TECHNICAL · SEO GLOSSARY
Site Audit
A systematic analysis of a website\'s technical SEO health — crawling all pages to identify issues with indexability, meta tags, structured data, page speed, internal linking, canonical tags, and other factors that affect how Google crawls, indexes, and ranks the site.
Definition
A site audit (also: SEO audit, technical audit) is a comprehensive crawl-based analysis of a website\'s SEO health across all discoverable pages. Unlike page-level analysis (checking a single URL), a site audit evaluates the site\'s entire crawlable structure. Core components of a site audit: (1) **Crawlability** — are all important pages accessible to Googlebot? Checks: robots.txt disallow rules, noindex directives, HTTP status codes (4xx errors, redirect chains), and page load timeouts. (2) **Indexability** — are indexed pages the right pages? Checks: canonical tag correctness, duplicate content, thin pages that shouldn\'t be indexed. (3) **On-page fundamentals** — title tags (presence, length, uniqueness), meta descriptions (presence, length), H1 headings (presence, uniqueness per page), and heading hierarchy. (4) **Structured data** — JSON-LD type detection and property-level validation against Google\'s Rich Results specifications. (5) **Internal linking** — orphan pages (no internal links), click depth distribution, broken internal links. (6) **Performance** — Core Web Vitals from real CrUX data or Lighthouse lab scores. (7) **External links** — broken outbound links, dofollow links to low-quality domains. (8) **Images** — missing alt text, oversized images, missing dimensions. Site audits are typically run with a crawling tool (Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, Semrush, DeepSEOAnalysis) that spiders the site\'s URL structure, analyses each response, and produces a prioritised list of issues. They should be run after any major site change (migration, redesign, CMS change) and periodically as an ongoing monitoring practice.
Why it matters for SEO
Site audits surface technical issues that prevent Google from efficiently discovering, indexing, and ranking content. A page with perfect content and backlinks that has a misconfigured canonical tag, a JavaScript rendering gap, or a broken internal link loses ranking potential it would otherwise have. Regular site audits catch regressions before they become sustained traffic losses.
How DeepSEOAnalysis checks this
DeepSEOAnalysis is a site audit tool — the free audit crawls your site, checks all of the above categories (crawlability, indexability, on-page fundamentals, structured data, internal linking, Core Web Vitals, images, external links), and produces a scored, prioritised report. Each finding includes the specific URL, the issue type, the severity, and the fix — with platform-specific guidance (Next.js, WordPress, Shopify, etc.) where applicable.
Useful tools and resources
GLOSSARY
Related terms
technical
Technical SEO
The discipline of optimising a website\'s infrastructure — crawlability, indexability, site speed, structured data, and security — so that search engines can discover, render, and understand pages correctly.
Read definition →technical
Crawl Budget
The number of pages Googlebot will crawl on a site within a given timeframe — determined by crawl rate limit and crawl demand.
Read definition →technical
Indexability
Whether a web page can be added to Google\'s search index and therefore appear in search results — determined by the absence of indexation barriers: `noindex` directives, canonical tags pointing elsewhere, HTTP errors (4xx/5xx), robots.txt disallows blocking crawl, or redirect loops.
Read definition →structured data
Structured Data
Machine-readable annotations added to HTML — usually JSON-LD — that explicitly describe what a page is about to search engines and AI systems.
Read definition →performance
Core Web Vitals
Three Google metrics — LCP, INP, and CLS — that measure real-user loading, interactivity, and visual stability.
Read definition →See how your site scores on Site Audit.
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