Site Audit Fixes: Working Through a Full SEO Sweep
The Site Audit is the widest check in the suite. In one pass it looks at your pages for the everyday problems that hold a site back in search: missing or duplicated titles, thin meta descriptions, broken canonical tags, images without alt text, muddled headings, slow loading, missing structured data and pages that cannot be indexed.
Because it covers so much at once, the report can look long. This page explains how to read it as a set of patterns rather than a to-do list of hundreds of items, which guide fixes each category, and where your platform changes the fix.
Read the report as patterns, not pages
A first Site Audit on an established site often lists the same finding dozens or hundreds of times. That is normal, and it is good news. Almost every repeated finding comes from a shared template: the product page layout, the blog post layout, the category page, the header or the footer. Fix the template once and every page built from it improves at the same moment.
Before you open a single fix guide, sort the report by finding type and ask one question of each group: is this coming from a template, from content that editors wrote, or from a single odd page?
- Template findings appear on every page of one type. A product template that prints
the shop name as the whole title, or a blog layout that wraps the post title in an
h2instead of anh1, are typical. These are developer or theme settings jobs. - Content findings vary from page to page. A missing meta description on some posts but not others, or images uploaded without alt text, point at an editorial habit. These need a process change as well as a clean-up.
- One-off findings affect one or two URLs, such as an old landing page with a stray
noindex. Fix them individually and move on.
Thinking this way usually turns a report of several hundred lines into somewhere between five and ten real jobs, which is a far more manageable starting point for a small business.
The fix guides by finding
Each guide takes one category from the report and walks through what it means, how to confirm it and how to put it right.
What searchers see in the results
Fixing missing or weak title tags covers writing a unique, descriptive title for each page, putting the main topic near the start, and removing duplicates that make pages compete with each other. Fixing meta description issues covers summaries that match what the searcher asked, avoiding copies of the title, and why search engines may still show different text from the one you wrote.
Which URL counts
Fixing canonical tag problems covers
the self-referencing canonical, and the classic mistakes: canonicals pointing at the HTTP version, at
a URL with a different trailing slash, or at the homepage from every inner page. Fixing
indexation and crawl issues covers pages blocked by robots.txt, forgotten noindex tags,
sitemap mismatches and how to use Search Console to find out why a page is not in Google.
How the page is built
Fixing missing image alt text covers
describing meaningful images, using an empty alt="" for decorative ones, and clearing a
backlog on a site with thousands of images. Fixing
heading hierarchy covers a single main heading, logical levels, and choosing heading tags for structure
rather than for font size. Fixing missing structured
data covers choosing the right schema.org types for each kind of page, starting with Organization,
Article and BreadcrumbList.
How fast it loads
Fixing slow page speed covers server response time, render-blocking files, oversized images and the three Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift. For the metrics themselves, see the Core Web Vitals Guide.
By platform
The same finding is fixed in different places depending on how the site is built. The WordPress guide covers SEO plugins such as Yoast and Rank Math, page-builder gaps and theme-level fixes. The Shopify guide covers theme templates, product SEO fields and what the platform does and does not let you change. The Next.js guide covers the Metadata API, generating structured data per route and choosing static or server rendering.
Which findings to fix first
The Site Audit treats every category equally in its report, but they do not matter equally to your traffic. A practical order for most sites:
| Priority | Finding | Why it comes here |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Indexation blocks | A page that cannot be indexed cannot rank, however good everything else is. Check this before anything cosmetic. |
| 2 | Canonical errors | A wrong canonical quietly tells search engines to ignore the page you care about in favour of another URL. |
| 3 | Missing or duplicate titles | The title is the strongest on-page clue to what a page is about and is usually the blue link people click. |
| 4 | Slow key pages | Speed affects visitors on every page view, and poor Core Web Vitals on your busiest templates cost the most. |
| 5 | Headings and alt text | These help people using screen readers and help machines understand the page. Fix at template level where possible. |
| 6 | Meta descriptions and schema | They shape how a result looks and how clearly machines identify your content, but they do not rescue a page that has deeper problems. |
Within each row, start with the pages that bring in enquiries or sales. A duplicate title on an archived news post from years ago can wait; the same problem on your main service page should not.
noindex or a robots.txt rule blocking
everything, stop and fix that first. It often means a staging setting was carried over at launch, and
it overrides every other improvement.Fixing at the template level
Most sites are built from a handful of layouts. Here is how the common findings map to the place you actually change them.
- Titles and descriptions: set a sensible pattern in the template or SEO plugin, for
example
Page topic | Brand, then override it by hand on the pages that earn money. A pattern that only swaps one word between pages is not unique enough. - Canonicals: should be generated automatically from the page's own clean URL, using
HTTPS, your chosen host (with or without
www) and your chosen trailing-slash style. - Headings: the layout decides whether the page title is an
h1. Check the logo, sidebar widgets and footer too, because themes sometimes use heading tags there for styling. - Alt text: the template can pull alt text from the media library, so fix it once in the library rather than on each page where the image is used.
