New: Site Audit Tool
By Dan Published Updated 3 min read
Quick answer
KeySearch Site Audit crawls your domain and gives it a Site health score. Enter your domain, set Pages to crawl (500 by default), and start the audit. Issues are grouped as Critical, Warning and Notice. Click any issue to see the affected pages. You only use audit credits for pages actually crawled.
Key takeaways
- Enter your domain once; the audit crawls from the domain level.
- Pages to crawl defaults to 500, and you only use credits for pages actually crawled.
- Issues are grouped by severity: Critical, Warning and Notice, plus informational checks.
- Click an issue to see every affected page and its internal and inbound links.
- Not every issue needs fixing; use the audit as an overview of your site's SEO health.
After months of development, we are happy to release our new Site Audit Tool. It should really be called the “Simple Site Audit Tool” since that was our main focus when building it. Many site audit tools bombard you with tons of information which can be very overwhelming. We tried our best to keep the tool simple while still giving you the benefits and power an in-depth site audit can give.
Update: the Site Audit has been redesigned since this post was first published. The steps below describe the current version; the screenshots and video show the original 2023 design.
Getting Started
When you open the tool you will see a box at the top to enter your domain. The Site Audit crawls from the domain level so no need to enter specific URLs. Then you can set the number of pages you’d like to crawl in the “Pages to crawl” box. The default setting is 500. The tool will only crawl this amount of pages of your domain. If you leave it set to 500, and let’s say your site only has 200 pages, it will only crawl the 200 pages and you will only use 200 audit credits from your monthly allowance. Credits for pages that weren’t crawled are returned to your account.
Each plan comes with monthly audit credits on top of your normal search credits (2,000 audited pages a month on Starter and 5,000 on Pro). The audit page shows how many credits you have left and when they refill. The history button next to the domain box opens your recent audits.
Once you’ve added your domain and set the number of pages to crawl, press the “Start audit” button and the Site Audit begins.
The Audit will now be working. You don’t need to leave the audit open, you can go work on other things and come back later when the Audit is finished. Results appear automatically, and an audit can take anywhere from a few minutes to longer for big sites, depending on the crawl size.
Site Audit Summary
Once the Audit is finished you will see your overall Site health score at the top, along with the number of issues found, broken down by severity.
- Critical issues are potentially the most troublesome. These are the ones that may have the most negative SEO impact and should be your top priority for getting fixed.
- Warnings are not quite as troublesome. Usually, these won’t badly hurt your SEO but fixing them may give you a bit of a boost in the search engines.
- Notices are things you should fix for best practices. They may or may not give you any boost but it’s probably best to get them sorted out when you have the time.
Below the score you will see the Issues list, grouped by severity and color-coded: red for Critical, amber for Warning and green for Notice. After those comes an “Informational” group. Informational items are just there for info. They are not issues and do not need any fixing. Checks your site passed are tucked away in a collapsed “passed” section at the bottom.
Getting The Details
You can click on any issue in the list and it will load all the URLs we found with that issue, along with each page’s status, score, internal links and inbound links. You will also see a quick description of the issue at the top, further explaining what you are seeing.
Certain issues may also show you more info under the URL. For example, “Titles are too long” will show you the titles we found so you can see the issue clearly. Another example is “Pages with deprecated HTML tags”, which will show you the deprecated tags we found on that page.
Keep in mind the Site Audit is just here to give you info. Not all of the info you may choose to act on. There may be reasons not to fix a certain issue and that is fine. The idea here though is to give you an overall view of the SEO health and optimization of your website.
