Running a site audit, the process of looking for, and correcting, SEO errors on your site, is something that every marketer should do. It keeps your site performing at its best, and it means that you can spot any issues (hopefully) before they start causing problems. But if you do site audits the old-fashioned way it’s a lot of work.

Most SEOs understand this, but with the best will in the world, it’s hard, in fact almost impossible to give yourself space in the day to do a site audit 100% properly. You want to, but then the phone rings, you get a few emails and suddenly, the site audit hasn’t been done. Your website’s faults remain languishing, hidden from view, harming your site’s potential rankings. This does no one any good.

At Wordtracker, we (or rather, the product guys) spent a lot of time thinking about how to make this process easier. After many hours of toil, the site audit function in Keywords was born. Finally, you can run a site audit and get all the data you need in literally a handful of clicks. Here then, is a walk through the tool, in small and easy steps.

1) Log in to Keywords (and if you don’t have an account, get one from here ). I’m going to assume you don’t have a campaign set up, but if you do just skip to Step 4.

2) Click on ‘New Campaign’ (underneath where it says 'Campaigns').

3) You’ll then be asked for the domain that you want to audit. (The option 'I’m not working on a specific domain at the moment' is for keyword research. You’ll need to put in an address like www.YourBrand.com for us to audit.) Also, if you run lots of sites, you’ll need a new campaign for each one, so put in a description that makes it memorable.

4) That’s pretty much the hardest thing you need to do. Now you’ll be presented with this screen, so just click 'New' in the site audits section, or the plus button. Once you’ve set up a site audit, the ‘new’ button will change to 'Manage', but the plus button will still be there for creating new audits.

5) Now, Wordtracker will crawl your site in the background. Each crawl is limited to 10,000 pages so if your site is bigger than this, it’s best to split it into sections. Eg, www.YourBrand.com/one-section then do a separate one for www.YourBrand.com/another-section. This also means that you get actionable results quicker. You don’t need to do anything while the crawl is happening, by the way. You’re free to get on with other things, like those pesky emails. Oh, and if you close the browser tab by accident, don’t worry. The audit will run in the background.

6) When the data is good to go, it will display in a really easy-to-view format. You'll see a bar graph like this:

So you can see where the bulk of your work is. What we’ve done here is look at what’s wrong with your site and group it according to error type. For more information on what these errors are, have a read of my earlier article on site audits When you’re ready to start looking at the errors in more detail, just move on to the next step.

7) We’ll now give you the data split by problem and URL. If I was to click ‘server error’ for example, I can see instantly which pages have server errors and precisely what those errors are. I’d be presented with a table like this:

We call this “scrummy data” (we don’t really). It can be filtered, sorted, exported to Excel. However you like your data, you can get it here.

That, brilliantly, is pretty much it. You’ll have all this data at your finger tips with just a handful of clicks. But what does it all mean? What can you do with it? The previous article will help you. Read through it, make sure you understand what you’re aiming for and be thankful for all the hours of work you’ve saved by not doing it manually.

Next up: Do you know how you can use the Wordtracker Keywords tool to track your keyword rankings? If not read this keyword ranking article from my colleague Mal. Now you have no excuse, so best get started now!

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About Andrew Tobert

Andrew was Wordtracker's Content Manager in 2012. Now he works freelance, helping companies make the most of their websites and social media channels. He's at andrew.tobert@gmail.com if you want to get in touch.