The SEO audit process
The SiteGuru audit consists of three parts:
- Crawling
- SEO audit
- Link check
In this article, we'll discuss each of the steps and explain how it works.
Note: consider this article as background information. You don't need to understand this to work with SiteGuru.
Crawling
The goal of crawling a site is to identify all the pages to be checked. We crawl the site in 3 different steps:
- Finding all the pages we found in earlier crawls
- Finding all the pages in the sitemaps. This includes sub-sitemaps up to two levels.
- Finding all pages that are linked to from your other pages.
During the website check, we might add more pages that are referenced as a canonical URL, or that are used as a redirect.
When all pages have been found, or if the limit of pages for the site has been reached, the crawl has completed. Now it's time for the next step: the SEO audit.
SEO Audit
The SEO audit starts with some page-level checks: is the website secure, does it redirect to one version of the URL, and does it have a sitemap.
Next, all your pages are checked for everything that is relevant for SEO. We do this by accessing the page and evaluating the source code of the page.
SiteGuru, much like Google, does not apply client-side rendering. That means javascript on the page is not executed. Any content that is added or modified using javascript after the page has loaded, is not considered.
During the check, all relevant metatags, headers, redirects, the page title, images, and more are stored in our database.
Also, all links are stored and will be checked in the next step.
If you've enabled the pagespeed check, this step also includes a call to Google's Pagespeed Insights API to get the pagespeed score and Web Vitals.
Once all pages have been checked, your main SEO report becomes available.
Link check
After the SEO checks, all links that we found on the site's pages are evaluated. Any redirected links or links that don't work, are flagged. The link check takes somewhere between 1 to 5 seconds per link. If we identify issues with he link check and suspect we're putting too much pressure on your server, the link check is slowed down, and may take a bit longer.
How long does my SEO check take?
As with most things in SEO: it depends.
A single page check usually takes somewhere between 5 seconds and 10 seconds. Multiply this by the number of pages on your site to get an idea of how long the total audit will take.
If you've enabled the Pagespeed check, the check takes considerably longer and can take up to 20 seconds. To speed up your sitecheck, we only check the pagespeed of up to 100 pages.
Sitecheck completed
After the link check, the sitecheck is done and you'll get an email with the results. We'll run a new check every week.
