Effective Website Audit With Serpstat: Tool Overview

We will go over the website issues and vulnerabilities the tool can detect, see what its assessment is based on, and learn how to set up a website audit with Serpstat. In the process, you'll also recall some technical audit basics.
Let's get started!
Step #1: Create a Project for Site Audit
Step #2: Analyze the Audit Overview report
Step #3: Analyze the Main Website Issues
3.1 HTTP Status Code
3.2. Meta tags
3.3. Headings
3.4. Content and Multimedia
3.5. Page Indexing
3.6. Redirects
3.7. Links
3.8. HTTPS Certificate
3.9. Using hreflang attributes
3.10. AMP Pages
3.11. Markup
3.12. Page Load Speed
Step #4 Set up a custom report
What is an SEO Audit? When and why do you need it?
More often than not, people start considering a website audit in case of emergency, such as a Google penalty. It can cause a significant drop in rankings for the targeted keywords or even get your website completely excluded from search results. Sounds like each SEO's nightmare, right?
That's where a thorough website audit is vital, as it allows you to detect technical SEO issues and fix them. After implementing the improvements, you can start monitoring your performance in organic search results and, after a while, get it back to normal.
However, there's a wiser way to go about it. An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure, and a website audit is no exception.
So, let's say your website performs well, and its positions in SERPs and traffic are growing. That's exactly when you should conduct an audit. What's the point in that? The answer is simple:
First, start by assessing your website rankings in search results to compare the before (prior to making any technical improvements) and after.
Next, we will dive into specifics. Let's figure out how to set up your site audit project and then discuss some technical issues that can be detected on your website.
Step #1: Create a Project for Site Audit



*click on the arrows to see the steps for setting up a project.
Serpstat shows a 93% SDO (Domain health) score for the domain I chose as an example, which means that the team takes good care of its website and conducts regular audits. Although, there are still some improvements they can make (even though they're less critical), which we will discuss further.

Step #2: Analyze the Audit Overview report


High priority: the most severe errors that must be fixed first.
Medium priority: the issues that are not as critical but still affect the domain's performance and must be corrected.
Low priority includes the least significant issues. However, it doesn't mean you should ignore them. After you're done with the high- and medium-priority ones, you need to address them.
The report also has such categories as Information and Viruses:
Information is a section that has recommendations for optimizations. They are not as critical and mandatory but still worth checking out.
The Viruses section has the results of checking the website for malware.

Step #3: Analyze the Main Website Issues
Serpstat Site Audit tool not only finds problems on the website but also gives recommendations on how to fix them. Also, it notes the issues you corrected since the last audit so that you can track your progress.
#1 HTTP Status Code
It's essential for webmasters and SEOs to monitor all server responses and find pages that have errors on them.
If the search engine detects that your website has plenty of pages with server or client errors, it's going to consider it poor quality or abandoned, and the negative impact on trust and rankings will not be long in coming.
- 4xx (400-499) is a client error code. It usually means that the page doesn't exist (e.g., the infamous 404 Not Found error), has restricted access, or the request included the wrong syntax;
- 5xx (500-599) is a server error code. It means that the server couldn't fulfill the request for some reason.
#2 Meta tags
Therefore, t's necessary to make the metatags unique, and complete.
The title should precisely reflect the content of the page, the description should contain a brief summary of the content, and both should be within an appropriate length.
So, the tool finds and gives recommendations on the following metatag issues :
- empty or missing Title or Description;
- duplicate Title or Description;
- very long Title or Description;
- very short Title or Description.
- using meta refresh tag for redirect;
Also, you can switch to the Passed section to see the list of issues that are not present on your site, and avoid making those mistakes in the future.
#3 Headings
The H1 tag (level 1) stands for the most significant headline, and the H6 tag indicates a subheading (level 6), which is the least significant. The H1 Headers must be present on each page and be unique.
Serpstat notes two major issues:
- absence of H1;
- multiple H1 headers;
- wrong hierarchy of headers.

#4 Content and Multimedia
- pages with Lorem ipsum;Lorem Ipsum is a placeholder text that programmers use to fill in page layout. For the search engine algorithm, it's a clear sign that the page content is meaningless and irrelevant.
- absence of Body text;If there's no relevant content on the page - there's no reason for the search engine to show it in the top search results (or at all), as it doesn't correspond with any search query/search intent.
- too large page size;If the page takes too much time to load, it has a negative impact on users' behavior: increases bounce rates and in turn, drops the rankings. Moreover, some Google Algorithm Updates are specifically aimed at removing slow-loading pages from the top search results.
- image size too large;
- image contains empty alt attributes.

#5 Page Indexing
What is this Google index? As Google itself puts it, " The Google index is similar to an index in a library, which lists information about all the books the library has available. However, instead of books, the Google index lists all of the webpages that Google knows about".
Page indexing is influenced by:
- external links that lead to your website page(s);
- submitting a new or updated page to Google Search Console. That way, you "ask" the Googlebot to crawl or recrawl your website and update the information;
- several special internal techniques.
- pages are blocked from crawling in the robots.txt file;
- pages are blocked from crawling by the <noindex> tag;
- multiple rel="canonical' tags;
- cross-domain canonical links;
- canonical has a relative URL;
- low word count;
- Iframe found on a page;
- flash elements on the page;
- pages with the canonical tag.

#6 Redirects
A 301 redirect indicates that the URL has been permanently redirected to a different address, while the 302 code means it's a temporary redirect. It shows the robot that this document is temporarily available at a different address.
Always pay close attention to all redirects on your website and make sure they're set up correctly.
- Redirect pages;
- HTTP Status code for the redirects;
- count.

#7 Links
- absence of favicon;
- the URL is too long;
- too many GET-parameters in the URL;
- too many on-page links;
- internal links contain the rel="nofollow" attribute.
- external links don't contain the rel="nofollow" attribute.

Can Be In The Page URL
Page URL Length For SEO
#8 HTTPS Certificate
Also, Google ranks such websites higher in search results.
- self-signed certificate;
- HTTPS pages lead to HTTP pages;
- HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) is not supported;
- incorrect certificate name;
- an old version of the TLS protocol;
- using SSL protocol;
- pages with insecure password input;
- invalid (expired) certificates;
- HTTP URLs are included in the sitemap.xml;
- mixed content
- the certificate is not trusted in all web browsers;

Version On The Website
#9 Using hreflang attributes
- pages without hreflang and lang attributes;
- conflicts of hreflang attributes in the original code of the page;
- page is not multilingual;
- invalid hreflang attributes;
- incorrect hreflang links.
#10 AMP Pages

#11 Markup
Serpstat analyzes the following:
- Open Graph markup
- Twitter Card markup
- schema.org markup.

#12 Page Load Speed
You should always pay special attention to this factor since slow-loading websites tend to annoy users, which increases the bounce rate, and in turn, makes your search engine rankings drop.
Fast and proper loading, on the other hand, will increase the overall website usability, improve your rankings, and along with that, drive more traffic to your website.
With Serpstat, you will discover the issues that harm your website loading, and find ways to fix that:
Step #4: Set up a custom report
You can configure a personal report with the parameters of interest, and apply filters to them:

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