⭐ Beginner — No coding experience needed
How to Crawl Your Website to Find SEO Issues Quickly
Learn how to crawl your website to find SEO issues across every page — missing titles, broken links, duplicate content and more. Step by step for complete beginners.
What you will learn in this guide
- What a site crawl is and what it finds
- Why crawling your site regularly prevents SEO problems
- How to run a crawl using the Site Crawler tool
- How to read and prioritise the results
- The most important issues to fix first
- How often you should crawl your site
1 What is a site crawl?
A site crawl is when a tool visits every page on your website — just like Google does — and records what it finds on each one. It checks for SEO issues like missing title tags, broken links, duplicate content, slow pages and pages that are blocked from being indexed.
Why it matters: Google crawls your site regularly. If it finds problems — broken pages, missing titles, thin content — your rankings suffer. A regular crawl lets you find and fix these problems before Google penalises you for them.
2 How to run your first crawl
- 1 Open the Site Crawler Go to performance-tools.html#site-crawler and enter your homepage URL — e.g. https://yoursite.com
- 2 Choose how many pages to crawl For a small site, 10 or 20 pages covers most of the important content. For a larger site, choose 50 pages to get a representative sample across your main sections.
- 3 Wait for the crawl to complete The crawler starts at your homepage, follows every internal link it finds, and visits each page in turn. A 20-page crawl typically takes 30–60 seconds.
- 4 Review the results Each page is scored and listed with its issues. Errors are shown in red, warnings in amber. Start with the errors — these are the most damaging to your rankings.
3 What issues to fix first
| Issue | Priority | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Missing title tag | 🔴 Critical | Google uses the title tag as the main headline in search results |
| Broken internal links (404) | 🔴 Critical | Wastes crawl budget and damages user experience |
| Duplicate title tags | 🟠 High | Confuses Google about which page to rank for a query |
| Missing meta description | 🟡 Medium | Google may write its own — usually worse than yours |
| Thin content (under 300 words) | 🟡 Medium | May be seen as low quality and skipped in indexing |
| Missing H1 tag | 🟡 Medium | H1 reinforces what the page is about to Google |
4 How often should you crawl?
For most small sites, once a month is enough. Run a crawl after any major changes — a redesign, a CMS update, adding new pages, or moving to a new hosting provider. Any of these can introduce new issues without you realising.
Good habit: Add a monthly calendar reminder to run a 20-page crawl. It takes two minutes and catches problems before they affect your Google rankings.