Last updated on December 7, 2018 at 10:50 am
Running a website audit is an extremely important task. It is a lengthy process that requires diligence and often involves attentively scanning through dozens, if not hundreds, of web pages to find weaknesses and areas for improvement. We’d all be spending hours and hours manually checking each web page if it weren’t for website audit tools. Luckily, there are plenty of great ones out there.
We are always looking out for awesome tools that can facilitate our work in terms of SEO, and we have previously worked with such website auditors as Woorank, Google Lighthouse, and SEO Powersuite. However, I want to note that there aren’t any SEO tools that can give you a 100% guarantee that your online performance will improve. It’s up to you to add the final human touch of creativity to stand out.
Another one of such quality website audit tools is part of SE Ranking’s tool package, which we have previously reviewed. Not only does this website audit tool quickly find and identify website errors, but it also creates a list of technical issues for web developers, content writers, and web designers. Before we start the review, we invite you and try the tool out for yourself by signing up for a free trial.
Website Audit
Once you finish adding your website as a project by following the steps outlined here under the Starting up section, the system will automatically start running an audit of the added website. Depending on how many pages the website has, it may take some time for the tool to complete the audit.
When running an SEO audit, you can monitor the crawling process as it happens, view the completion percentage, and the queue position, if there is more than one website in your account. On top of that, you can speed up the audit by configuring the maximum number of pages, the scanning depth and the number of requests per second.
The Report Section
Once the audit has been completed, you can look at the results by accessing the Report section. Once you perform more than one audit of the same website, a graph that shows the dynamics of changes will appear, letting you know if you’re on the right track.
As you scroll down the Report page, you can see information about the website’s domain characteristics that shows the location of the site’s server and the site’s expiration date, SEO Metrics that display the site’s Moz DA and number of backlinks, and Index status that demonstrates how many web pages are indexed in Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Further down on the Report page, you can find detailed information about such analyzed parameters as the website’s Health check, Page, Meta, Content, Link and Image analysis, Optimization tips, Usability, and Technology.
The Health check analyzes the site’s main tech features, like site mirror, HTTP to HTTPS redirects, robots.txt, XML sitemap, frames, flash, duplicated pages, etc.
The Page analysis provides information regarding on-page errors, such as URL length, pages blocked by robots.txt, page size, pages with noindex meta tags, rel=”canonical”, rel=”alternate”, page redirect, to name a few.
The Meta analysis summarizes page titles and descriptions, checks their uniqueness on the site, looks at whether they comply with restrictions on the number of characters, and highlights duplicates.
Under Content analysis, you can easily see if you have any duplicate content, if you have pages that are too big or too small, plus look through the status of the HTML headings.
The Link analysis enables you to monitor each page’s inbound and outbound links. Here you can also get recommendations about the use of nofollow tags in links, how you can improve anchor texts for key queries, etc.
The Image analysis points out images that don’t have Alt texts as well as images with 4xx and 5xx statuses.
By clicking on Optimization, you will see general optimization tips for mobile and desktop versions of your website. In addition, you will see errors regarding the use of JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content, tips on compression and minifying HTML, CSS, and JS, and more.
Last but not least, the Usability and Technology analysis checks for the presence of branded favicons, correct markup, a custom 404 error page, in addition to providing an analysis of the loading speed and website security.
Generating an XML Sitemap
Through the XML sitemap feature, you can enable search engine crawlers to find the list of pages that you want to index. As you are generating a sitemap, you are free to choose the type of pages you want to include, as well as specify the page change frequency, and various crawling depth priorities.
The Crawled Pages Section
The Crawled Pages section shows you all of the site pages, external links, and images that were crawled. Moreover, you can find their analysis against key SEO parameters. The analysis of each separate page guarantees that you don’t miss any warnings. Plus, the platform highlights the parameter that needs to be fixed, if an error is found.
The Crawled pages, External links and Crawled images subsections are equipped with filters that enable you to conveniently work with a selection of necessary data. For instance, you can easily sort pages by error type and work with those pages only. Moreover, you can create filters for one or several parameters, and export the results in the .xls file format.
External Links
Here you can see a list of website links that lead to external resources, as well as the results of their analysis against such parameters as the server response, presence of the nofollow tag, anchor text, crawl depth, a web page that links out to an external resource, etc.
Crawled Images
In this subsection, you can find all the images located on your website. You can also see the results of their analysis against key image-related parameters, like server response, Alt text, size, and so on.
The Compare Crawls Section
Once two or more audits of the same website have been completed, you can select the audit dates and compare their results to learn what improved and what got worse.
The Page changes monitoring Section
Under the Page changes monitoring subsection, you can select pages, track and get notified of any change that occurs on all important page elements. This feature gives you instantaneous notice when any alteration takes place.
The Settings Section
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