Semrush Site Audit Tool Tutorial – How to do Your Site Audit With Semrush

Are you looking to boost your organic search traffic? Does your website have some problems but you are not known to them? All these questions can be answered by running a site audit. In this Semrush site audit tool tutorial, we will learn how to use Semrush to find and fix problems with your website.

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Semrush is an all-in-one SEO tool for bloggers, marketers, and anyone looking to increase organic search traffic to a website. It is a combination of multiple tools. If you want to learn how to use Semrush you can check out this Semrush Tutorial.

Semrush Site Audit Tool is included in the Semrush package. This tool audits your site/website and returns a Semrush audit report showcasing the health of your site. It crawls your site, finds problems, and delivers a checklist of the errors you can fix to make your website healthy and boost its SEO and organic search traffic.

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What is SEO Site Audit?

If you want to improve your SEO and increase traffic to your website. Then SEO site audit is something you should run for your blog or website.

A SEMrush SEO site audit is done to:

• Find problems in a website like duplicate content, missing image alt tags, broken links, and other SEO problems
• Fix these problems to improve SEO and get more search traffic to your website

Semrush site audit tool crawls your entire website or the pages to ask it to crawl and detects technical SEO problems which are hard to detect manually. Semrush SEO audit tool is very helpful to find and fix SEO problems in your website quickly.

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How Semrush SEO Audit can Help?

If you are running a blog or a website you might be struggling to get organic search traffic. This is the point you should run an SEO site audit to identify and fix technical SEO problems on your website.

Semrush site audit tool helps by finding problems in your website like duplicate content, missing or long titles, meta descriptions, missing image alt tags, broken links, and much more.

This will give you a Semrush audit report on what needs to be fixed on your website. So that search engines find your content and rank them as per the search query.

Let’s take a deep dive into this Semrush site audit tool tutorial. This will help you in your Semrush site audit tool learning to find and fix SEO problems on your website or blog. Also, this will help you to rank higher on search engines and get more traffic and conversions.

Before learning site audit using Semrush. You need to have the tool with you. Let me quickly tell you how to get access to the Semrush Pro account which is worth $119.95. Just follow the steps below:

Activate the 7-day Semrush Pro free trial, by clicking on the link below:

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You will land on the page which looks like the below:

Click on the button which has “Start your free trial!” written. You will land on the page below. Just enter your Email and choose a password to create your Semrush account.

You will be taken to the next page where you can choose from the Semrush plans. For beginners, I would suggest choosing the Pro plan. If your budget and needs are higher then the Guru plan is good for you. After choosing the plan click on the ‘Get free trial’ button.

Now, I have chosen the Pro Plan and just enter your billing information. Congratulations! your Semrush Pro free trial will be activated and you can enjoy using this tool free for the next 7 days. After this time If you are satisfied with this tool, you can choose to subscribe to a yearly or monthly subscription.

Your Semrush Pro free trial will now be activated and you can enjoy using this tool for free. If you are satisfied with this tool you can choose to subscribe to a monthly or yearly subscription.

Step-By-Step Semrush Site Audit Tool Tutorial

Let us see how to use the SEMrush Site Audit tool to perform a site audit. The steps are below.

Step 1: Create a Project

The first step in this Semrush Site audit tool lesson is to set up a project in the Semrush tool. The Projects provide recommendations based on an entered domain for improving SEO and tracking it over time.

To add a new project log in to your Semrush account and click on ‘Add new Project’ as you can see in the image below:

Once you click on it, you will see a box-like below. As you can see in the image below, I have entered my domain – achaltomar.com and provided a name for the project ‘Achal Tomar Website’ to it.

After you enter this information click on the ‘Create project’ button and now you will a page like the one below:

Step 2: Start Site Audit Using Semrush

Now, you need to click on the first tab which says ‘Site Audit Site Health’ in the image above. This will lead you to the page below. On this page, you need to click on the button ‘Set Up’ in the first tab which says: ‘Site Audit’.

Post this, you will see a pop-up like the below image which will show the site audit settings.

You can leave the default option and click on ‘Start Site Audit’. If your website has more than 100 pages you can select more pages from the ‘Limit of checked pages’ option. In the crawl scope, you can select not to Crawl all subdomains by unchecking that option.

To make this easy just click on ‘Start Site Audit’ and leave all options as it is. I have, however, selected now to track subdomains because I don’t have them on my website.

You will see that Semrush has started your site audit process and you will the page below once the Semrush site audit is complete. This will take some time to wait for it to complete. Once completed you will see the status below.

The site audit shows my Site Health = 89% and Pages will issues = 63. Click on the ‘Site Audit’ tab and you will see the detailed site audit results below.

As you can see the site health score for my website achaltomar.com is 89%. This site health score is determined by Semrush taking into account multiple factors like pages with issues, broken pages, pages blocked by the crawler, warnings, and notices from the crawler.

A higher site health score means your website is doing good in SEO. Post site audit completed I have 4 errors, 316 warnings, and 439 notices which I can fix now.

