Đoàn Lê Minh Anh
A website can have valuable content and an attractive design yet still struggle to grow if search engines cannot crawl it properly. Ahrefs Site Audit helps businesses identify technical issues that affect indexability, user experience, and SEO performance.
This guide explains how to set up an audit, understand common issue categories, prioritize fixes, and track progress after making changes. Rather than treating the report as a list of warnings that must all be addressed immediately, you’ll learn how to assess each issue’s impact and choose the work that will deliver the greatest value for your website.
What Is Ahrefs Site Audit, and How Does It Help Businesses?
Ahrefs Site Audit crawls a website to identify issues that could hinder SEO. It follows internal links, reads page information, and checks a range of technical factors, including HTTP status codes, title tags, indexing directives, broken links, and load times. The results are presented as alerts that help teams review issues and plan fixes.
An audit does not mean the tool decides which pages need fixing or guarantees higher rankings. An alert indicates something worth reviewing; the decision to act depends on business goals, website structure, and the issue’s actual impact. For example, a broken link on a key product page is usually a higher priority than a minor issue on a page with little traffic.
For businesses, the value of auditing lies in finding issues systematically rather than waiting for customers or internal teams to report them. The report also gives marketing, development, and content teams a shared task list, helping them work together instead of addressing isolated incidents one at a time.
Set Up a Project and Run Your First Audit
Before you begin, define the scope of the audit. If your website has multiple subdomains, language versions, or test environments, clarify which parts belong to the live website. Crawling staging pages or URLs that are not intended for users can clutter the report and waste the team’s time.
- Create a project: Add your domain and select a crawl scope that fits how your website is set up.
- Verify your website: Complete ownership verification using a supported method to manage the project more easily.
- Configure the crawl: Choose URL sources, page limits, crawl depth, and a speed appropriate for your server capacity.
- Check accessibility: Make sure the crawler is not unintentionally blocked by robots.txt, a firewall, or login settings.
- Run the audit: Start the initial check, then record its date and scope as a baseline for comparison.
If your website is large, you do not have to crawl every page at first. You can start with product directories, service pages, or the URL groups that generate the most revenue, then expand once you have the data under control. Manually check a few URLs as well to confirm that the tool can access the same page versions customers see.
Record your crawl settings and any limits you have applied. If a later audit uses a different scope, the number of issues may change simply because the tool crawled more or fewer pages—not necessarily because the website improved or deteriorated. Keeping this in mind is essential for accurate progress reporting.
Technical Issue Categories to Watch
Reports typically group issues by severity and topic. Specific alert names may vary by tool version, but the categories below are a useful starting point for interpreting results and identifying causes.
Crawlability and Indexing Issues
A 4xx error means a request could not be completed. This often happens when a page has been deleted but internal links still point to it. A 5xx error indicates that the server encountered a problem while processing the request. Incorrect redirects, long redirect chains, and redirect loops can also make it harder for crawlers to reach the destination URL. Distinguish between pages intentionally set to noindex and pages blocked by mistake, because not every noindex directive is an error.
Check the URL, response code, linking page, and page purpose before making changes. If content has moved to a new address, update internal links and use an appropriate redirect if needed. For server errors, work with the technical team to review logs, hosting settings, and whether the issue can be reproduced rather than simply running the audit again.
Internal Links, Canonicals, and Duplicate Content
Broken links lead users to dead ends and weaken navigation. Orphan pages have no internal links pointing to them, so crawlers may have trouble finding them if their URLs are not listed in a sitemap or another source. Incorrect canonical tags, or tags pointing to an unsuitable URL, can confuse search engines about which version to prioritize.
Evaluate duplicate content in context. Product filters, URL parameters, or print versions can create multiple, nearly identical addresses. Do not delete or merge pages just because the tool flags duplicate content. Determine which pages serve distinct search needs, which should be consolidated, and how URL variations should be managed.
Page Tags, Images, and Performance
Missing, duplicate, or overly generic page titles and descriptions can make it harder to distinguish pages in search results. Large image files, unsuitable or missing alt text, and slow-loading resources can affect the user experience. Review these alerts against the actual content: title and description length are indicators, not fixed rules for every page.
Check important pages first, such as the homepage, key category pages, service pages, and articles that generate leads. When you encounter a speed issue, measure it on relevant devices and network conditions, then identify the cause—such as images, JavaScript, the server, or a third-party application. An audit can point you in the right direction, but it does not replace in-depth performance testing.
How to Prioritize Fixes and Make the Most of Your Resources
Do not work through the report in the order issues appear or try to make every metric perfect right away. An issue deserves high priority when it has a significant impact, affects important pages, and can be addressed with reasonable resources. A simple matrix can help you weigh impact, scope, urgency, and implementation difficulty.
- Address immediately: Issues that make key pages inaccessible, unintentionally block indexing, cause widespread incorrect redirects, or trigger server outages.
- Schedule for the near term: Broken links on important pages, incorrect canonicals, common redirect chains, or an internal linking structure that makes key pages difficult to discover.
- Plan improvements: Missing or duplicate title tags across multiple pages, unoptimized images, and user experience issues with limited scope.
- Monitor or ignore with a reason: Alerts that do not affect your goals, apply to pages intentionally set to noindex, or reflect known system limitations.
For transparent prioritization, score each issue from low to high against three criteria: its impact on users and SEO, the number or value of pages affected, and how easy it is to fix. A serious issue affecting hundreds of URLs may take precedence over the same issue on a secondary page. Conversely, an issue on a page that generates significant revenue may need quick attention even if it affects only one page.
Assign each task an owner, deadline, sample URL, and method for confirming the result. Content teams can update page information; technical teams can address server settings or code; and marketing can assess search intent and priorities. LilyTech can help businesses connect auditing with their SEO plans, website design, and digital experience improvement roadmaps.
Track Progress and Maintain Regular Checks
After making a fix, verify it directly on the affected URL before considering the issue resolved. Check the response code, page content, links, and relevant technical tags. For changes made across many pages, sample multiple URLs from the same group. Then rerun the crawl with settings equivalent to the previous audit so you can make a fair comparison.
Do not focus only on the total number of issues. A new audit may uncover more problems because it crawled more URLs, even as earlier issues have been fixed. Track issues by category, the number of affected URLs, completed tasks, and newly reported alerts. If a metric rises, determine whether it reflects a genuinely new issue or a change in crawl scope.
How often you audit depends on how frequently your website changes. An online store with constantly changing categories and products may need more frequent checks than a rarely updated corporate website. In addition to regular checks, run an audit after a domain migration, URL structure change, website redesign, new content management system implementation, or major release.
To turn reports into an ongoing process, save a record of the site’s current state, the issue list, and decisions made. When the same type of issue keeps recurring, investigate the root cause in the page template, publishing process, or source code. Fixing the root cause is usually more effective than addressing URLs one by one, and it reduces the chance of the problem returning after future updates.
Conclusion
Ahrefs Site Audit helps businesses identify technical issues, but its value depends on how results are interpreted and what happens next. Start with a clearly defined scope, check issues that affect accessibility and indexing, prioritize fixes based on page value, and verify your changes with a new crawl. A consistent process can help your team reduce risk, allocate resources effectively, and improve your website using data.
If your business needs an assessment of its current website, a prioritized plan for fixing issues, or help aligning SEO with website development, contact LilyTech for advice tailored to your goals and resources.
