What Issues Can Site Audit Identify?

With the ability to check over 140+ website issues, Semrush Site Audit makes your website audit process easy and effective. Below you can find the complete list of errors, warnings, and notices and a little bit about the categories of issues that Site Audit checks for. For more information about each of the issues and why you should fix them, download the Ultimate Site Audit Checklist. Some of the checks are combined to ease your routine.

Crawlability and Architecture

First and foremost, your website has to be crawlable before you can begin to think about SEO. To foster easier navigation for search crawlers, the website’s structure should be clean and well-organized. In order to make your structure as clean as possible, some of the main focus areas will be your sitemap, robots.txt file, and your internal links and URL structure. Site Audit covers over 20 of the most important common issues in this area.

On Page SEO

Issues regarding your content, title tags, h1 tags, meta descriptions, and images all play into your website’s on page SEO. In order to optimize, you’ll want to avoid any duplicate content, titles, descriptions or h1 tags. You’ll also need to make sure that your content, titles, and descriptions are all at an optimal length. Site Audit checks for over a dozen of the most common on-page SEO issues, so you can identify all of the mistakes on your site that could be hurting you.

Technical SEO

A great deal of SEO depends on technical aspects of a website such as proper HTML, page load speed, and mobile optimization. Site Audit will tell you if you have any pages with an oversized HTML file or slow load speeds. It will also point out the use of flash, frames, or other outdated technology that should be avoided for SEO.

HTTPS Implementation

When moving a website from HTTP to HTTPS there are a lot of common mistakes that you can run into. From proper certificates to redirects and canonicals, encryption and more, Site Audit checks for every possible issue involved when a website moves to HTTPS. There’s a dedicated report showing all of your HTTPS-related issues which you can get to quickly by following the widget from the Overview report.

International SEO

For larger companies and global websites, international SEO can be tricky. Correct usage of hreflang tag is going to be critical to your success getting search visibility across the regions and languages you desire. Site Audit checks for multiple issues like the use of the right language and country codes, conflicts with page source code, incorrect hreflang links, and more.

AMP

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) are one of Google’s preferred methods of delivering mobile web pages, and Site Audit checks over 40 of the most common AMP-related issues, more than any other software on the market.

Performance

Performance-related checks in Site Audit will look for issues concerning a website’s page loading speed and user experience. Page load speed is becoming one of the most important SEO factors these days – if your site is too slow to load, users will leave and look for another website to visit. To help your performance, it is important to keep the HTML, CSS, and Javascript on your site lightweight and easy for crawlers to read.

Internal Linking

The internal Linking report gives you a full in-depth look at all of the internal links on for an entire website. You will further see four different widgets that can help identify specific issues; Link Distribution, Incoming Internal Links, Pages to add Outgoing Links and Internal Links Issues. These issues can include something large such as internal links that are broken, to minor ones such as pages only having one internal link.

Full List of Issues Site Audit Can Identify

Below is the list of all errors, warnings, and notices that Site Audit can identify on a website. All issues should be addressed to improve your Site Audit score and website health. The order of priority is Errors (most harmful to a website) – Warnings (harmful) – Notices (least harmful).

Errors

Hreflang conflicts within page source code

Pages returning 5XX status code

Pages don’t have title tags

Issues with duplicate title tags

Pages with duplicate content issues

Broken internal links

Pages couldn’t be crawled

Pages couldn’t be crawled (DNS resolution issues)

Pages couldn’t be crawled (incorrect URL formats)

Broken internal images

Pages with duplicate meta descriptions

Format errors in Robots.txt file

Format errors in sitemap.xml files

Incorrect pages found in sitemap.xml

Pages with a WWW resolve issue

Pages with no viewport tag

Size of HTML on a page is too large

About the issue

A webpage’s HTML size is the size of all HTML code contained on it. A page size that is too large (i.e., exceeding 2 MB) leads to a slower page load time, resulting in a poor user experience and a lower search engine ranking.

How to fix it

Review your page’s HTML code and consider optimizing its structure and/or removing inline scripts and styles.

AMP pages with no canonical tag

Issues with hreflang values

Pages returning 4XX status code

Issues with incorrect hreflang links

Non-secure pages

Issues with expiring or expired certificate

Issues with old security protocol

Issues with incorrect certificate name

Issues with mixed content

No redirect or canonical to HTTPS homepage from HTTP version