• Site Health Score – This site health score is a percentage representation of the total number of warnings and errors that have been found on a website. A higher score means your site has fewer issues.
• Crawled Pages – This is the total number of pages that have been crawled and analyzed by the SEMrush site audit tool
• Errors – Errors are simply the total number of issues found on the pages crawled on your website. These errors can have a direct impact on your website search rankings.
• Warnings – These are less severe issues that have been detected on the website. They are not very severe but still are worth being fixed
• Notices – Notices the least severe issues found on your website. Examples are pages with no internal links, missing outbound links, and missing anchor texts. These are also worth being fixed

What I recommend is to download the PDF versions of this report. This helps you to send it to your SEO team or developers who can fix them. To download your Semrush site audit report click on the PDF button as pointed by the arrow in the image below.

You will see a pop-up box below:

Now, select the report you want to download. By choosing the ‘Full Site Audit Report’ as below:

Just click on ‘Export to PDF’ and your report will be downloaded to your computer. You will get an email with this report to the email ID you entered.

You will also get a weekly report if this report is updated every week. Untick this box if you don’t want this Semrush site audit report to run every week. This PDF report looks like the one below for my website.

This is it, you now have your Semrush Site Audit report as a PDF. This completed your site audit process using the Semrush Site Audit tool. In the next step of this Semrush site audit tool lesson, let us look at what to look at in this report.

How to Use Semrush Site Audit Tool Report

The first thing you will notice in the PDF report is the errors, notices, and warnings. As you scroll down in the PDF report you will see each of them as below.

As per the Semrush site audit PDF report problems with my site are:

Errors: 4

• 4 issues with mixed content

Warnings: 316

• 120 images don’t have alt attributes
• 110 outgoing internal links contain nofollow attribute
• 37 pages have a low text-HTML ratio
• 18 pages don’t have meta descriptions
• 17 pages have a low word count
• 10 pages have duplicate H1 and title tags
• 4 pages don’t have enough text within the title tags

Notices: 439

• 125 URLs with a permanent redirect
• 102 outgoing external links contain nofollow attributes
• 83 links on this page have non-descriptive anchor text
• 60 issues with blocked external resources in robots.txt
• 29 pages are blocked from crawling
• 21 links on this page have no anchor text
• 16 pages have only one incoming internal link
• 2 subdomains don’t support HSTS
• 1 page has more than one H1 tag

How To Find and Fix Errors, Warnings, and Notices From Semrush Site Audit Report?

Fix Errors: 4 issues with mixed content – Semrush shows this error If your website contains any elements that are not secured with HTTPS, which may lead to security issues. So, to fix this Replace all HTTP links with the new HTTPS versions. You can see the explanation by Semrush below:

If you scroll down in the Semrush Site Audit report PDF you will see the pages and links due to which this error is happening as below:

When I click on the 1st ‘Resource URL’ it takes me to the image below. As we can see this opens in a not secure link. As my site is on HTTPS I need to fix this problem.

Now, to fix this I will download this image on my computer. Open the link where the errors are found: https://www.achaltomar.com/how-to-install-and-configure-google-tag-manager-in-wordpress/

I will replace the downloaded image with the previous image as below:

Now, the new image will not have this error as it is uploaded in the HTTPS link. Similarly, I will change all other images which are not on the HTTPS link by downloading and replacing them.

So, by doing some simple changes to our website. We can find and fix problems and get our site health score improved.

Fix Warnings – Let me look into 1 of the warnings and ways to fix it below:

4 pages don’t have enough text within the title tags – Titles containing 10 characters or less do not provide enough information about what the webpage is about and limit your page’s potential to show up in search results for different keywords. For more information, you can see this Google article. To Fix this: Add more descriptive text inside your title.

As per the report I have found these warnings on the pages below:

To fix this I will add a long title for my pages with errors. This is easy to do if you use WordPress and Yoast SEO tools.

Fix Notices – Let me look into 1 of the notices and ways to fix it below:

29 pages are blocked from crawling – If a page cannot be accessed by search engines, it will never appear in search results. How to fix: Make sure that pages with valuable content are not blocked from crawling by mistake.

As per the report I have found these notices on the pages below:

These are category pages. This means I have not included my categories on my sitemap. To include them I will go to my Yoast dashboard and include them in the sitemap as you can see below:

This will fix this error. The categories will now be included in my website sitemap.

Now, as you can see with Semrush Site Audit Tool you can fix errors on your website and make it more SEO friendly. There are explanations of errors, notices, and warnings on the report so they are easy to fix. This helps to improve SEO and increase visitors to your website.

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After how much time should you run a SEMrush Site Audit?

The site audit frequency is dependent on the size of your website and how frequently changes are made to it. If you own a small website with a few hundred pages and less frequent changes, then I recommend doing a site audit once every 3 months.

For a larger website with thousands of pages and frequent updates, the Semrush website audit can be done every month. By regularly running the site audit you can remove any errors which could also improve your website SEO.

Semrush Site Audit Tool Tutorial – Conclusion

A Site Audit is a great way to improve your website’s SEO. It helps you to gain more search visibility and increase your website visitors. The Semrush Site Audit Tool saves valuable time by finding problems on your website. This could take a long time if you do it manually.

Once you know what problems your website has, you can easily fix them. I recommend Semrush for the site audit. Semrush audit features help you find and fix problems related to your website in an easy way.

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Frequently Asked Questions

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If you want to try the Semrush Site Audit tool, you can get Semrush 7 days free trial with access to all its features.