Looking from the outside, one can never judge the amount of effort that is required to run a website successfully. Factors like design and content are only scratched on the surface; there are tons of processes running in the backend. Though SEO specialists don't necessarily have to be coding experts, they should still keep a check on everything that might affect SEO. And to keep a check on every aspect, it becomes essential to run website audits on a consistent basis.
Sometimes there are mistakes in your website that prevent it from ranking higher on the search engine result pages (SERPs) or even ranking at all. You can find out these issues through website auditing. The list of issues detected is, in most of the cases, really long. However, not all of them are worth spending time and effort on. What we should rather do is prioritize the ones that have the most effect on the website’s health.
This is going to be a step-by-step guide to help you find mistakes on your website using one of the most reputed website auditing tools SE Ranking. But before we get into that, let’s see what this software is capable of doing.
SEO Software and Tools
Any SEO software worth its mettle will always have a site audit or crawl feature. A good SEO tool includes a feature that allows you to crawl your website and find out its general health status. Not only this, but it also helps you determine every issue with your site that is dragging down its organic performance. Decent software for SEO also comes with some other essential features like keyword research tools, backlink profiling tools, etc.
Now the tool that we are going to use today, SE Ranking, is a cloud-based platform for marketing and SEO professionals. It is hands down one of the best tools available in the market for website audits. Besides, you can also track the performance of your keywords, check backlink quality, and can get a sneak peek into the marketing efforts of your competitor. SE Ranking is an incredible all-in-one tool for your website and SEO because it provides awesome features at flexible prices.
Why Choose SE Ranking?
Easy to set up: Even if you are an SEO beginner, SE Ranking will make it extremely simple for you to get started. It guides you through the five-step setup process. All you have to do is enter the general information of your site, select the keywords for monitoring, and select your country and search engine preferences. Everything can be set up in just a few minutes, and you can even change these details later if needed.
All-in-one SEO tool: If you want to check the performance of your website on the SERPs, then SE Ranking is an exceptional tool for your purpose. But, there’s much more to this tool than just checking the SEO rankings. You can use SE Ranking to monitor the SEO campaigns of your competitors, generate new leads, monitor your keywords ranking and traffic, and find out the problems with your website. You get almost everything in this tool to keep your website on a successful trajectory.
Value for money: Given its features and functionality, SE Ranking is worth every penny it’s charging. In addition to monitoring personal websites, you can even use this tool to provide marketing services to multiple clients. Its cheapest plan costs $18.60 per month, which is quite fair for the quality of services you get in return.
Robust resource library: When a tool has such a broad list of features, it is obvious that there will be a learning curve. But the vast resource library of SE Ranking consists of tons of references to help you out at every stage. The resource has detailed instructions with screenshots for all the features, so it might take a little time, but you’ll certainly get hold of it.
Starting Up
As we have discussed above, to find mistakes in your website, you’ll need a website auditing tool. And website audit is one of the key features SE Ranking is well known for. Using this feature, you can find out your website health score.
Additionally, you can also find out the exact reasons why your health score might be low and how to fix critical and less critical but still important issues. The indomitable page crawler of SE Ranking can go through somewhere around 1000 pages in just two minutes.
One of the best parts of SE Ranking is the way it lays out such complex data on the dashboard. The dashboard consists of coloured graphs and numbers that make it very easy for the users to understand the data. Moreover, the website audit feature will not only tell you the problems but it’ll also tell you how you can minimize them. Let’s dive right into the auditing part.
Launching the Website Audit Tool
To audit any website, first, you’ll have to sign up and add it to your projects. After signing up, you’ll enter the first page of SE Ranking, in the middle of the screen, you’ll find a button to ‘create a new project’. After you click that button, you’ll be asked to fill in some general information about the site, relevant keywords, the search engine you want to target, competitors you want to track and connect Google analytics.
Once you finish adding the project, you’ll land on the dashboard. Now you can either launch the website audit tool from the vertical navigation bar on the left-hand side or from the table on the main dashboard. Click on the start audit button, and depending on the settings, SE Ranking can start the audit automatically or wait for you to do it manually.
Once the audit has been launched, you can keep track of the scanning process. The time taken by the audit to complete is dependent on the number of pages your website has. However, you don’t have to sit empty during the scanning process because SE Ranking will send you an email once the scan is completed.
Overview
The first thing that you see after the audit is finished is the ‘overview’ tab. In this tab, you get the summary of the overall technical health of the website which helps you in prioritizing the issues. On the top of the page, you can see the general information of the site, like the number of crawled pages and URLs. There’s also an overall assessment of the site’s technical state, as in, its health score on the scale from 0 to 100. This health score is SE Ranking’s very own metric that is calculated by checking various aspects of the site that influences the site’s technical optimization..
On the top right-hand side, you get a core web vitals report that is a set of metrics based on user experience. Google always considers these metrics to rate website satisfaction. The core web vital data is displayed for both desktop and mobile separately.
Under the ‘top issues’ block, you’ll find the top five issues of the site based on their significance and quantity. You should address these issues as soon as possible. There are various other information blocks on this page, like, domain metrics, page indexation, HTTP status codes, page depth (clicks), server response time, and much more.
Issue Report
To see the list of every issue found on this site, you can go to the ‘issue report’ tab. SE Ranking analyses 110 parameters. This section contains information about the technical condition of the site based on those. These parameter checks are broken down into 16 categories that include security, site crawling, duplicate content, loading speed and external/internal links, to name a few. SE Ranking is constantly adding new up-to-date checks to their tool.
The check results are denoted by some icons. A green checkmark indicates that a parameter doesn't have any issues and that the check has been passed. Whereas a blue exclamation mark points out notices that do not affect the site as much, but they are definitely worth paying attention to. A yellow triangle with an exclamation mark denotes warnings. And finally, the red cross icon means that there is a critical error that must be fixed as soon as possible.
Crawled Pages
In the crawled pages tab, the number of found issues is displayed for each page. By clicking on each mentioned page, you’ll be able to see the complete list of issues. In addition, you can view every key parameter of each page such as HTTP response, status code, presence in the sitemap.xml file, robots meta tags and x robots tag, texts in the title tag and h1 header as well as their length, page size, and loading speed, and much more.
There are more than a total of 50 parameters available in the table. You can choose them from the list by clicking on the column button present on the top right of the list. All you have to do is check, mark the parameter that you want to analyse and untick the one that you don’t need. This makes analysing a lot more specific and, hence, convenient.
Some More Tabs For You
There are a few more tabs that provide great insights about the mistakes on your site. Here are some of them:
Found Resources: In this section, you will find information on the analysed site's resources, including images, CSS, and javascript files. By clicking on a number under the source URL column, you can check on which pages the resources are used and whether the search engines can crawl it. You can also check for alt text in the images.
Found Links: This section contains information about the internal and external links of the analysed site. For both types of links, every key parameter is displayed including, server status code, link type, source URL, anchor text, anchor type, alt attribute, etc. You can make use of filters to make the analysis easier.
Crawl Comparison: As soon as two or more audit reports are ready for a single project, you can compare their results under the crawl comparison section. All you have to do is select two necessary dates, and the system will then automatically analyse and show you the dynamics for all the relevant and needed parameters. By clicking the ‘archive’ button present in this section, you can access the previous versions of the audit reports.
Final Words
You might want to climb up the ranking or might already be on the top. Irrespective of the situation, a website audit will always help your site perform to its full potential. Eliminating technical errors might even help your website to rank higher, especially when done together with on-page optimization. It is, however, essential that you eliminate these issues in a prioritised order to not waste time and resources. This was a step-by-step guide aimed to help you find mistakes on your website.
