Free Sitecore SEO Audit

Sitecore is an enterprise .NET CMS with multiple product offerings and delivery models that affect how SEO metadata is generated. The primary Sitecore platform flavours relevant to SEO: (1) **Sitecore XP (Experience Platform)** — the traditional .NET MVC/Web Forms monolithic CMS. SEO fields are typically stored as Sitecore Item fields under a content tree. The built-in `Page Title` and `Meta Description` fields (in the `Data` template section) populate `title` and `meta name="description"` in the Razor views. Custom SEO templates extend items with additional fields: canonical URL, noindex, OG image, and hreflang data. The rendering layer (MVC Controller Renderings, View Renderings) is responsible for reading these fields and emitting the correct HTML meta tags in the `head`. (2) **Sitecore XM Cloud** — Sitecore\'s SaaS headless CMS offering. Content is managed in XM Cloud and delivered via Sitecore Experience Edge (GraphQL CDN). The head application is a Next.js app using Sitecore\'s JSS (JavaScript Services) SDK. SEO fields are defined in Sitecore templates and queried via Edge GraphQL; `generateMetadata()` in Next.js App Router reads these fields and generates the meta tags. (3) **Sitecore SXA (Sitecore Experience Accelerator)** — a component library and site scaffolding layer for XP that includes a dedicated SEO module. The SXA SEO module provides out-of-the-box meta title, meta description, robots tag, and canonical URL configuration via `Page SEO` fields on the item and site-level defaults. (4) **Sitecore OrderCloud** — the headless commerce platform (separate from content management; less relevant to blog/content SEO). The audit crawls the live URL and validates what the server actually renders — regardless of which Sitecore architecture produces it.

JSON-LD in Sitecore requires custom development regardless of the delivery architecture. The approach varies by platform: (1) **Sitecore XP (MVC)** — create a Controller Rendering or View Rendering that reads relevant item fields and renders a `script type="application/ld+json"` tag. For blog article pages, the rendering reads the page\'s Title, Date Created, Author, and OG Image fields and serialises them as Article JSON-LD. This rendering is added to the `Head Renderings` placeholder in the page layout so it outputs in `head`. For FAQPage JSON-LD on Q&A pages, create a structured data rendering that reads a multi-list or Treelist field containing FAQ items (each FAQ item is a Sitecore child item with Question and Answer fields). (2) **Sitecore XM Cloud + Next.js JSS** — JSON-LD is implemented as a Next.js component that queries the relevant XM Cloud fields via Edge GraphQL. For Article JSON-LD: query `title`, `datePublished`, `dateModified`, `author`, and `image` fields from the content item; render as a `script type="application/ld+json"` in the `head` via Next.js `generateMetadata()` or a server component. For FAQPage JSON-LD: query a multi-value component datasource containing FAQ Question/Answer pairs. (3) **SXA** — add a JSON-LD rendering to the SXA `Scripts` or `Head Renderings` placeholder. SXA\'s token substitution can inject item field values into the JSON-LD template, though complex structures (FAQPage with nested mainEntity array) typically require a custom rendering. (4) **Avoiding the GTM rendering gap** — in all architectures, inject JSON-LD in the server-rendered HTML (not via Google Tag Manager or client-side JavaScript). GTM-injected structured data appears in the rendered DOM but is absent from the initial HTML response — a rendering gap that creates uncertainty about whether Googlebot\'s first-pass crawl sees the schema.

Enterprise Sitecore implementations introduce several SEO challenges at scale that smaller CMS platforms don\'t typically face: (1) **Multi-site canonical management** — large organisations run dozens of sites from a single Sitecore instance (different brands, regions, languages, or business units). Each site must have correctly configured canonical tags pointing to its own domain. Misconfigured SXA site resolvers or shared template inheritance can cause cross-site canonical leakage — where a page on site-a.com has a canonical pointing to site-b.com. (2) **Multisite robots.txt** — each Sitecore site typically needs its own robots.txt. SXA supports per-site robots.txt via the Robots field in site settings. Without this, all sites may serve the same robots.txt, potentially exposing incorrect Disallow rules to the wrong domain. (3) **Multilingual canonical and hreflang** — Sitecore\'s multilingual support (language versions on the same item) enables hreflang implementation, but only if the rendering layer correctly generates `link rel="alternate" hreflang="x"` tags for all language versions. Sitecore XP implementations often have partial hreflang implementation: tags for some language versions but not all, or x-default not defined. (4) **Wildcard media library URLs** — Sitecore\'s Media Library serves files at `/sitecore/shell/`, `/-/media/`, or `~/media/` paths. These paths should be Disallowed in robots.txt to prevent Google from indexing media files as content. (5) **Publishing delay and crawl cache** — Sitecore XP\'s publish workflow means content changes go live on publish. Large publishing operations (batch publish of 10,000 items) can create TTFB spikes as the publishing engine writes to the SQL database and the web delivery rebuilds caches. Experience Edge (XM Cloud) avoids this via GraphQL-layer caching. (6) **Personalisation and A/B testing rendering** — Sitecore\'s personalisation engine can serve different content to different user segments. If personalized content is rendered server-side rather than via client-side JavaScript, Googlebot will see one variant consistently. If it\'s client-side, Googlebot may see a different variant than users. For SEO, ensure the default (un-personalised) experience contains all content you want indexed.

Yes. The complete audit is free with no signup and no email gate. Enter the URL of any Sitecore-delivered website — the audit crawls the rendered HTML as Googlebot would. No Sitecore license access, CMS credentials, or Sitecore Cloud account needed. Works with all Sitecore delivery architectures: XP traditional, XM Cloud + Next.js JSS, SXA, Experience Edge, and headless custom frontends. For Sitecore implementations using server-side rendering (which all JSS + Next.js architectures use), the audit correctly evaluates the server-rendered HTML. Paid DeepSEOAnalysis plans add saved report history, scheduled monitoring across multiple Sitecore sites, and white-label agency reporting with exportable PDF reports.