Is the SEMRush Site Audit any good?

[JanLG]

Hi everyone,

I have been hit by the recent google updates and I am in the process of recovering my site.
I am yet to implement the famous Kitchen Sink Method, but I have registered for a 30 day trial of SEMRush.

The software offers a site audit, which I performed.
It seems like I have quite some issues with my site.
Out of the 216 crawled pages, 208 have issues that need to be fixed.

Before I start implementing fixes I wanted to ask if any of you experts has experiences with the SEMRush site audits?
Can I trust these results and do they move the needle? Or should I just focus on different things to revive my site?

Thanks a lot for your time and comments!

 

[Ryuzaki]

Can I trust these results and do they move the needle? Or should I just focus on different things to revive my site?

The Kitchen Sink items are entirely about auditing your site. Using tools to aid you in doing that is more than fine. I've not done a Semrush audit, but I imagine it's going to be broad strokes and not be entirely accurate. But I'm sure it's going to help you hit the most egregious problems first, which you should do.

Whether or not it's worth it or if they'll move the needle, I'd look at these technical SEO issues as a throttle on your growth. As long as those problems exist, they'll be dragging down your growth potential. Let's say it's by a percentage multiplier. If you have enough problems (I'm making up numbers here), they could add up to a 20% figure. Which means your site would have a (100% - 20%) = 80% multiplier attached to it. So you'll only be reaping 80% of the growth you could be getting instead of 100%. That's one way to think about it.

So is it better to just power through that 20% handicap to make up the lost growth, or is it better to clean it up and unleash the beast at 100%? People have different opinions, but I like to work both hard and smart, not just harder because I don't want to learn or deal with technical things.

 

[Darth]

I would ignore the SEMrush tool, it's useless. Focus on the Kitchen Sink method.

 

[illmasterj]

The benefit of these tools are to have them on a schedule. They're never going to be as useful as a manual audit, but a manual audit can fall by the wayside.

These two things aren't exclusive. Schedule some sort of weekly audit to tell you when basic things need fixing (links have gone dead, are redirected, your editor completely f*cked up an old post, etc) and do a deep manual audit on a less regular basis (quarterly/bi-annually).