The site audit system is how a full technical SEO audit gets done quickly without cutting corners. It crawls a site, sends the findings to a set of specialist checks that run side by side, scores the results and builds a prioritised action plan. Then I verify the findings against the live site before anything is reported.
Built in-house. It is my own tooling rather than a reseller’s dashboard, which is why it checks the things I act on rather than everything a generic tool can measure.
What it does
The site audit system runs a complete SEO health check of a website. It identifies the type of business from the homepage, crawls the site’s internal links, and runs six specialist checks in parallel: technical SEO, content quality, structured data, sitemaps, performance and visual rendering. The results are combined into an overall health score and an action plan ordered from critical to low priority.
How it works
- Fetch the homepage and identify the type of business, which changes what matters most. A shop, a clinic and a publisher get different emphasis.
- Crawl the site, following internal links, respecting robots.txt, and following redirects up to three hops.
- Run the specialist checks side by side:
| Check | What it looks at |
|---|---|
| Technical | robots.txt, sitemaps, canonicals, redirects, security headers, crawlability and indexability |
| Content | E-E-A-T signals, readability, thin and duplicate content, and signs of scaled or low-value pages |
| Structured data | Schema detection, validation and missing opportunities |
| Sitemaps | Structure, quality and pages missing from the sitemap |
| Performance | Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift |
| Visual | Desktop and mobile screenshots, and what shows above the fold |
- Score the site across weighted categories: technical SEO, content quality, on-page SEO, structured data, performance, images and AI search readiness.
- Build the action plan, grouped by priority, with quick wins listed separately.
Example output
HEALTH SCORE: 68 out of 100 CRITICAL: 214 product URLs canonicalise to their category page, removing them from Google’s index HIGH: Mobile Largest Contentful Paint is over four seconds on collection templates, caused by uncompressed hero images QUICK WIN: 40 pages have titles over 60 characters that are cut off in search results
The example above is illustrative.
What I review
The score and the list are where my work starts. Before anything reaches a client, I check the findings that tools most often get wrong:
- Error pages are re-requested, because crawlers get rate-limited and report errors real visitors never see
- Duplicate and parameter URLs are checked for a canonical or noindex before they’re flagged
- Redirects are confirmed as redirects, not reported as canonicals
- Titles and descriptions are read from the raw HTML, not a rendered copy that can drop them
- Priorities are set by what matters to the business, not just what the tool weights highest
The action plan is then rewritten as developer-ready briefs, one issue per brief.
Limitations
- 500 pages per run. Larger sites are audited in sections or with a full Screaming Frog crawl.
- A snapshot. The crawl reflects the site on the day it runs.
- Estimates in the score. The health score is a summary, useful for tracking change, but the verified action list is what drives the work.
- Lab speed data. Performance checks are measurements at a point in time. Real-user Core Web Vitals data from Search Console is used alongside where available.
Services it powers
The site audit system powers the technical SEO audit, the pre-launch and post-launch checks in site migrations, and the first stage of an SEO strategy. It was part of the pre-migration audit in the Evewell case study. See the rest of the tools on the tech stack page.
FAQ
How many pages can the site audit system crawl?
The automated crawl covers up to 500 pages in a single run, which suits most small business sites. Larger sites are audited in sections, such as by template or folder, or with a full Screaming Frog crawl, so every important page is still checked.
Does the site audit give a score?
Yes, it produces an overall health score, weighted across technical SEO, content quality, on-page SEO, structured data, performance, images and AI search readiness. The score is a quick summary, not the point. The prioritised action list, verified against the live site, is what tells you what to fix first.
Can the audit check JavaScript-heavy sites?
Yes, with care. Some pages only show their content once JavaScript runs, so the audit compares the raw HTML with the rendered page. That catches content, headings and links that crawlers not running JavaScript would miss, which matters for some AI crawlers as well as Google.