This article presents a comprehensive and complete set of Semrush Site Audit features.

Core Functionality: What It Does

At its heart, Semrush’s Site Audit tool is a website crawler. It systematically navigates your website, page by page, much like a search engine bot (e.g., Googlebot). As it crawls, it analyzes various technical and on-page SEO aspects to identify issues that could be hindering your website’s performance in search engine results pages (SERPs), affecting user experience, or preventing proper indexing.

Key Features & What They Check:

  1. Overall Health Score:

    • Provides a percentage-based score (0-100%) representing the overall technical health of your site.
    • This score is based on the number and severity of issues found.

  2. Issue Categorization & Prioritization:

    • Errors (Red): Critical issues that need immediate attention (e.g., broken internal links, incorrect HTTPS setup, sitemap errors).
    • Warnings (Orange): Moderately severe issues that should be addressed (e.g., pages blocked from crawling, missing alt attributes, duplicate title tags).
    • Notices (Blue): Less critical issues or opportunities for improvement (e.g., outgoing external links with nofollow attributes, pages with only one incoming internal link).

  3. Thematic Reports (Detailed Checks): Semrush groups issues into several thematic reports, making it easier to understand and tackle problems:

    • Crawlability:
      • Checks for robots.txt issues (e.g., blocking important resources).
      • Analyzes sitemap.xml (format, presence, errors, pages not in sitemap).
      • Identifies crawl depth issues (pages too many clicks away from the homepage).
      • Finds broken internal and external links (4xx, 5xx errors).
      • Detects redirect chains and loops.
      • Identifies orphan pages (pages with no internal links pointing to them).
      • Checks for pages blocked by noindex or nofollow tags.
    • HTTPS:
      • Ensures proper HTTPS implementation.
      • Detects mixed content issues (HTTP resources on HTTPS pages).
      • Checks for insecure pages, missing HSTS, expired certificates, old TLS versions.
    • Site Performance (Core Web Vitals & more):
      • Measures page load speed metrics, including Core Web Vitals (LCP, FID, CLS).
      • Identifies uncompressed or unminified JavaScript and CSS files.
      • Detects large HTML page sizes.
      • Points out unoptimized images.
    • Internal Linking:
      • Highlights pages with too few or too many internal links.
      • Identifies broken internal links.
      • Checks for issues with link text (e.g., “click here”).
      • Identifies orphan pages.
    • On-Page SEO:
      • Titles: Missing, duplicate, too long, too short, multiple title tags.
      • Meta Descriptions: Missing, duplicate, too long, too short.
      • H1 Tags: Missing, duplicate, multiple H1s.
      • Content Issues: Low word count, duplicate content.
      • Images: Missing alt attributes, broken images.
      • Canonical Tags: Issues with rel="canonical" implementation.
    • Structured Data & Markup:
      • Checks for the presence and validity of structured data (Schema.org).
      • Identifies parsing errors in structured data items.
    • International SEO (Hreflang):
      • Validates hreflang tag implementation for multilingual/multiregional sites.
      • Detects common hreflang errors (wrong language codes, conflicts, missing return tags).

  4. “Why and How to Fix” Explanations:

    • For each issue found, Semrush provides a brief explanation of what the problem is and why it’s important, along with general guidance on how to fix it.

  5. Customizable Crawl Settings:

    • Crawl Scope: Audit entire site, specific subdomains, or subfolders.
    • Crawl Source: Website, sitemap, list of URLs.
    • Crawl Speed/Delay: To avoid overloading your server.
    • User-Agent: Choose which bot to emulate (e.g., SemrushBot, GoogleBot).
    • Disallow Rules: Respect robots.txt or ignore it, add custom disallow rules.
    • URL Parameters: Specify how to handle URL parameters.

  6. Scheduled Audits & Progress Tracking:

    • Set up recurring audits (daily, weekly) to monitor site health over time.
    • The “Progress” tab shows trends in your health score, number of issues, and how they’ve changed since the last crawl.
    • Compare crawls to see what has been fixed or what new issues have arisen.

  7. Reporting & Exporting:

    • Generate PDF reports (customizable with your logo for agencies).
    • Export issue lists to CSV or Excel for further analysis or sharing with development teams.
    • Integrate with Google Data Studio for more advanced reporting.

  8. Integrations:

    • Google Analytics: Connect to pull in data like pageviews for audited URLs, helping prioritize fixes for high-traffic pages with issues.
    • Google Search Console: Can sometimes provide additional insights, though the primary value is GA.
    • Trello, Jira, Asana (via Zapier or similar): Send tasks directly to project management tools.

What It Helps You Achieve:

  • Improve Technical SEO Health: Identify and fix the foundational technical issues that can prevent search engines from properly crawling, indexing, and understanding your site.
  • Enhance Crawlability & Indexability: Ensure search engines can discover and access all your important content.
  • Boost On-Page Optimization: Find and correct on-page elements that are crucial for ranking.
  • Identify Performance Bottlenecks: Improve user experience and potentially rankings by speeding up your site.
  • Ensure Security Best Practices: Keep your site secure with proper HTTPS implementation.
  • Prioritize SEO Tasks: The error/warning/notice system helps you focus on the most impactful fixes first.
  • Track SEO Progress Over Time: Monitor how your technical SEO efforts are improving your site’s health.
  • Facilitate Communication: Easily share reports and issue lists with clients or development teams.

In essence, Semrush’s Site Audit tool is a powerful diagnostic tool that helps webmasters, SEO professionals, and digital marketers uncover a wide range of technical and on-page SEO problems, providing the information needed to fix them and improve a website’s overall search visibility and user experience.