What a site audit checks and what to fix first
Rankings slip and the cause is rarely visible on the page you're looking at. A canonical pointing at the wrong host, a redirect chain three hops deep, a noindex tag left in from staging, a page nothing links to. None of that shows in a browser, and all of it decides whether a page gets indexed and how well it ranks.
An audit crawls your site and checks every page it reaches against 45 signals. Results come back grouped by issue type, with the exact pages affected listed under each one.
Three severities#
| Severity | What it means | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Critical | The page is broken or blocked from the index | Error status, noindex tag, soft 404, broken internal links, page still on HTTP |
| Warning | The page works but ranks below what it should | Duplicate titles, missing canonical, thin content, redirect chains, missing H1 |
| Info | Worth fixing while you're already in the file | Missing structured data, shallow internal linking, vague anchor text, skipped heading levels |
Work top down. A page returning a 500 or carrying a noindex earns nothing, however good the content is.
Per-page and site-wide checks#
Most checks look at one page on its own: status code, title, meta description, headings, images, structured data, viewport, links.
Nine compare pages against each other, so only a full crawl can find them. Duplicate titles and descriptions, near-duplicate content, orphan pages, pages with a single incoming link, two pages competing for the same keyword, sitemap URLs that return errors.
What the crawler sees#
On a connected site, the audit is served the same pre-rendered snapshot a search bot gets. Findings match what crawlers see, stale content included. When your snapshots are older than your last deploy, re-render before you audit.
Available on Basic and above Your plan sets how many pages an audit can crawl per run and per month.
Working through this chapter#
- Run a site audit covers URL sources, sampling, and page limits.
- Work through the issue list covers the two views, the filters, and handing a fix to your builder.
- Track your health score covers audit history and reading the deltas.