Run your first audit

An audit is the heart of SEMOptimiser. We crawl your site like Googlebot does – following links, rendering JavaScript, parsing markup – then grade every page against 200+ on-page, technical and content checks. Most audits finish in five to fifteen minutes.

Start an audit

1. From the dashboard, paste your domain into the audit input at the top (e.g. https://yoursite.com) and click Run free SEO audit.
2. Pick a crawl depth. Depth 3 covers your homepage plus everything two clicks away – fine for a first look. Depth 5 covers everything except very deep e-commerce trees.
3. Confirm and click Start. We immediately begin queuing URLs.
4. Watch the progress bar. You can leave the page – the audit continues running in the background and you'll see it in Audits → All audits.

How the crawler works

We start at the URL you give us, render it with a headless browser (so React/Vue/Next sites work), extract all internal links, and queue them. We respect your robots.txt by default and use a polite 500ms delay between requests so we don't overload your origin. For very large sites you can tune both in Settings → Crawl.

Reading the report

When the audit finishes, you land on the report dashboard. Three top-level scores appear first:

• SEO score (0-100): weighted from 200+ checks across technical, on-page, content and links.
• Core Web Vitals: pass/needs-improvement/fail for LCP, INP and CLS, based on field data where available.
• AI-readability: how well your content can be parsed by ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity (more in the AI Visibility category).

Below the scores, issues are grouped by severity: Critical (likely costing you traffic right now), Warning (best-practice misses), and Info (opportunities). Click any issue to see exactly which URLs are affected and the recommended fix.

One-click fixes

If you've connected a server (SFTP/FTP/cPanel) or your WordPress site via Application Password, many issues have a Fix button. Common one-click fixes include adding missing meta descriptions, generating image alt text, compressing oversized images, and inserting canonical tags. We always show you the diff before applying the change.

Common first-audit issues

Audit shows 0 pages crawled

Usually robots.txt blocks our user agent, the site requires authentication, or your CDN is rate-limiting us. See the Audits → "Why is my page not being crawled?" article for the full diagnostic flow.

Audit takes more than an hour

Large sites with 10k+ pages can take several hours. You can lower the depth, exclude noisy paths (like /author/* on blogs), or raise the concurrency in Settings → Crawl.

What to do next

• Fix the top three critical issues. They typically account for 60-80% of the SEO score gap.
• Schedule a weekly audit so you catch regressions early – covered in the Scheduling article.
• Connect Search Console to overlay real Google performance data on the report.