Unveil the Secrets of the SEO Audit Process

Navigating the world of SEO can be challenging, but conducting a thorough SEO audit is crucial for ensuring your website is optimized for search engines. There are numerous tools available for this purpose, and in this guide, we’ll be using SiteGuru to illustrate the process.

Let’s dive into the three main steps of the SEO audit process:

Crawling

SEO audit

Link check

Crawling

Crawling is essential to identify all the pages on your website that need to be checked. In this guide, SiteGuru accomplishes this in three ways:

Locating pages found in previous crawls

Discovering pages listed in your sitemaps, including sub-sitemaps up to two levels

Identifying all pages linked from other pages on your site

During the crawl, additional pages might be added if they are referenced as canonical URLs or used as redirects.

SEO Audit

The SEO audit begins with page-level checks to ensure your website is secure, redirects to a single URL version, and has a sitemap. After that, each page is checked for SEO-relevant elements by evaluating the source code.

SiteGuru, like Google, does not use client-side rendering, which means that any content added or modified using JavaScript after the page has loaded will not be considered. Throughout this process, all relevant meta tags, headers, redirects, page titles, images, and more are stored in a database for further analysis.

If you’ve enabled the pagespeed check, this step also includes a call to Google’s Pagespeed Insights API to obtain the pagespeed score and Web Vitals.

Link Check

Following the SEO audit, all links found on your website’s pages are evaluated. Any redirected links or links that don’t work are flagged. The link check process typically takes between 1 to 5 seconds per link. If issues arise and it’s suspected that too much pressure is being put on your server, the link check may be slowed down, taking a bit longer.

How Long Does an SEO Check Take?

The duration of an SEO check depends on various factors. A single page check usually takes between 5 to 10 seconds. Multiply this by the number of pages on your site to estimate the total audit duration. If you’ve enabled the Pagespeed check, the process may take up to 20 seconds per page, but to speed things up, SiteGuru checks the pagespeed of only up to 100 pages.

Upon completion of the link check, your SEO audit is done, and you’ll receive an email with the results. SiteGuru runs a new check every week to help you stay on top of your website’s SEO performance.

We hope this guide provides you with a better understanding of the SEO audit process and helps you optimize your website for search engine success.