Loading tutorials…
Loading tutorials…
Ubersuggest's Site Audit runs every crawl Ahrefs does at a fraction of the price. The trap is the issue list — most operators triage it alphabetically. This walks through the URL-impact prioritization that turns 800 reported issues into 30 weeks of real work.
Who this is forMarketers paying $29-99/mo for Ubersuggest who ran Site Audit once, saw 400 reported issues, and never opened it again. This is how to make the audit a real weekly checkpoint.
What you'll need
Step 1
Project → Site Audit → Settings → set max URLs (1K-5K), exclude faceted-nav, search URLs, and parameter patterns before crawling.
Open your project → Site Audit → click the Settings gear in the top right.
Set Max URLs to crawl. 1,000 is fine for sites under 500 real pages. 5,000 for content sites. Anything above 5K typically wastes credits on URL variants you don't need.
Add URL exclusion patterns: ?filter=, ?sort=, ?s=, /search/, ?page=, session-ID parameters. Faceted nav is the #1 credit waster for Site Audit.
Set the User-Agent. Default is Ubersuggest's bot. If your firewall or CDN blocks bots, allowlist this specific UA in Cloudflare or WAF.
Pick a crawl schedule. Weekly is right for active sites; monthly for static brochure sites. Daily eats credits with no real value.
Step 2
Site Audit → Run Audit. For 1K URL sites, allow 15-45 minutes. 5K URLs, 1-3 hours. Don't close the tab — the crawl runs server-side regardless.
Click Run Audit. Ubersuggest queues the crawl and processes it server-side.
While it runs, open Google Search Console → Pages → check 'Indexed' count and note it for cross-validation.
Smaller sites (under 1K URLs) finish in 15-45 minutes. Mid-size (1K-5K) takes 1-3 hours. Large sites (5K+) can run overnight — Ubersuggest will email you when done.
Don't run multiple audits in parallel on Individual plan — they queue and you may hit the daily-search cap.
Step 3
Site Audit → Issues. Three severity buckets. Always start with Critical, then Warnings, then Notices. Sort by URL count within each bucket.
Open Site Audit → Issues. Three columns: Critical, Warning, Notice. Plus a Health Score at the top (0-100).
Health Score is directional only. Don't chase 100. The real metric is URLs affected by Critical issues.
Click into Critical Issues. Sort by 'URLs affected' descending. A single broken-link issue affecting 200 pages beats 12 individual 4xx pages.
Within Critical, you'll typically see: pages with no H1, duplicate title tags, broken internal links, redirect chains, 5xx errors, noindex on indexable pages. These are the real ranking killers.
Export the top 20-30 Critical issues to CSV. Assign owners. Set a deadline. Re-crawl after fixes ship — Health Score should move 5-15 points in the first round.
Step 4
Compare Ubersuggest crawled URLs vs GSC indexed pages. If off by 25%+, your scope or sitemap is wrong. Diagnose before acting.
Once the crawl is complete, compare two numbers: Ubersuggest's 'Pages Crawled' vs GSC's 'Pages indexed' count.
Within 15%: your scope is right. Act on the issue list.
Off by 25%+: investigate. Either (a) Ubersuggest is missing URLs in your sitemap (add them and re-crawl), or (b) Ubersuggest is crawling URLs that aren't supposed to be in the index (add to exclusion rules).
Spot-check 10 random URLs from the Ubersuggest crawl. Open in a browser. Confirm Ubersuggest's reported status (200/4xx/5xx) matches reality. If a page shows 4xx in Ubersuggest but 200 in browser, the firewall is interfering.
Step 5
Don't spread fixes. Pick the 5 Critical issues with the highest URL count. Fix them. Re-crawl. Then move to the next 5.
Resist the urge to fix every issue at once. Pick the top 5 by URL count.
Common top-5 patterns: (1) hundreds of pages missing meta descriptions → write a default template; (2) duplicate title tags across product pages → add variable + count; (3) 4xx on internal links from a deprecated section → bulk-redirect with .htaccess or middleware; (4) noindex on pages that should be indexable → audit the robots meta logic; (5) redirect chains → flatten redirects to single-hop.
Ship the fixes. Re-crawl 7-14 days later (give CDN caches time to clear).
Repeat: top 5 → fix → re-crawl. Three iterations usually moves Health Score from 60-70 to 85-90 on a content site.
Step 6
Don't touch Warnings until Critical issues affect fewer than 50 URLs. Warnings include missing alt text, low word count, slow pages — real but lower-leverage.
Warnings are usually: missing alt text on images, low word count pages, slow loading pages, missing schema markup.
These matter but in aggregate, not individually. Don't fix one alt-text at a time — bulk-update with your CMS's bulk editor or AltText automation.
Address Warnings only after Critical issues affect fewer than 50 URLs site-wide. Otherwise you're polishing trim while the engine is broken.
Notices (lowest severity) are often Ubersuggest being overly cautious. Review them quarterly, not weekly.
Common mistakes
Chasing Health Score instead of URL-impact
What goes wrong: You spend 6 weeks fixing 200 Notice-level issues to boost Health Score from 75 to 88. Ranking is flat because none of those fixes addressed the 12 Critical issues hurting your top 50 indexed pages. Six weeks gone, no traffic lift, $4,000+ in writer/dev time wasted.
