SEMRush Site Audit: A Guide to Website Quality Control

A Site Audit, also known as an SEO Audit, will allow you to check how well your company website is faring. In other words, it analyzes site health. And for that, we have SEMRush! SEMRush is known for being a quality assurance tool that’s both instrumental and indispensable for your company website! Aside from that, it is a competitor analysis tool and an SEO audit tool as well. Also, SEMRush can analyze your social media post performance! So, with this long resume, SEMRush Site Audit is a shoo-in for a website quality control tool. Thus, it’s perfect for anyone looking to improve their search engine rankings.

SEMRush + Site Audit = Ranking Perfection

“Scan your website for 130+ technical and SEO mistakes,” states the SEMRush Site Audit page. Thus, the Site Audit tool crawls websites; it will give an in-depth report on website issues that need your attention. Once you fix these issues, you’ll be sure to improve your website SEO!

So, SEMRush will search for and point out quality issues with your website. Plus, it can find up to 130 technical mistakes that’ll help your website achieve more popularity than ever before!

Then, when SEMRush reports on your site issues, it generally counts how many pages have such an issue. Also, helpfully enough, SEMRush even has guides for each problem your site encounters! So, it’s especially crucial to check the guides when SEMRush lists your site issues.

What does SEMRush look for?

SEMRush gives you Thematic Reports. Hence, it gives you the most common website issues, some of which include:

• Crawlability. This is important because search engine bots need to search for your website’s information to internet users.
• HTTPS Implementation. So, this type of issue refers to any problems regarding the site’s transition from HTTP to HTTPS.
• International SEO. Here, you get advice for ranking globally. Additionally, this covers issues with the hreflang tag.
• Performance. This aspect mainly involves performance, especially site loading speed! Also, file minification falls under this.
• Internal Linking. So, this type of issue checks on interlinking between pages. Thus, SEMRush will help you avoid orphaning pages.
• Markups. SEMRush will give you a numerical grade based on markups in your website’s code.
• Core Web Vitals. With this aspect, you’ll see just how healthy your site is in terms of its loading performance. Also, along with interactivity and visual stability, these are factors of Google’s ranking score.

A checklist of specific Site Audit issues SEMRush can find 

Errors 

For Errors, this type of website issue is in red. However, these are also the most pressing concerns for your site, so you have to fix them ASAP when you see them!

• Incorrect pages found in sitemap.xml
• Pages returned 4XX or 5XX status code
• Pages don’t have title tags 
• Issues with duplicate title tags 
• Pages have duplicate content issues 
• Internal links are broken 
• Pages couldn’t be crawled 
  • … due to DNS resolution issues
  • … due to incorrect URL formats
• Internal images are broken 
• Pages have duplicate meta descriptions 
• Robots.txt file has format errors 
• Sitemap.xml files have format errors 
• Pages with WWW resolve issue 
• No viewport tag 
• Pages with too large HTML size 
• AMP pages have no canonical tag 
• Issues with hreflang values 
• hreflang conflicts within page source code 
• Issues with incorrect hreflang links 
• Non-secure pages 
• Expiring or expired certificate issues
• Old security protocol issues
• Incorrect certificate name issues
• Mixed content issues
• No redirect or canonical tags to HTTPS homepage from HTTP homepage
• Redirect chains and loops 
• Pages with a broken canonical link or have multiple canonical URLs 
• Pages have a meta refresh tag 
• Issues on broken internal JavaScript and CSS files 
• Subdomains don’t support secure encryption algorithms 
• Sitemap.xml files are too large 
• Links couldn’t be crawled (incorrect URL formats)  
• Structured data items are invalid 
• Pages have slow load speed

Warnings 

Warnings are highlighted in orange and aren’t as serious as Errors. However, they are still website problems that you need to address! Site issues under Warnings can still impact your SEO score.

• Pages don’t have meta descriptions 
• External image is broken 
• External links are broken 
• Links on HTTPS pages lead to HTTP page 
• Pages don’t have enough text or have too much text within the title tags
• Pages don’t have an h1 heading or have duplicate H1 and title tags 
• Too many on-page links 
• URLs with a temporary redirect 
• Images don’t have alt attributes 
• Too many parameters in page URLs 
• No hreflang and lang attributes on pages
• Pages don’t have character encoding declared or don’t have doctype declared 
• Low word count on pages
• Pages use Flash or contain frames 
• Pages have underscores in the URL 
• Outgoing internal links contain nofollow attribute 
• Sitemap.xml not indicated in robots.txt 
• Sitemap.xml not found 
• Homepage does not use HTTPS encryption 
• Subdomains don’t support SNI
• HTTP URLs in sitemap.xml for HTTPS site 
• Uncompressed pages 
• Issues with blocked internal resources in robots.txt 
• Issues with uncompressed or uncached JavaScript and CSS files 
• Pages have too large JavaScript and CSS total size
• Pages use too much JavaScript and CSS files 
• Issues with unminified JavaScript and CSS files 
• Link URLs are too long 

Notices

Notices are outlined in blue. This type is the least important of the three and does not impact your website’s health at all! Nevertheless, they are still necessary for making your site look good.

• Pages take more than 1 second to become interactive  
• Pages have more than one H1 tag 
• Page URLs are longer than 2 characters 
• Pages are blocked from crawling 
• Outgoing external links contain nofollow attributes 
• Robots.txt not found 
• Pages have hreflang language mismatch issues 
• Subdomains don’t support HSTS 
• Orphaned pages in Google Analytics 
• Orphaned pages in sitemaps 
• Pages blocked by X-Robots-Tag: noindex HTTP header
• Issues with blocked external resources in robots.txt 
• Issues on broken external JavaScript and CSS files 
• Pages need more than 3 clicks to be reached 
• Pages have only one incoming internal link 
• URLs with a permanent redirect 
• Resources are formatted as page link 
• Links have no anchor text or have non-descriptive anchor text 
• Links to external pages and resources return a 43 HTTP status code  

Use SEMRush to control the quality of your website

All in all, SEMRush is a reliable, versatile website audit tool that serves several purposes. So, it can analyze site health as well as your competitors’ performance. Not only that, it tackles your social media posts’ performance. Finally, it can even audit your SEO. Thus, all these things help get your site to reach its full potential. 

So, a SEMRush site audit’s primary purpose is to rank on search engines. However, with the complete list of the issues SEMRush can point out, your site will be thoroughly optimized once you’ve finished fixing everything.

SEMRush Site Audit can find website issues. Primarily, it analyzes problems of Crawlability, HTTPS Implementation, and International SEO. Also, SEMRush can check on your Website Performance and Internal Linking. Finally, it reviews Markups and Core Web Vitals. So, once you’ve fixed everything with SEMRush’s issues, your website quality control will go through the roof!

Even though SEMRush is a great site audit tool, a dedicated web developer can also help in website quality control.

About Axel May Rivera

Axel is an avid fan of many dramas and songs. She is always eager to explore and discover more when it comes to movies and entertainment, especially in Korean and Filipino culture. In her free time, she enjoys reading books and playing badminton.