In-depth guide to SE Ranking's Website Audit tool (full step-by-step walkthrough)

Let's take a deep dive to explore every section of a SE Ranking's Website Audit tool and discover how ready a website is for search engines and actual people. Be sure to first check out our quick overview video of the tool before moving on. Under the issue report section, you'll find a detailed report on all of the issues that are affecting your website's performance in search. The report is based on the analysis of more than one hundred and ten parameters, which SE Ranking has organized into different categories. To help you stay on top of website issues, we have added a couple of quick filters so that you can access all the necessary data points at your convenience. These filters include current issues that are affecting your site's performance right now and need immediate attention, fixed issues that have already been resolved, but be sure to check all pages to ensure no issues are left unresolved, new issues that were identified during the most recent site audit, all tracked issues encompasses every issue that is continuously tracked for your website over time, and the turned off issues filter highlights deactivated

or ignored issues that are not currently being monitored and which won't appear to clients or in guest links. The best part is that you can choose to view all issues or focus on errors, warnings, and notices separately across all of the aforementioned categories. Besides pointing out and describing issues, website audit can also tell you what exactly needs to be fixed and how. You can click on the number of found issues in any row to get a complete list of pages with that issue along with detailed information on each page. Now clicking on the kebab menu here will present you with several options that allow you to export all detected issues to a file in XLS or CSV format, ignore an issue until the next restart, or permanently disable an issue. You are also free to download the website audit report, email it to a client or colleague, or share access to it via a guest link. The website audit tool also allows you to quickly create an XML site map. Just specify which pages must be included in the site map and configure the necessary parameters. Under crawled pages, you can see list of every found page

along with the detailed breakdown of detected issues. Make sure to click on the issue count to see the full list of a page's issues. To prioritize your fixes, start with the pages that drive the most revenue by filtering or sorting data by traffic, keyword rankings, or referring pages so you can tackle your highest impact pages first. To make the analysis process more convenient, you're free to use built in filters as well as custom ones. And if you want to separately analyze different language versions of the site or pages from certain website sections, you can choose to view results by directories instead of by pages. This will help you get a good understanding of the site structure, subdomains, categories, language versions, and so on. Under Found Resources, you will find information on the analyze site's images, CSS, and JavaScript files. By clicking on a number under the source URL column, you can check on which pages the resources used and whether search engines can crawl it. For images, you can also check the alt text. In addition, you will see the status code for each resource,

its size, and loading speed. You can also use built in quick filters to look at all resources together or choose to analyze images, CSS, and JavaScript files separately. The next section contains information on the analyze sites found internal and external links. For each link, both external and internal, every key parameter is displayed, namely the server status code of the page the link points to, the link type, be it hyperlink, image link, canonical, hreflang, meta refresh, CSS, or JavaScript, the link source as in the page on which the link is placed, the anchor text and type, alt text for image links, and you can see whether the link is a Dofollow or Nofollow. As soon as two or more audit reports are ready for a single project, you can compare their results under the crawl comparison section. Plus, you can see the dynamics for every parameter. Now let's move on to the tool's flexible setting options that allow you to have complete control over the website audit process and resulting report. Under schedule, you can automate the audit and run it on a weekly or monthly basis.

Just make sure to specify the day and time of the check. Here, you can also specify the email to which the reports will be sent. Under source of pages for website audit, you can specify which pages the tool should scan. The options are either all pages of the site or all pages of the site along with subdomains. The system can also audit the site based on your own XML site map, which will be automatically located once you run the first audit. Another option allows you to manually add a link to the XML site map by clicking on the add site map button. Moreover, you can upload a custom list of pages you want the system to check. To do this, add a TXT or CSV file with each URL entered on a new line. Under rules for scanning pages, you can specify whether our bot should take into account noindex and nofollow directives as well as robots. TXT file directives. You can also add additional rules to include or exclude certain website directories or folders from the audit. To prevent our bot from crawling duplicate pages, you can instruct it to ignore URL parameters.

And if external domains block our bot, you can add individual links or entire domains to the exclusion list. If your site's pages are closed off from crawling, use parser settings to enable our tool to audit your site. Select the user agent name that will be used to crawl the site, decide if you want to enable JavaScript client side rendering, and give it access to the pages by specifying the username and password. Under limits and restrictions, you can select the maximum number of pages that can be crawled. Before setting the number, check your subscription plan's account limits to see how many pages are available for one site. Make sure to also specify the maximum scanning depth and the maximum number of requests that can be sent to the server. Under report setup, you can choose which website audit version to use, and we strongly recommend using the latest one. What's more, you can independently change some parameters that the system takes into account when crawling a site. For example, if the length of a title in one of the pages of the analyzed site goes beyond or falls short of the length recommended by the service from twenty to sixty five characters,

an error will be indicated in the report. You're welcome to change these parameters depending on your goals. And the last section here is monitored issues. Here you can disable some checks if you think they are irrelevant to your site. Such checks won't be taken into account during the audit and will not affect the overall health score of the analyzed website. We have reviewed every quarter of the website audit tool. If you have any questions, reach out to us or visit our knowledge base. Thank you for choosing SE Ranking and happy SEO ing.