In this lesson, you will find out how to utilize SEMrush Site Audit to boost your technical SEO.
Watch the full free course at SEMrush Academy: https://bit.ly/2LJjreM

0:54 Crawler setup
1:52 Crawler settings
2:16 Allow/Disallow URLs
2:34 Parameters
3:37 Strategy
4:42 Key aspects on technical SEO
5:49 How to approach issues, warnings, and notices
7:22 Site Audit
8:19 Errors
8:48 Warnings
9:12 Notices

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Apply your newly acquired knowledge by practicing with SEMrush and build up your real-world skills.
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Get a comprehensive and detailed overview of technical SEO in our free course:
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We have used SEMrush for the last 4 years to help our clients grow their organic traffic, to the point that it now powers our entire business.

We've used the audit tool to help with a plethora of problems, from mission critical migrations to daily technical audits, from massive multinationals to SMBs.

In this series we will be going through the technical strategy used by Type A Media on our clients' sites, and how we use the site audit tool to find and fix issues on these sites.

So, without further ado, let's get into it.

Getting Started with the Tool: Site Audit Crawler Setup
The first thing you are going to learn is how to actually set up the crawler.

SEMrush makes it really easy to get started, but there are some essentials you need to know first.

Crawled Pages Limit
This is the first screen you will see. You may be asking, why do I want to limit the number of pages?

Well, if you have an enterprise site, it's actually a better idea to break the site into sections and crawl a lower number of pages.

We do this because it still brings up all the template level issues, without needing to wait all day to crawl a million pages.

In SEO, it's all about cost/benefit analysis.

You can specify if you want to crawl just a subdomain (like blog.domain.com or a subfolder).

You can then choose what you want the bot to crawl from the site to the sitemaps.

Crawler Settings
Next we get a bit more technical. Most sites are fine crawling as SEMrush bot, however if you are struggling to crawl due to CMS or technology restrictions, Googlebot is a good option.

If you are on a hosted solution like Shopify or Squarespace, or your SysAdmin has really sensitive controls on your server, choose 1 URL per 2 seconds.

Allow and Disallow Certain URLs
This bit is where we can really define our crawl.

If there is a particular problem area on the site you want to investigate, you can define the exact paths you want to include and exclude.

URL Parameters
If the site has lots of parameters caused by a search box or pagination, we want to exclude them from the crawl.

The best way to check for them is to click this link to the search console to retrieve the parameters Google has already recognised.

Website Restrictions
Next up is website restrictions. If you are crawling a staging server as you are migrating a site, typically, it's behind a login. You can add these details by clicking “crawling with your credentials”. If your robots file blocks 3rd party crawlers you can choose to ignore it.

Crawling Schedule
Next up is the schedule. If you are going to be fixing things every week, I'd run it on a regular basis so you can see improvements over time.

As a safety measure, I like to crawl 3 times a week - so if a rankings fluctuation happens I can easily rule out technical SEO as the cause.

Technical SEO Audit Strategy
When you think about your website, think of it like your own musculoskeletal body. All of the parts are connected to each other and affect each other in some way.

So just like when the doctor hits your knee with a hammer and your foot shoots out, similarly, when we change one aspect of the site, many pages will be affected.

Therefore, one of the most important factors in technical SEO is setting priorities. To do this we use the Eisenhower Matrix, which defines:

Important and Urgent
Things that need to be fixed right away
Important and Not urgent
Things we need to make a business case for and fix over time
Not Important but Urgent
Something to be briefed to a secondary team
Not Important and Not Urgent

Also known as a “nice to have” - something that you will write down on a piece of paper and probably never do.

Within this decision-making matrix we are going to approach key aspects on technical SEO theme by theme.

#TechnicalSEO #TechnicalSEOcourse #SiteAudit #WhatIsASiteAudit #SEMrushAcademy