pro plan suits small businesses or individual marketers who want to improve their website’s SEO performance. It includes site audits, keyword research, backlink analysis, and position tracking.

The Guru plan is designed for growing marketing agencies or businesses with more extensive digital marketing needs. Along with the Pro features, this plan includes additional features such as historical data, a content marketing platform, and extended limits for certain tools.

The Business plan is designed for large enterprises with complex marketing needs. Along with the features from the Guru plan, this plan includes features such as Google Data Studio integration, API access, and white-label reporting.

Monthly vs. Annual Billing

When subscribing to Semrush, you can choose between monthly or annual billing. If you choose the monthly billing option (as shown in the picture in the above section), you’ll be charged every month for your subscription.

However, if you choose the annual billing option (see picture below), you pay for the entire year upfront. One of the main advantages of the annual billing option is that you can save up to 17% compared to monthly billing.

In addition to cost savings, annual billing provides some predictability and peace of mind since you won’t have to worry about monthly charges or billing cycles.

It’s worth noting that Semrush offers a 7-day money-back guarantee for all subscriptions, regardless of billing option. If you’re unsatisfied with the service, you can request a full refund within the first seven days of your subscription.

Free Trial

Semrush offers a free trial that allows new users to test the platform and its features without committing to a subscription. The trial period lasts seven days, during which you can access all the features available in the Pro plan.

However, by clicking any of the buttons on this page, you’ll get a whopping 2 weeks free. This means you can use the full suite of Semrush tools to perform keyword research, track your website’s rankings, conduct site audits, and much more. Try it now.

Additional Add-Ons

In addition to the three main pricing tiers, Semrush offers a variety of add-ons that can enhance your experience with the platform. These include additional projects, additional users, and API access.

If you need to manage multiple projects within Semrush, you can purchase additional projects. Each project added to your subscription will come with tools and reports, allowing you to analyze multiple websites or campaigns simultaneously.

You can purchase additional users, which is particularly useful if you need to collaborate with colleagues or clients and share access to your Semrush projects. The API add-on is another popular option, enabling developers to integrate Semrush functionality into their applications.

With this, you can retrieve data from Semrush programmatically and automate keyword research or competitor analysis tasks. The cost of these add-ons varies depending on the type and quantity purchased. You can add and manage these add-ons from your Semrush account dashboard.

Custom Plans

Semrush understands that every business has unique needs and requirements, so they offer custom plans. These plans are designed for businesses with specific needs not covered by the standard pricing tiers or add-ons.

With a customized plan, you can tailor your subscription to your particular requirements and only pay for the needed features. It offers complete flexibility and lets you choose the number of projects, keywords, users, and reports you need.

You can also add specific features such as white-label reports, API access, and historical data. The cost of a custom plan varies based on the features included, the number of users, and the volume of data you need to process.

For a full account, read our full Semrush pricing review for 2024 below.

Can I Do a Free SEO Site Audit With Semrush?

Yes, you can do a free SEO site audit with Semrush. The free trial includes access to their Site Audit tool for a limited time. During the free trial, you can perform a site audit and get insights into the technical and on-page SEO issues affecting your website’s performance.

To access the trial, create an account on Semrush’s website and provide your billing information. You won’t be charged during the trial period, but if you don’t cancel before the trial ends, you’ll be automatically enrolled in a paid plan.

That said, it’s important to note that the free trial has some limitations. For example, you can only audit one website, and the number of pages you can crawl is limited. Additionally, some advanced features aren’t available during the trial period.

However, the free trial provides an excellent opportunity to test Semrush’s Site Audit tool and see how it can improve your website’s SEO.

How to Do a Free SEO Site Audit With Semrush?

Performing a free SEO site audit with Semrush is a straightforward process. Here are the steps to follow:

1. Create a Semrush Account — Sign up for a free account by visiting the Semrush website. Follow the prompts to create your account and log in.
2. Start a New Project — Once you’re logged in, navigate to the “Projects” tab in the top navigation bar and click on “Create my first project” or “Create a new project.”
3. Enter Your Website URL — In the “New Project” window, enter your website URL in the “Project domain” field. You can also give your project a name if you like. Choose the location and device you want to perform the audit.
4. Configure Audit Settings — In the same “New Project” window, choose “Site Audit” under “Setup.” You can customize the audit settings according to your preferences, such as crawl scope, crawl source, and other advanced settings.
5. Start the Audit — Click the “Start Site Audit” button to begin the audit. The audit will take some time to complete, depending on the size of your website and the settings you choose.
6. Review the Audit Results — Once complete, you can review the results by navigating to your project dashboard’s “Site Audit” section. The report will provide an overview of your site’s health score, crawlability, HTTP status codes, broken links, and other technical issues.

You can also drill down into specific issues to get more details and recommendations on fixing them. And it’s as easy as that. Get started now.

Semrush SEO Audit FAQs