Generate a Website SEO Audit Report in Under 30 Minutes

As you’ve searched, you have likely found a mix of recommendations with no clear indication as to your “true north”. Our goal here is to help you cut through the noise and hone in on those key items that are essential to a website’s SEO health.

Ensure you have access and a basic understanding of the following tools: 

1. Google Analytics

2. Google Search Console

3. An SEO tool (examples: SEMrush, Moz, Ahrefs, Screaming Frog)

Our Approach to SEO

As a digital marketing agency, VividFront focuses deliberately on technical and on-page SEO metrics. Whether it be through auditing and optimizing inherited sites for our clients or custom developing an entirely new website experience, on-page and technical SEO best practices are incorporated into everything we do.

Funny thing is, that generally speaking, a number of core basic SEO best practices are often forgotten about or simply not implemented from the get go. Most often, these things are fairly easy to identify and remedy, if you know what to look for. While our efforts go a bit further (ok, a lot further) than is discussed below, we will show you how to get a very high level idea of a website’s technical and on-page SEO health if: you don’t have the means or funds to hire a digital marketing agency and/or you’re already familiar and need some help cutting through the noise.

Follow along for the VividFront-approved approach to auditing a site’s SEO health in under 30 minutes.

Essential SEO Tools

If you need to set up the aforementioned tools above, here are some help guides for each of them to assist with setup:

• Google Analytics

• Google Search Console

• SEMrush, Screaming Frog, Moz, Ahrefs

So many options, so little time. At VividFront, we like to start with a high-level site audit using the SEMrush site audit tool. With the free version, your results are more limited, so our recommendation is to supplement where you can with other tools (discussed below). 

Determining Basic Site Health Using SEMrush 

• Create an SEMrush free account

• Find ‘site audit’

• Enter the site’s domain name

• Set the limit of checked URL’s to 100 (anything above requires a subscription). With the 100, you will get a good idea of whats working and what’s not.

• Choose ‘Use Website’ as source for crawl. 

• Click ‘Audit Site’

The audit may take some time to collect all of the data. Feel free to continue reading on as you wait for results to populate. 

Fixing SEMRush Errors

The first place we start our audit is with the overall site health. In this example, the site we audited has an SEO health rating of 86%. Next to the site health metric, you can see how many errors and warnings were found. The priority items are the errors because these have a larger impact on the overall website health score. 

Fixing SEMrush Warnings 

Similarly to errors, the next place we look for potential areas of optimization is the “warnings” tab. These are less critical, per se, but still extremely important to the overall health of a website. Using the same website as an example, here is a overview of flagged warnings:

Supplementing SEMrush results

At VividFront, we use SEMrush as our go-to tool when conducting the first audit of a website. However, even the best tools have inherent limitations to them. Hence, we use a few others to supplement our results allowing us to get a more holistic understanding of a website’s potential key areas of improvement. 

PageSpeed Insights

This is a free tool offered by Google. It allows you to measure the speed of a website and will inform you of failing components where they exist. It also audits and reports on SEO errors that SEMrush leaves off their report. 

Using the website from before, we found an additional area of optimization for SEO. See below:

These 7 links are all “Learn More” links. These are flagged because they are non-descriptive in nature and need additional context so the user can evaluate where the link leads before clicking. In this instance, one example takes users to the services page. 

Here, we would recommend replacing “Learn More” with “Learn More About Our Services”. As before, this is a simple fix that can greatly improve the user experience and help your site rank better in search results.

Learn more about the measures Page Speed Insights reports on by visiting their SEO audit section of their site documentation (see what I did there - I described the link in detail so you knew what to expect once clicked).

Special Addition: Screaming Frog

One of our favorite tools to use at VividFront is called Screaming Frog. The user interface is much less aesthetically pleasing than SEMrush or other tools but it is extremely powerful and can give you details that other tools lack. 

To supplement our initial SEMrush and Google Page Insights tests, we will run our site through Screaming Frog as our last step. 

Sometimes its not totally clear from other tools exactly what the issue is and how to find/fix it. This is where Screaming Frog excels - it allows you to find the origin of nearly any error so that it can be easily located with the website admin and fixed. 

In the below image, you will notice that Screaming Frog also picked up something that SEMrush and Page Speed Insights missed - a missing H1 on four website pages. This is one of those super easy fixes that have a huge impact on site health. 

Screaming Frog Issues List

The H1 tells Google what a webpage is about (the most important heading is the H1 because it indicates to Google and, thus to users, what a page is going to be about. Without an H1, the page’s goal is unclear and Google will penalize you in search results. 

To find the pages that are missing an H1, you can drill down into the H1 report within Screaming Frog and see each page needing remediated.

So Many Tools, So Little Time

There you have it! With these three free tools, you are able to gain a high-level understanding of the state of a website’s health. 

Overall, this website scores above average but has a number of key items that can be easily fixed by someone with a basic understanding of how to navigate the admin of a website. Indeed, this site will greatly benefit from these seemingly small fixes because the higher up a website appears in search results, the more likely it is to be clicked on by high intent customers.