First things first, you need to create a project for a domain you want to perform a site audit on. Go to List of Projects(1) and click on Add New Project(2). Enter a domain name and a project name. If you already have a project created for the target domain, you'll need just to click Start Audit(3) on the project dashboard to launch the audit.

You'll be prompted to configure crawling settings: the maximum number of pages to be crawled, the scanning speed (you can leave the automatic speed control box checked or uncheck it and set a custom crawling speed by pulling the slider towards higher or lower speed indicator). Click on More options to access advanced settings: 

Here you can tell the crawler whether it should crawl subdomains and adhere to your robots.txt guidelines (both options enabled by default); set the condition under which only pages with a specific word in their URL are going to be crawled; an input http authorization credentials if the site is not publicly accessible yet and you'd like to check it against errors before going live:

 

When the site audit is finished, you'll see an SDO score on the project dashboard — a metric that measures site's technical optimization on a scale from 1 to 100. It's calculated as a ratio of the found issues and their severity to the number of checked issue types and number of crawled pages. The higher the SDO score, the better your site is optimized

For details on the site audit findings, go to Site Audit > Audit Summary. The first thing you’ll see here is a concise report with visual elements that displays the number of found errors from three categories: high, middle priority, and low priority errors. The Information category presents data that is not necessarily errors - for example, pages with a canonical tag. All errors from a particular category can be accessed by clicking the corresponding figure. On the left, Serpstat presents findings of the last audit; on the right - the previous audit results (if you did any previously). Serpstat checks for viruses on the website as well - the data is taken from Google Safe Browser. The report can be exported in PDF or XLSX.

You can compare the site audit results with the previous audit by selecting the necessary audit from the dropdown. Also, you can start another site audit by clicking Repeat Analysis. 

High priority errors are the most dangerous and damaging for your domain SEO. Fixing those errors should be the first item on your to-do list.

Middle priority errors are not so severe as the high priority ones, but still, they have a heavy negative impact on your online visibility.

Low priority errors are not so undermining for the website SEO and can be sorted out after fixing the first two categories.

The scheduling options are: daily, every 3 days, every 7 days or manual. By default, manual option is on.

SDO Score Dynamics displays the changes in the SDO from the audits history.

Below you'll find the Categories: types of errors merged into logical blocks. To get errors of a particular type, click the category name:

Serpstat Site Audit checks sites for the following errors.

HTTP Status Code.

Pages that respond with 5xx or 4xx codes. If our crawler received of these codes from the site's hosting server, the corresponding section in the report will have a gray checkmark. To get details, expand the error report.

The report features:

1. Broken URL
2. Status code for the broken URL
3. Pages linking to the broken URL 

Meta Tags

Title is a meta tag that search engine uses to generate a SERP snippet and is important for click-through and SEO. It has to be an accurate and concise description of a page's content (up to 70 characters).

Description is a meta tag that provides a concise summary of the page. Meta descriptions are commonly used on search engine result pages (SERPs) to display preview snippets for a page. Website owners and SEOs have to be careful to avoid duplicate titles or descriptions and need to adhere to the length recommendations.

Serpstat Site Audit checks meta tags for the following errors:

• duplicate titles or descriptions
• missing title/description
• title/description length (too short or too long)

Headings

H1-H6 headings are used for creating page structure - they indicate the importance of page contents. H1 is the most important heading, mostly used for post titles, item names etc. H6 is the least important heading.

Every page should have only one H1 heading, while each H1 heading should be unique within the site. You have to keep the valid ordering of headings.  

Serpstat inspects pages for two major errors:

• missing H1 heading;
• invalid heading nesting.

Accessibility & Indexation

Indexation is the process of analyzing data collected by search engine crawlers from a website. The documents are later added to the search engine’s index.

To be indexed, a page needs to be accessible to crawlers. Serpstat checks the pages for the following errors:

• canonical errors;
• flash elements;
• iframes;
• disallowed pages in robots.txt - check that you have proreply set disallow directives;
• pages with 'noindex' tag - check that you have correctly set noindex tags;
• too little text on a page.

Redirects

Redirection is the process of forwarding users and robots from the requested URL to other URL.

Types of redirects:

• 301, permanent redirect (recommended)
• 302, temporary redirect

It's recommended to avoid linking to the redirected page.

Serpstat displays following data:

• redirected page;
• redirect code
• redirect target page
• number of pages with redirects

Links

A page should have some outbound links, however, too many outgoing links may cause page rank leakage.

Server Parameters

Serpstat validates domains against the following:

• presence of an SSL certificate
• redirects between the www and non-www URLs
• redirect from http to https

Audit Summary also features some charts: Crawl Depth, Redirect Types and Status Codes.

Crawl Depth - the number of clicks required to access a specific page, considering the homepage as a starting point. The X-axis displays how many clicks a user needs to make to reach a page and the Y-axis shows how many pages have a particular depth level. The main page is set to 1.

Redirect Type - the number of pages that have a specific redirect type. The X-axis displays how many pages have the type of redirect indicated on the Y-axis.

Status Codes - the number of pages that return certain HTTP codes. The X-axis displays how many pages return the status code indicated on the Y-axis.