Semrush’s Site Audit is another tool to analyze an entire website for issues related to technical SEO.
In this Semrush Site Audit review, you will learn how to use Site Audit and find out issues and fix them.
What is Semrush Site Audit?
Semrush’s Site Audit is a website audit tool by Semrush. It audits your website with 130+ on-page and technical SEO checks, including crawlability, internal linking, coding, hreflang, AMP, and HTTPS issues.
Since it’s a cloud-based service, you do not need to install it on your computer and run manual crawls, unlike WebSite Auditor of SEO Powersuite.
How to use Semrush Site Audit
You need an active Semrush account to start using the Semrush Audit tool.
It has got both free and premium plans. But, here is a quick overview of Site Audit limitations based on Semrush prices.
| Feature | Free | Pro | Guru | Business |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Projects | 1 | 5 | 15 | 40 |
| Max. number of web pages to crawl per project | 100 | 20,000 | 20,000 | 100,000 |
| Monthly Price | Free | $119.95 | $299.95 | $449.95 |
Once logged in to your Semrush account, create your project. Give it a name and specify your domain.
Once done, click on the ‘Setup‘ button under Site Audit.
Or Click on the ‘Site Audit‘ link in On-Page & Tech SEO navigation section.
Site Audit Settings
A popout window will open. From there, you can configure Site Audit settings.
Domain and limit of pages
- Crawl Scope: Select which domain (or sub-domain) should the Semrush should crawl
- Limit of checked pages: Specify how many pages Semrush should check. The limit depends on your Semrush subscription plan. If you have a Pro account, you will have a 20,000-page limit.
- Crawl Source: From where should the Semrush Site Audit tool start from crawling
Crawl source has four options:
- Website: Semrush will start from the homepage and go deeper from its linked pages
- Sitemaps on site: Site will find the order of sitemaps on your site
- Enter sitemap URL: Specify your main sitemap URL, and Semrush will start crawling from sitemap specifications
- URLs from file: Provide a list of URLs
Crawler settings
You will see two options: 1) User Agent 2) Crawl Delay
User Agent
Select which User-agent should crawl your site. SiteAuditBot-Mobile is picked by default. But you can change to another like GoogleBot-Mobile.
Crawl-Delay
Suppose you have a website with massive traffic, and your web hosting plan has limited bandwidth. In that case, the crawl-delay setting will be helpful because you can configure the delay between crawls.
Allow/disallow URLs
If you want Semrush not to crawl any page, you can specify them here.
For example, use this option if you want to restrict Semrush from crawling any specific area of your site, such as Membership pages, thank you pages, non-public pages, OTO (One-Time-Offers) pages, etc.
Remove URL parameters
Define which pages with parameters should Semrush Site Audit skip.
Bypass website restrictions
Schedule
Specify how often should Semrush site audit crawl your site. Unless your site is a bigger site publishing multiple pages per day, it’s good to set this to weekly.
Click on the ‘Start Site Audit‘ to proceed.
Depending on the size of your site, resources allowed in your hosting subscription, and the quality of web hosting, the finishing time may vary.
Site Audit Overview
Site Audit’s Overview section consists of several parts.
Site Health
A score developed by Semrush is based on the number of errors and warnings found on a site and their uniqueness. The higher the Site Health score better you are doing as a webmaster.
Here is the average site health score in some industries:
- Art & Entertainment: 77%
- Autos & vehicles: 76%
- Beauty & Fitness: 78%
- Business and industrial: 77%
- Computers & electronics: 75%
- Finance: 75%
- Food & drink: 76%
- Games: 79%
- Travel: 77%
- Sports: 75%
Takeaway: Try to improve the overall Site Health score by fixing issues associated with your site.
Crawled Pages
This is also an indicator of how many pages are on your site. The report breaks it down into five different groups:
- Healthy
- Broken
- Have issues
- Redirects
- Blocked
Thematic Reports
This section gives you an overview of site audits based on Crawlability, HTTPS, Core Web Vitals, Site Performance, Internal Linking, Markup, and International SEO.
Top Issues
At the bottom, you will see the top issues that Semrush Site Audit found.
Issues
The issues tab will include all the problems based on severity. Errors will show issues of the highest severity, and Warnings will consist of issues of medium severity.
Here are some common issues of each category:
| Errors | Warnings | Notices |
|---|---|---|
| Pages don’t have title tags | Sitemap.xml not found | Have more than one H1 tag |
| Pages have duplicate title tags | Images don’t have alt attributes | Orphaned pages |
| Pages couldn’t be crawled | Too many on-page links | Pages take more than 1 second to load |
| Slow page speed | Too much text within the title tags | Robots.txt not found |
| Returned 4XX status code | Don’t have enough text within the title tags | Links with non-descriptive anchor text |
| Internal broken links | Links on HTTPS pages lead to HTTP page | Outgoing external links with nofollow attribute |
| Pages with canonical broken link | Broken external links | Links with no anchor text |
| Invalid structured data items | Sitemap.xml not indicated in robots.txt | URLs with longer than 200 characters |
| Pages with 5XX status code | External images are broken | |
| Duplicate meta descriptions | Low word count | |
| Too large HTML size | Pages without H1 tag | |
| Broken internal images | Outgoing internal links contain nofollow attribute | |
| Hreflang value issues | Low text-HTML ratio | |
| Non-secure pages | Unminified Javascript and CSS files | |
| Boken internal JavaScript and CSS files | Don’t have meta description | |
| Redirect chains and loops |
Click on the ‘Why and how to fix it‘ link to see more details.
Click on the issue to see more details.
Here are the broken internal links the Semrush Site Audit tool found.
Now you can export broken links as a spreadsheet and start fixing them. Learn more about Semrush broken links checker.
