If you want to improve your website's SEO performance, you need to regularly audit its technical, on-page, and off-page factors. SEMrush is a powerful SEO tool that can help you conduct a comprehensive website audit and identify any issues or opportunities for optimization. In this article, we'll show you how to use SEMrush to audit your website's SEO in six steps.
The first step is to connect your website to SEMrush and create a project. A project is a set of tools and reports that you can use to monitor and manage your website's SEO. To create a project, go to the Projects dashboard and click on the Create project button. Enter your website's domain name and choose a name for your project. You can also connect your Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts to get more data and insights.
To audit your website's SEO using SEMrush: * Enter your website's URL into SEMrush's Site Audit tool. * SEMrush will analyze your website's on-page SEO, technical SEO, and off-page SEO factors. * Review the audit report provided by SEMrush, which will highlight issues such as broken links, missing meta tags, duplicate content, site speed issues, and more. * Prioritize the issues identified based on their severity and impact on SEO performance. * Utilize SEMrush's recommendations and suggested fixes to address the identified issues and improve your website's SEO performance. * Regularly monitor your website's SEO health using SEMrush's Site Audit tool and make necessary adjustments to maintain and improve your SEO performance over time.
Start by setting up your project and running the Site Audit tool. It scans your site for issues like slow loading times, broken links, and SEO errors. Analyze the audit report to identify critical problems and improvement opportunities, focusing on both on-page and technical SEO aspects. Use the Position Tracking feature to monitor keyword rankings and understand how visible your site is in search results. Check the Backlink Audit tool to evaluate your site's backlink profile for quality and potential toxic links. Lastly, leverage SEMrush’s recommendations to optimize content, improve site structure, and enhance overall SEO performance.
Site Audit: Scan your website for technical issues like broken links, slow loading, mobile usability, and more. Prioritize fixes based on severity and impact.
The next step is to run a site audit, which is a tool that crawls your website and checks for technical issues that might affect your SEO. To run a site audit, go to the Site Audit tool in your project and click on the Set up button. You can customize the settings, such as the crawl scope, frequency, speed, and rules. Then, click on the Start site audit button and wait for the results.
Keyword Gap: See what keywords competitors rank for that you're missing or underperforming on. Identify new target keywords and optimize content accordingly. On-Page SEO Checker: Analyze individual pages for keyword relevance, title tag optimization, meta descriptions, and other on-page SEO factors. Track progress ove
The site audit report will show you the overall health score of your website, as well as the number and severity of issues found. You can see the details of each issue, such as the affected pages, the impact, and the recommendations. You can also filter and sort the issues by type, status, tag, or URL. You should prioritize fixing the critical and high-priority issues that might harm your SEO, such as broken links, duplicate content, or slow loading speed.
Backlink Analysis: Monitor your backlink profile, identify spammy links, and discover opportunities to build high-quality links from relevant websites. Position Tracking: Track your website's ranking for target keywords across different search engines and see how you compare to competitors.
The next step is to run an on-page SEO checker, which is a tool that analyzes your website's content and provides suggestions for optimization. To run an on-page SEO checker, go to the On Page SEO Checker tool in your project and click on the Set up button. You can choose the pages you want to optimize, the keywords you want to target, and the competitors you want to compare. Then, click on the Collect ideas button and wait for the results.
Organic Traffic Insights: Analyze your organic traffic sources, understand user behavior, and identify content gaps to improve organic reach. Brand Monitoring: Set up alerts for mentions of your brand online and track sentiment to proactively address any issues.
The on-page SEO report will show you the optimization ideas for each page and keyword, as well as the potential traffic gain. You can see the details of each idea, such as the strategy, the difficulty, and the examples. You can also filter and sort the ideas by category, priority, or page. You should implement the ideas that can improve your SEO, such as adding meta tags, optimizing headings, or increasing readability.
The last step is to run a backlink audit, which is a tool that evaluates your website's backlink profile and identifies any toxic or spammy links that might hurt your SEO. To run a backlink audit, go to the Backlink Audit tool in your project and click on the Set up button. You can choose the sources of your backlinks, such as SEMrush, Google Search Console, or external files. Then, click on the Start backlink audit button and wait for the results.
This is the best thing that I like about SEMrush! Although it needs to be linked with the Google Search Console to fetch the results, the SEMrush "toxicity" report makes it easy to judge between a healthy and an unhealthy backlink. As backlinking is very crucial for domain authority and online visibility, it is very necessary to keep a track of the same. After all, many backlinks will be there that aren't done by you. Most of these backlinks are "toxic" to burn away your rankings. Start backlink audit on SEMrush and act as per the report suggests.
The backlink audit report will show you the overall toxicity score of your website, as well as the number and quality of backlinks. You can see the details of each backlink, such as the domain authority, the anchor text, and the toxicity level. You can also filter and sort the backlinks by type, status, or source. You should remove or disavow the toxic or spammy backlinks that might damage your SEO, such as low-quality directories, paid links, or irrelevant sites.
Export issues as tasks: Share findings with developers & track progress. Schedule regular audits: Monitor health & stay ahead of problems. Integrate with Google Analytics: Gain deeper insights into user behavior.