How to avoid: Sort Critical issues by 'URLs affected' descending. Fix the top 5. Re-crawl. Repeat. Health Score is a side-effect, not a target.
Crawling at full scope without exclusions
What goes wrong: Audit returns 8,000 URLs when your real site is 800. Faceted-nav parameters, search-result URLs, and ?utm_ variants dominate the report. You waste 6 hours filtering noise that should never have been crawled — roughly $300-600 in founder/specialist time. Daily search budget burns out.
How to avoid: Add exclusion patterns before the first crawl: ?filter=, ?sort=, /search/, ?s=, session IDs. Re-crawl with the cleaner scope and the issue list becomes manageable.
Re-crawling daily during fixes
What goes wrong: You fix issues, re-crawl daily, see no improvement (because CDN caches haven't cleared), and assume the fixes didn't work. You reverse the changes. Three weeks lost — typically $1,000-2,000 in developer time. Worse, the daily crawls burn 30x the credits monthly crawls would.
How to avoid: Wait 7-14 days between fix deploys and re-crawls. CDN caches need time to clear, and Ubersuggest's bot needs time to recrawl after the cache flush.
Treating Ubersuggest crawl as authoritative when it conflicts with GSC
What goes wrong: Ubersuggest reports 'noindex' on a page that's actually indexed in Google. You spend 2 days 'fixing' a problem that doesn't exist (~$400-800 in dev time). The page was always indexable — Ubersuggest's bot just got blocked by Cloudflare on that URL.
How to avoid: Always cross-validate with GSC. If Ubersuggest and GSC disagree, GSC is authoritative for your own site. Spot-check 10 random URLs against the live browser before acting.
Not allowlisting Ubersuggest at the firewall
What goes wrong: Cloudflare Bot Fight Mode or AWS WAF rules throttle Ubersuggest's bot. The crawl reports false 5xx errors and missing pages. You spend a week 'fixing' problems that don't exist. Production developers waste time investigating ghost issues — typically $1,500-3,000 in engineering time.
How to avoid: In Cloudflare → Security → Bots, allowlist the Ubersuggest user-agent string. In WAF rules, add an explicit allow for it. Re-run the audit and confirm 5xx errors drop dramatically.
Ignoring Site Audit after the first crawl
What goes wrong: You run the audit once at signup, fix the obvious stuff, then never come back. Six months later, the site has accumulated 60+ new Critical issues from theme updates, plugin changes, or content migrations. None get fixed because no one re-runs the audit — the $29-99/mo subscription is paying for capacity you don't use, and ranking losses cost $3,000-10,000 in organic traffic.
How to avoid: Set weekly or monthly scheduled audits. Subscribe to email alerts for new Critical issues. Review every Monday morning — 10 minutes of triage catches problems before they compound.
Recap
Done — what's next
How to set up your Ubersuggest account the right way
Read the next tutorial
Hand it off
Running an audit once is a project. Triaging weekly, shipping fixes, and validating the lift is a job. A vetted technical SEO specialist on EverestX will own the audit cadence, the fixes, and the verification — typically $400-1,000/mo at $14-16/hr.
See specialist rates
Screaming Frog crawls deeper and surfaces more technical detail (canonical chains, hreflang errors, JavaScript rendering issues). Ubersuggest is more curated — fewer issues, cleaner UI, easier prioritization. Use Screaming Frog for deep technical audits, Ubersuggest for weekly health checks.
Health Score is a weighted average across all issues. Low score usually means either (1) a high URL-count Critical issue is dragging it down, or (2) your crawl scope is wrong and ?utm pages are tanking the score. Diagnose before chasing.
No. Some Notice-level issues are Ubersuggest being overly cautious. Examples: 'page has more than 100 internal links' is fine for most content sites. 'Title under 30 characters' may be intentional for brand pages. Triage, don't carpet-bomb.
Weekly for active sites that ship changes weekly. Monthly for static sites. Daily only if you're actively pushing major changes — daily crawls burn credits and rarely surface new issues that fast.
Yes, every issue table has CSV export. Pull the top Critical issues into a sheet, assign owners, set deadlines. Track fix-completion percentage as a weekly KPI.
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is the cheapest 'all-in-one' SEO tool on the market — and the easiest to misconfigure on day one. This walks through the account, project, and search-budget setup that 80% of new users skip.
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest's data sometimes disagrees with GSC, Ahrefs, or your own analytics. The trap is assuming the tool is broken. This walks through the common discrepancy patterns and what each one actually means.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Screaming Frog only earns its keep when the crawl matches how Googlebot actually sees your site. This walks through the install, license activation, memory tuning, and configuration choices that 90% of first-time users get wrong.
Ahrefs
Site Audit only earns its keep when the crawl actually mirrors how Googlebot sees you. This walks through the project + crawl settings that 80% of DIY setups misconfigure on the first pass.
SEMrush
Site Audit returns 3,000 issues. You have time to fix 30. Picking the wrong 30 wastes a quarter; picking the right 30 lifts rankings within 60 days. This is the priority order specialists use.
Ubersuggest
You're paying $29-99/mo for Ubersuggest. The question isn't whether the tool is worth it — it's whether you're using more than 20% of it. This is the honest decision framework for when to hire vs. keep doing it yourself.