Here’s a video that shows other issues listed by Semrush Site Auditor.
Page Audit
Like in WebSite Auditor by SEO Powersuite, Semrush lets you go deeper and finds overall audit statistics at the individual page level.
Our article on Blogger SEO techniques has several not severe issues.
Statistics
The statistics tab will include your site’s overall performance from a technical SEO standpoint. For example, on this page, you can determine if there are an excessive amount of pages with 4XX and 5XX status codes and if your internal linking practices are good or need to improve.
Crawl comparison
Once the Semrush Site Auditing tool crawled your site multiple times, you can see whether it found new issues or if your work on fixing previous errors has worked off.
When you click on the chart button, you will be directed to the progress section, and it will give you a historical chart for audits from a previous date to the most recent date.
Semrush Site Audit Cost
Like all other main tools in Semrush, the Site Audit tool comes in all plans, including the free tier. While the free plan caps the max number of pages to crawl at 100 and offers limited features, paid plans restrict pages that can crawl according to the Semrush subscription level.
Here is a comparison table of features and limits for Semrush Site Audit software.
| Pro | Guru | Business | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Projects | 5 | 15 | 40 |
| Pages to crawl per project | 20,000 | 20,000 | 100,000 |
| Pages to crawl per month | 100,000 | 300,000 | 1,000,000 |
| Google Data Studio integration | – | Yes | Yes |
| Scheduled PDF reports | 5 | 20 | 50 |
Which plan is good for using Semrush site auditor?
Essentially, the Pro plan is cost-effective if your site is no larger than 20,000 pages in total. For all other cases like managing clients’ site auditing works, Guru or Business plan is worth it. Furthermore, you can buy more pages to crawl from your Subscription info page.
Alternatives
There are several Semrush Site Audit alternatives with competitive pricing. Here are some competitors of Semrush that offer site auditing tools.
- WebSite Auditor by SEO Powersuite
- Screaming Frog
- Agency Analytics
- WebCEO
Semrush vs. WebSite Auditor
WebSite Auditor is offered as dedicated software for site auditing by SEO PowerSuite. It consists of many features and tools. You can learn more in this complete WebSite Auditor review.
Here are some key benefits of WebSite over Semrush Website Auditor:
- WebSite Auditor is a software – You can run it on your PC or a virtual machine and run unlimited pages
- Many customizable options – From crawler configuration to reporting settings.
- TF-IDF – Learn which content your pages are missing with Term Frequency – Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF).
- Keyword map integration – Audit content for better search engine performance
- Site Visualization – Get a visual picture of your site structure in internal links, page views, and click-depth.
- Content Editor – Edit content within WebSite Auditor with SEO recommendations.
- Generates XML Sitemap, Robots TXT files – Currently Semrush Website SEO Audit tool does not generate XML sitemaps or robots.txt files according to custom filtering.
Is Semrush Site Audit worth the cost?
It is no debate that it’s required to have any sort of website auditing tool in your arsenal. But, the question is whether Semrush is worth it when considering many contenders.
If you review Semrush deeply (price versus features etc.), you will come to know that it offers tremendous value under every Semrush pricing plan. Whether Pro, Guru, or Busines, Semrush has every tool you need.
Obviously, there are some disadvantages of solely using Semrush Site Auditor instead of a dedicated site-auditor like WebSite Auditor, such as not getting TF-IDF keyword reports and essentially more robust features.
But, if you are a solopreneur and are looking for an excellent tool to audit a site without spending much, Semrush is worth it as you get 40+ more powerful other tools to grow your business online.
- Semrush Keyword Research
- Semrush Keyword Gap
- Competitor Keyword Research
- Semrush SEO Content Template
- Semrush Position Tracking
However, if you have a website with huge pages or manage multiple clients and want a more robust platform, I recommend WebSite Auditor. Its Enterprise plan costs $299.95 per year, and you get to crawl unlimited pages and allows using proxies and different user agents than the Semrush Site Audit tool to speed up the process.
FAQs on Semrush Website Audit tool
What features does Semrush offer in its site audit report?
Semrush Site Audit consists of many features. Some of them are Crawl comparison, Google Data Studio integration, Scheduled crawls, Email reports, Crawl agent customization, and calculation of Core Web Vitals in bulk.
What is Semrush Site Audit?
Semrush Site Audit is a website auditing tool. It crawls your website content and linked resources and analyzes to detect 130+ issues and guide you on how to fix them.
How do I delete a Semrush Site Audit project?
Unfortunately, you cannot delete a Semrush site audit project. You have to delete the project entirely to delete Site Audit data.
How do I run a Semrush Site Audit?
Create a project on Semrush, and set up the Site Audit by specifying your domain, crawl depth, etc. Learn more in this step-by-step guide.
What is Semrush site health?
The Site Health score is based on the number of errors and warnings found on your site and their uniqueness. The higher the score, the fewer problems your site has, the better it is optimized for search engines, and the more user-friendly it is.
Does Semrush have a free trial?
Semrush site audit free
Semrush’s free plan lets you audit a site for up to 100 pages.
Is Semrush site audit free?
It is free for up to 100 crawled pages, and some features are restricted.
What is an SEO audit?
SEO audit analyzes a website to detect issues that severely affect search engine friendliness. A good SEO audit tool goes beyond on-site SEO and attaches Off-page SEO factors such as backlinks.
Final Words on Semrush Site Audit Tool
One of the most used tools in Semrush is the Site Auditing tool. Depending on your expectations, it might largely fulfill them. By comparing it with its competitors in terms of pricing and value for investment and features, using Semrush for website auditing is a no brainer.
So, what are your thoughts on the Semrush Website Audit tool? Have you tried it already? Share your thoughts below.