Starting an SEO audit

Adding the site to SiteGuru

The first step of your SEO audit is adding the site to your SiteGuru account. To add a new site, log in to SiteGuru and click the Add Website button on the top right.

Next, you'll see the following pop-up in which you can enter the details of the new site. 

Form for adding a new site to SiteGuru

Only the URL field is required. The other fields are optional.

URL of your site

Enter the URL of the site you want to audit, such as www.example.com. If you're auditing a website on a subdomain, such as subdomain.example.com, enter the URL including the subdomain. 

You don't need to add http:// or https:// to the domain. That is added automatically.

Check Pagespeed

As part of the SEO audit, we check the Google Pagespeed Score of your site's pages. These checks may show up in your Google Analytics reports, unless you have checked the box that filters out all spiders and bot traffic, This is an option in Analytics: go to View Settings and check 'Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders'.
Filter bots and spiders in Google Analytics
If you don't want the pagespeed to be checked, disable this option in the form.
Check pagespeed toggle
For a basic site audit, these are all the fields you need to enter. Click Add Website to add the site to your account and start the crawl.More options for crawling your site

More options for crawling your site

Crawl scope

If you want to run the audit on only a part of the website, click the option Only crawl a specific folder.
Crawl scope settings
Enter the full URL of the section you want to crawl. For example, if you want to crawl the blog and every page in it, you could enter http://www.example.com/blog. Any pages outside that section will not be included in the audit. This option is relevant if you're optimizing specific parts if your site.

Excluding folders

Apart from selecting just one specific folder, it's also possible to exclude specific folders from the crawl. This can only be done after site has been added. 
More about excluding folders

URL parameters

We normally ignore Query Parameters from the URL when crawling your website. That means www.yourwebsite.com/blog and www.yourwebsite.com/blog?page=2 are the same page to us, and only www.yourwebsite.com/blog will be audited. This avoids duplicate pages.

If your website relies on query parameters for navigation, and you want us to audit www.yourwebsite.com/blog and www.yourwebsite.com/blog?page=2 separately, check the Keep Query Parameters checkbox.
Query parameters
That's all you need to do to start the audit. After saving the site, you'll find more options in the Settings tab of the site:

Setting the pagespeed strategy (desktop/mobile)

We're using Google Pagespeed Insights to check the performance of your site. By default, we use the score for mobile. This score is somewhat more strict and uses a small screen and lower bandwidth to calculate the score. If most of your visitors are on desktop, it might be better to use the score for desktop.


Excluding specific folders

Above, we explained how you can limit the crawl to just one folder and it's subfolders. However, it's also possible to crawl the entire site, while excluding one or more folders from the crawl. This can be helpful if you want to limit the number of pages to audit, or if you want to ignore a specific section of the site for now.

Exclude folders

Click Add folders to exclude and enter the URL of the folder you want to exclude. Any subfolders within that folder will also be excluded. 

To add the folder to the audit, click the recycle bin icon next to the folder name, and run a new audit.

Changing the crawl schedule

A new crawl is started automatically every week. You can specify at what day of the week and at what time this should happen:

Crawl schedule options

Change the Pause sitechecks toggle to  stop the weekly crawls from running automatically. Even if sitechecks are paused, you can still start a new crawl manually from the site report.

Deleting a website

If you no longer want to monitor a website, you can remove it from your account.

Click on the Settings tab in the site report, and click the Delete link. After you confirmed that you want to delete the site, the site is removed. You have now freed up a slot in your account and you can add in a new site if you want.

If you've invited others (clients or colleagues) to the site, these people will also no longer have access to the site.

You can add back a site that you deleted, but keep in mind that the history will be gone.