In the ever-evolving landscape of search engine optimization (SEO), technical SEO forms the bedrock upon which successful organic strategies are built. While understanding keyword research and content creation is crucial, a website riddled with technical issues will struggle to achieve optimal search engine visibility. Semrush offers powerful site audit capabilities, but leveraging them to their full potential requires moving beyond the surface-level reports. This guide will explore advanced Semrush site audit techniques, empowering you to identify and rectify complex technical SEO challenges, ultimately boosting your website’s performance in search results.

Unlocking the Power of Semrush Site Audits

Semrush’s Site Audit tool provides a comprehensive analysis of your website’s health, identifying various issues that can impact its search engine ranking. However, simply running a basic audit isn’t enough. You need to understand how to customize and interpret the results to uncover deeper, more intricate technical problems.

Configuring Advanced Crawl Settings

Before even running your audit, take the time to fine-tune your crawl settings. This ensures Semrush accurately reflects your website’s structure and avoids wasting crawl budget.

• Crawl Source: Specify whether to crawl the website as Googlebot Desktop, Googlebot Mobile, or other user agents. Selecting the appropriate user agent ensures you’re identifying issues relevant to the user experience on different devices.
• Allowed/Disallowed URLs: Utilize the “Disallow in robots.txt” and “Do not crawl these URLs” options to exclude specific pages or sections of your website from the audit. This is particularly useful for preventing the tool from crawling staging environments, duplicate content, or resource-intensive areas.
• Crawl Speed: Adjust the crawl speed to avoid overloading your server. Slower speeds are ideal for websites with limited server resources.
• URL Parameters: Configure how Semrush handles URLs with parameters. Properly defining parameters prevents duplicate content issues arising from variations in URL structures (e.g., tracking parameters).

Deep Diving into Crawlability and Indexability

Crawlability and indexability are fundamental aspects of technical SEO. If search engine crawlers can’t access and understand your website’s content, it won’t be indexed and, consequently, won’t rank.

Identifying and Fixing Broken Links

Broken links create a poor user experience and negatively impact your website’s credibility. Semrush identifies both internal and external broken links. Address these issues by:

• Replacing broken links: Update the links with working alternatives.
• Redirecting broken links: Implement 301 redirects to relevant pages to preserve link equity.
• Removing broken links: If no suitable replacement exists, remove the broken link altogether.

Analyzing Crawl Depth and Internal Linking

Crawl depth refers to the number of clicks it takes for a crawler to reach a specific page from the homepage. Pages buried deep within the website may be crawled less frequently. Improve crawlability by:

• Strengthening internal linking: Ensure important pages are easily accessible from the homepage and other high-authority pages.
• Optimizing website architecture: Create a logical and intuitive website structure that facilitates crawling.
• Using XML sitemaps: Submit an XML sitemap to Google Search Console to guide crawlers.

Addressing Indexability Issues: Noindex Tags and Robots.txt

The Semrush Site Audit flags pages that are blocked from indexing via the noindex meta tag or robots.txt. Review these pages carefully to ensure no critical content is accidentally blocked. If a page should be indexed, remove the noindex tag or modify the robots.txt file accordingly.

Optimizing Site Speed for a Better User Experience

Site speed is a crucial ranking factor and significantly impacts user experience. Slow-loading websites lead to higher bounce rates and lower conversion rates. Semrush can help identify areas for improvement.

Leveraging Core Web Vitals Metrics

Semrush integrates with Google’s PageSpeed Insights to provide Core Web Vitals metrics (Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)). These metrics provide valuable insights into the user-perceived performance of your website. Use Semrush to:

• Identify slow-loading resources: Optimize images, minify CSS and JavaScript files, and leverage browser caching.
• Improve server response time: Consider upgrading your hosting plan or using a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
• Optimize images: Compress images without sacrificing quality to reduce file sizes.

Minifying Resources and Leveraging Browser Caching

Minifying CSS and JavaScript files removes unnecessary characters (whitespace, comments) to reduce file sizes. Browser caching allows browsers to store static assets locally, reducing the need to download them repeatedly. Semrush will highlight areas where these optimizations are missing.

Ensuring Mobile-Friendliness

With the majority of web traffic now coming from mobile devices, ensuring your website is mobile-friendly is paramount. Semrush can identify mobile usability issues that negatively impact user experience.

Responsive Design and Mobile-First Indexing

Semrush checks for mobile-friendliness issues such as:

• Mobile-unfriendly content: Content that is too wide for the screen or requires horizontal scrolling.
• Small font size: Font sizes that are too small to read comfortably on mobile devices.
• Touch elements too close: Touch elements (buttons, links) that are too close together, making them difficult to tap accurately.

Addressing these issues ensures a seamless user experience on mobile devices and helps your website perform well in Google’s mobile-first index.

Implementing and Validating Structured Data

Structured data (schema markup) helps search engines understand the context of your website’s content. Properly implemented structured data can enhance your website’s visibility in search results by enabling rich snippets, knowledge panels, and other enhanced features.

Identifying and Fixing Schema Errors

Semrush can detect errors in your structured data implementation. Common errors include:

• Missing required properties: Certain schema types require specific properties to be present.
• Invalid data types: Using the wrong data type for a property (e.g., using text instead of a number).
• Incorrect syntax: Errors in the schema markup code itself.

Use Google’s Rich Results Test to validate your structured data and ensure it is implemented correctly.

Conclusion

Mastering technical SEO requires a proactive and data-driven approach. By leveraging the advanced features of Semrush Site Audit, you can uncover and address complex technical issues that may be hindering your website’s performance. Remember to regularly monitor your website’s technical health and make necessary adjustments to stay ahead of the curve. By prioritizing crawlability, indexability, site speed, mobile-friendliness, and structured data implementation, you’ll pave the way for improved search engine visibility and a better user experience.