What is the Site Auditor?
The site auditor add-on is part of our SEO tools package that allows you to discover and fix your on-site SEO issues, help boost your client's rankings, and improve the on-site user experience for your clients' websites.
Our site auditor scans for 40+ of the most common technical SEO issues. Here's a list of what we scan for, and how it affects your SEO.
Where do I find the Site Auditor?
First, you will need to enable the site auditor in your client campaign. After doing this, you'll find the site auditor under the SEO section in your campaign's left side menu.
Running your first site audit
To run your first site audit, click on the "Run Audit" button in the pop-up that appears front and center.
The setup wizard will appear and assist you with configuring your first audit. The first page will present settings options on how you want the audit to run.
For example, you can limit the number of pages you want to crawl via the "Page Crawl Limit" dropdown and more. You will find a detailed description of this page and its options in the next section.
The second page of the wizard will allow you to set the schedule for this crawl.
And on the last page, you will see the Start Crawl button to commence the audit.
After starting an audit, you will notice that the crawler will show a "crawl initializing" status in the top right of the Test page. This indicates it is currently running. You will also have the option to cancel an audit at anytime.
Feel free to navigate away from the Site Auditor once the audit starts running. It will continue to run in the background until the audit is complete.
Please note that cancelled audits will appear in the History tab.
How do I run a new audit?
To run succeeding audits, click here.
Can I modify the crawl settings for future audits?
You sure can, you are able to make the following changes:
control the number of pages you want to audit
decide if you wish to include sub-domain pages in the crawl
exclude specific page(s) from being crawled
You can learn more about modifying crawl settings in this article.
How long does an audit take?
Audits can take anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of hours to complete depending on the number of pages being crawled, the website's structure, and the current load on our servers. Our auditor is specifically designed to run slowly and gently, to avoid bringing down websites due to a large influx of traffic.
After you start your site audit, it will continue to run in the background. This allows you to perform other activities such as creating reports and return once the crawl is complete.
What's in your Site Auditor dashboard
When you load the Site Auditor, the most recent audit scores will be displayed in the dashboard. A quick description of these sections are as follows:
Tests, Pages, and History tabs
Tests - This tab acts like the home button and clicking on it will bring you to the main results page of the latest Site Audit.
Pages - This tab will load the pages that have been crawled and their corresponding scores and statuses. The pages are sorted by Status Code by default.
History - This tab will report all the audits you ran for this campaign, as well as the audit scores, duration of the audits, pages crawled, and statuses. Clicking on any of the three most recent audit dates will load the results for that audit.
2. The Action section
The Settings button - Clicking this button loads the settings panel where you can view the Filters, Crawl Settings, Schedule, and Ignored Tests filter for the current audit.
The Share button - This button will allow you to download the test results in a PDF or XLS format, or share the report using a link.
The Perform Audit button - Clicking this will run a new audit for the campaign.
3. The Score and Stats section
Various information regarding the audit is displayed here. The overall website score, the date it was crawled, how many errors are considered critical, how many are warnings, and more.
4. The Tests section
This table lists all the tests performed and how many pages were flagged as failed.
You can also search for a specific test via the search field.
Clicking on a test will load the detailed results of that specific test.
Site Auditor Pages section
The Pages section will display all the pages on your website that have been crawled by the auditor. Clicking on a page in the table will open the Page Details section.
The pages are sorted by the audit score from lowest to highest by default. You can customize the sort order by clicking on the column name.
You can also add/remove metrics or show/hide page results by clicking the Settings button in the top right corner.
Click here to learn how to ignore pages.
Site Auditor History section
You have the option to view past site audit results by clicking the History tab from the main section. Here's our guide on how to do just that.
We keep historical site audit data for 6 months, and after that, this data is automatically removed. You can download your site audit data as a PDF report if you wish to keep long-term records. See here for more information on creating reports and downloading them as PDFs.
Clicking an audit will load the results on the same page. You also have the ability to compare results between audits.
How to customize and share your audit results
The site audit report provides a lot of information to analyze, and each client's reporting requirements will be different. Here's how you can customize the information you report to a client.
Also, if your client requests a PDF report of the site audit, you can download an audit result and send it via email. Another option is to add site audit results to an existing scheduled report.