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Course 04: Practical workflow

Site Audits

A site audit turns a crawl of a website into a clear list of problems worth fixing. It combines crawl data, search engine data, and judgment to explain what is blocking crawling, indexing, and visibility.

The value of an audit is not the number of warnings it produces. It comes from choosing the right scope, verifying what the crawler reports, and ordering fixes so the most important work happens first.

In this course, you’ll follow the complete audit workflow, from planning the crawl to writing findings and validating fixes.

Start with audit process What you’ll learn

4 short lessons. Practical workflow. Builds on Technical SEO and On-Page SEO.

Your learning path 4 lessons
01
Audit processScope, crawl setup, and baseline
 02
Issue checksWhat crawlers test and flag
 03
PrioritizationImpact, effort, and page value
 04
FindingsEvidence, fixes, and validation
One workflow, four stepsFollow them in order for a full audit, or jump to the step you are working on.

Lessons 01 to 04

What you’ll learn

Each lesson covers one stage of the audit workflow and explains how to apply it to a real website.

01Workflow

Audit process

How to plan an audit, configure the crawl, and save a baseline for future comparison.

  • Audit scope
  • Crawl configuration
  • Supporting data
  • Crawl completeness
  • Baseline crawl
Open lesson
02Detection

Issue checks

What crawlers test across status codes, indexability, content, links, and AI access.

  • Status code checks
  • Indexability checks
  • Duplicate content
  • Severity levels
  • False positives
Open lesson
03Planning

Prioritization

How to order fixes by impact, reach, effort, risk, and page value.

  • Impact and effort
  • Blocking issues
  • Template fixes
  • Page value
  • Fix sequencing
Open lesson
04Interpretation

Findings

How to write verified findings with evidence, recommendations, and acceptance criteria.

  • Root cause
  • Evidence
  • Recommendations
  • Acceptance criteria
  • Recrawl validation
Open lesson

Context

Why Site Audits matters

Individual SEO checks only become useful when they are applied consistently across a whole website and interpreted in context.

A repeatable audit process catches regressions early, protects important pages during releases and migrations, and gives teams a clear, prioritized list of work.

In SiteAuditLint

Run, compare, and share audits

SiteAuditLint crawls your website, checks every URL against technical, on-page, tracking, and AI visibility rules, and groups results by severity.

Use scheduled audits and crawl comparisons to track fixes over time, then share findings through HTML reports, Slack, or Linear.

Before moving on

Course checklist

Make sure you understand:

  • How to define audit scope and configure a crawl
  • What issue checks measure and how to verify them
  • How to prioritize fixes by impact, reach, effort, and risk
  • How to write findings with evidence and acceptance criteria
  • Why every fix should be validated with a recrawl

Summary

Key takeaway

A site audit is a repeatable process: plan the crawl, verify the issues, prioritize the work, and write findings that lead to validated fixes.

The lessons examine each step in more detail, starting with audit process.

Continue to audit process
Builds on earlier courses. Review Technical SEO and On-Page SEO for the individual signals an audit checks, or read the technical SEO audit guide.