How to Run a Site Audit (And Fix What You Find)
A site audit tells you exactly what's holding your site back in search. Broken links, slow pages, duplicate content, missing meta tags — these issues pile up silently and drag your rankings down. I run a site audit on every site I work on before doing anything else. Here's the process.
Crawl your site and collect raw data
Start by crawling your entire site with a dedicated crawler. Enter your domain, let it run, and wait for the full crawl report. For sites under 1,000 pages, this takes a few minutes. The output is a full picture of every page, link, and technical issue.
Semrush's Site Audit crawls your entire site and categorises issues by severity. The visual dashboard makes it easy to see what needs urgent attention versus what's cosmetic.
Budget alternative: Seobility (from $0/mo)
Fix critical errors first (broken links, 4xx/5xx errors)
Sort your audit results by severity. Critical errors are things like broken internal links, pages returning 404 errors, missing canonical tags, and blocked pages. These directly harm your crawl budget and user experience.
Semrush's Site Audit flags issues as Errors, Warnings, and Notices with specific fix instructions for each. Start with Errors and work down — don't spend time on Notices if Errors remain.
Budget alternative: Seobility (from $0/mo)
Check for duplicate content and thin pages
Duplicate content confuses search engines about which page to rank. Look for pages with identical or near-identical content, pages with fewer than 300 words, and pages that serve no clear search intent. Consolidate, expand, or noindex these.
Semrush's duplicate content check covers exact duplicates and near-duplicates. It also flags thin pages by word count — giving you a clear list of pages to improve or remove.
Budget alternative: Seobility (from $0/mo)
Audit your site speed and Core Web Vitals
Run your site through Google PageSpeed Insights alongside your audit tool. Focus on LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift), and INP. These are Google ranking signals — poor scores mean you're at a disadvantage.
Semrush's Core Web Vitals report pulls real-world performance data and identifies specific elements causing problems — images, scripts, fonts — not just abstract scores.
Budget alternative: Seobility (from $0/mo)
Review your internal linking structure
Internal links pass authority between pages and help Google understand your site's hierarchy. Look for orphan pages (pages with no internal links pointing to them), pages with too many outbound links, and pages that should be receiving more internal links.
Ahrefs' Site Audit has the clearest orphan page detection and internal link graph visualisation. Seeing how link equity flows through your site makes prioritisation much easier.
Budget alternative: Seobility (from $0/mo)