Semrush Site Audit: Avoid SEO Surprises in Site Acquisition

Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them: A Step-by-Step Guide to Semrush Site Audit in 2026

Navigating the world of website acquisition can be daunting, especially for first-time buyers and entrepreneurs looking to acquire. A critical aspect of due diligence is understanding the target site’s SEO health. One tool that can significantly aid in this process is Semrush. Are you confident you’re avoiding the hidden SEO pitfalls that can turn a promising acquisition into a costly mistake?

Step 1: Setting Up Your Semrush Project

Before running a Site Audit, you need to create a project for the website you’re evaluating. This organizes your data and allows you to track progress over time. I had a client last year who skipped this step and ended up with an disorganized mess of reports that were hard to interpret.

1. Navigate to the Projects Dashboard: Log in to your Semrush account. On the left-hand menu, click on “Projects”.
2. Create a New Project: Click the “+ Create project” button. This will open a window where you can enter the domain name of the website you’re considering acquiring. For example, if the site is “example.com”, enter that. Give your project a descriptive name, such as “Example.com Acquisition Audit.”
3. Configure Project Settings: Once the project is created, you’ll be taken to the project dashboard. Here, you can connect various Semrush tools, including Site Audit.

Pro Tip: Enable email notifications for your project to receive updates on new issues or changes in the site’s SEO health. This can be found under “Project Settings” in the top right corner.

Step 2: Initiating a Site Audit

Now that your project is set up, it’s time to run the Site Audit. This is where Semrush crawls the website and identifies potential SEO issues.

1. Access the Site Audit Tool: On your project dashboard, locate the “Site Audit” tool. If it’s not already active, click the “Set up” button.
2. Configure Crawl Settings: This is a critical step. The default settings may not be optimal for every website.
• Crawl Source: Under “Source,” choose how Semrush will discover pages to crawl. The default is “Website.” For larger sites, I strongly recommend selecting “Sitemap” and providing the URL of the site’s XML sitemap. This ensures Semrush prioritizes important pages.
• Pages to Crawl: Specify the number of pages to crawl. For an initial audit, 5,000 pages is a good starting point. You can increase this later if needed.
• Crawl Scope: Determine which areas of the site to crawl. You can include or exclude specific sections using URL patterns. Be careful here! Accidentally excluding key pages is a common mistake.
• Respect robots.txt: Leave this checked. Ignoring the robots.txt file can lead to inaccurate results and potentially harm the website.
• User-agent: Keep the default “SemrushBot.”
3. Start the Crawl: Once you’ve configured the settings, click the “Start Site Audit” button. Semrush will begin crawling the website.

Common Mistake: Failing to configure the crawl settings properly. I’ve seen entrepreneurs launch audits with default settings, only to discover that Semrush missed critical sections of the site. Always double-check these settings before starting the crawl.

Step 3: Analyzing the Audit Results

After the crawl is complete (this can take anywhere from a few minutes to several hours, depending on the size of the site), Semrush will present you with a comprehensive report of the website’s SEO health.

1. Overview Dashboard: The overview dashboard provides a high-level summary of the site’s SEO health, including the overall health score, the number of errors, warnings, and notices, and a breakdown of the most common issues.
2. Errors, Warnings, and Notices: These are categorized based on their severity. Errors are the most critical issues and should be addressed first. Warnings are less severe but still important to fix. Notices are informational and may not require immediate action.
3. Explore Key Issues:
   • Crawlability: Issues that prevent search engines from crawling the website, such as broken links, blocked pages, and redirect chains.
   • Site Performance: Factors that affect the website’s loading speed, such as large images, unminified code, and slow server response time. According to a HubSpot study, 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in two seconds or less.
   • Internal Linking: Problems with the website’s internal linking structure, such as orphan pages and excessive links.
   • HTTPS Implementation: Issues related to the website’s SSL certificate and HTTPS configuration.
   • Markup: Errors in the website’s schema markup, which can affect how the site appears in search results.
4. Prioritize Fixes Based on Impact and Effort: Semrush assigns an “Impact” score to each issue, indicating its potential impact on the site’s SEO performance. It also estimates the “Effort” required to fix the issue. Focus on fixing errors with a high “Impact” score and a low “Effort” score first.

Expected Outcome: A clear understanding of the website’s SEO strengths and weaknesses. You’ll have a prioritized list of issues to address, along with actionable recommendations for fixing them. This is invaluable information for negotiating the acquisition price or deciding whether to proceed with the deal at all.

Step 4: Diving Deeper into Specific Issues

The overview dashboard provides a good starting point, but to truly understand the website’s SEO health, you need to dive deeper into specific issues.

1. Click on an Issue Category: On the left-hand menu, click on one of the issue categories (e.g., “Errors,” “Warnings,” “Notices”). This will take you to a detailed report for that category.
2. Review Individual Issues: Each issue is listed with a description, the number of pages affected, the “Impact” score, and the “Effort” score. Click on an issue to see a list of the specific pages that are affected.
3. Example: Broken Links: Let’s say you click on “Broken Links” under the “Errors” category. Semrush will show you a list of all the broken links on the website, along with the pages where they appear. You can then export this list to a CSV file and use it to fix the broken links.
4. Use Filters: Use the filters at the top of the report to narrow down the list of issues. For example, you can filter by “Impact” score or by the type of issue.

Pro Tip: Pay close attention to issues that affect a large number of pages. These issues are likely to have a greater impact on the site’s SEO performance. For instance, I once audited a site where a misconfigured canonical tag was causing duplicate content issues on hundreds of pages. Fixing this one issue had a significant positive impact on the site’s rankings.

Step 5: Reporting and Action Planning

Once you’ve analyzed the audit results, it’s time to create a report and develop an action plan for addressing the identified issues. When creating your plan, remember that action-oriented marketing is key to success.

1. Export the Audit Report: Semrush allows you to export the audit report in various formats, including PDF and CSV. This can be useful for sharing the results with other stakeholders.
2. Prioritize Issues: Based on the “Impact” and “Effort” scores, create a prioritized list of issues to address. Focus on fixing the most critical issues first.
3. Develop an Action Plan: For each issue, create a detailed action plan that outlines the steps required to fix it. This may involve technical changes to the website, content updates, or link building efforts.
4. Assign Responsibilities: Assign responsibility for fixing each issue to a specific member of your team.
5. Set a Timeline: Set a realistic timeline for addressing the identified issues.

Case Study: We recently helped a client evaluate a potential acquisition in the Atlanta area. Using Semrush Site Audit, we identified several critical issues, including a large number of broken links, a slow loading speed, and a lack of mobile optimization. We estimated that fixing these issues would require approximately 40 hours of work. Based on this information, our client was able to negotiate a lower acquisition price, saving them over $10,000. The site was in the Brookwood Hills neighborhood, and the broken links were primarily pointing to outdated press releases from the Buckhead Business Association. Semrush identified these issues in under an hour.

A crucial aspect of modern SEO and marketing is understanding mobile-first marketing, which can reveal further areas for improvement.

By following these steps, you can use Semrush Site Audit to effectively evaluate the SEO health of a website before acquiring it, mitigating risks and maximizing your investment. Remember, a thorough SEO audit is an investment in your future success.

Don’t just passively review the Semrush Site Audit report; actively use the insights to negotiate a better deal or walk away from a potentially disastrous acquisition. Use the identified issues as leverage to reduce the purchase price or demand that the seller fixes them before closing. This proactive approach is what separates successful entrepreneurs from those who end up regretting their acquisitions. And remember, if you’re scaling up, don’t make these app growth mistakes.