- Structured data: add Organization once, sitewide, and generate Article, Product or BreadcrumbList markup from the fields each template already has.
- Speed: fonts, scripts and hero images are usually loaded by the layout, so savings made there apply to every page that uses it.
After a template change, pick three or four pages built from it and view the source to confirm the change is really in the HTML, not just visible on screen. Caching plugins and content delivery networks can serve the old version for a while.
Site Audit, Site Audit Pro or Site Crawler?
Three tools in the suite look at a whole site, and people often ask which to run. They answer different questions.
- Site Audit asks: what is wrong on my pages? It is the broad on-page and technical sweep described here, and the natural first run for a site that has never been checked.
- Site Audit Pro asks: how do my pages compare with each other? It looks across a larger site for duplicate titles and content, per-page Core Web Vitals, structured-data validity and internal link health. Its findings are covered in the Site Audit Pro fixes and the Site Audit Pro Guide.
- Site Crawler asks: can a search engine get around my site? It follows links the way a bot does and reports broken links, redirect chains, orphan pages and sitemap mismatches. See the Site Crawler fixes and the Site Crawler Guide.
A sensible routine is to run the Site Audit first, clear the template-level problems, and then use the other two tools to look at the site as a connected whole. The full reference for this tool is the Site Audit Guide.
Order of work
- Run the Site Audit and export or note the finding categories and how many pages each affects.
- Deal with anything that stops indexing: robots.txt blocks, stray
noindextags and canonicals pointing at the wrong URL. - Group the rest into template findings, content findings and one-offs, as described above.
- Fix template findings in your theme, SEO plugin or code, using the platform guide for WordPress, Shopify or Next.js where it applies.
- Clear content findings on your most important pages by hand, then change the publishing checklist so new pages include a title, description, alt text and one main heading.
- Work on speed for the busiest templates, measuring before and after so you know which change helped.
- Add or correct structured data, and test a sample page in a validator before rolling it out.
- Run the audit again. Expect the counts to fall in large steps as template fixes land, then more slowly as content is tidied.
Search engines need to recrawl pages before changes show up in results, which can take days for popular pages and weeks for quieter ones. Use the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console to request a recrawl of the few pages that matter most.
1. How often should I run a site audit?
For most small business sites, once a quarter is enough, plus an extra run after any redesign, theme change, platform migration or large content upload. Those events are when template problems are introduced, so checking straight afterwards catches them before search engines have recrawled the whole site. Busy sites that publish every day, or online shops that add products constantly, benefit from a monthly check so that new content does not quietly build up missing titles or alt text.
2. My audit shows hundreds of issues. Is my site badly broken?
Usually not. Large counts nearly always come from a small number of templates repeating the same problem on every page built from them. A shop with four hundred products and a product template that leaves out the meta description will show four hundred findings from one cause. Group the report by finding type, work out which layout each group comes from, and you will normally find five to ten real jobs rather than hundreds.
3. How long should a title tag be?
There is no fixed limit in the rules. Google shortens titles in results based on the pixel width available, which in practice is often somewhere around fifty to sixty characters on desktop. A useful habit is to put the words that describe the page first and the brand name last, so that if the end is cut off the searcher still sees what the page is about. Uniqueness and accuracy matter much more than hitting an exact length.
4. Why does Google show a different description from the one I wrote?
Google treats the meta description as a suggestion. If it thinks another passage on the page answers the search better, it will show that instead, and the snippet can change from one search to the next. You cannot force your text to appear, but a description that accurately summarises the page and uses the words people search for is more likely to be used. A missing description leaves the choice entirely to the search engine.
5. Do I need structured data on every page?
No, but most sites benefit from a small, accurate set. Organization markup on the site as a whole, BreadcrumbList on inner pages, and Article, Product or LocalBusiness where they genuinely describe the page are a sound base. Structured data helps search engines identify what a page is and makes some pages eligible for enhanced results, but it has to match the visible content. Markup that describes things not on the page can lead to a manual action.
6. Is alt text an SEO thing or an accessibility thing?
Both, and accessibility comes first. Screen readers read alt text aloud to people who cannot see the image, so it should describe what the image shows or does in that context. Search engines also use it to understand images, which helps in image search. Decorative images such as dividers or background patterns should have an empty alt attribute so screen readers skip them, rather than no alt attribute at all, which can cause the file name to be read out.
7. Will fixing audit findings improve my rankings straight away?
Some fixes can have a quick effect, such as removing an accidental noindex or correcting a canonical that pointed away from the page. Most on-page improvements work more gradually, because search engines need to recrawl the pages and reassess them, and ranking also depends on content quality, links and competition. Treat the audit as removing obstacles. It makes sure good content can be found and understood, but it does not replace having content worth ranking.
The Site Audit checks titles, descriptions, canonicals, alt text, headings, speed, structured data and indexation in one pass, so you can see which patterns repeat across your templates and fix them once.
Run the Site Audit →