The AI Site Audit is a comprehensive health check of your entire site’s SEO — not just one page at a time, but every published post and page analyzed together. While individual page scores are useful for day-to-day optimization, the site audit catches problems that only become visible when looking at the big picture: keyword cannibalization, orphan pages, site-wide missing meta data, and patterns of thin content. The audit produces a prioritized action plan telling you exactly which pages need attention and what to fix first for the biggest impact.
Why Run a Site Audit
Individual page scores tell you about one page. A site audit tells you about patterns across your entire site:
- Keyword cannibalizationAre multiple pages targeting the same keyword, competing with each other?
- Orphan pagesAre there pages with zero internal links pointing to them, invisible to Google?
- Missing meta dataHow many pages site-wide have no meta description at all?
- Thin contentWhat percentage of your content is too short to be useful?
- Duplicate titlesAre multiple pages using the same SEO title, confusing Google about which to rank?
Step-by-Step: Running an Audit
- Go to SEO Forge > Site Audit in the WordPress sidebar.
- Click Run Audit. Once you have an audit, the button becomes an outlined “Re-run Audit” — the accent-orange call-to-action is reserved for the next thing you’ll want to do: Fix All or Fix selected with AI.
- Wait while SEO Forge checks every published post and page. This takes 1 — 3 minutes on larger sites (500+ pages).
- The results page appears with a summary dashboard and detailed findings.
New layout (2026-04-23 → 2026-04-26, SF-118 + SF-121 + SF-112)
- Compact hero strip: the SEO Health Score and Critical / Warnings / Info counters are merged into one row, not three stacked cards. The counters are clickable — clicking Critical scrolls straight to the issue list and filters to critical-only.
- AI Priority Action Plan is interactive: each action in the plan is a button. Click it and the page jumps to the matching issue card, pulses an orange outline around it, and expands its affected-pages accordion.
- “Show N pages” accordions: instead of a giant cloud of tag-style page chips, each issue’s affected pages are hidden by default behind a toggle. Expand it to get a clean table with a checkbox column, the page URL, and per-row Edit / Fix with AI icons that appear on row hover.
- Select-all + sticky bulk bar: tick the Select-all checkbox in a table (or individual rows) and a floating panel appears at the bottom of the page — ” pages selected · Clear · Fix selected with AI”. Click Fix selected to run the chunked AI fix on only the rows you picked, not every affected page.
- AI preview drawer for ALL Fix types (v1.0.7): clicking Fix with AI on any issue — meta title, meta description, focus keyword, thin content, duplicate titles, no internal links, missing H1, missing alt — opens the same right-side drawer with current value, AI suggestion (editable textarea), and Regenerate / Cancel / Apply & Save buttons. Meta types use a single-line input with a live character count (red on overflow); content rewrites get a tall textarea (no count, since post bodies have no length cap). Unsaved-edit guard works the same in both modes.
- Audit stays put when you fix individual issues (v1.0.7): previously a single Fix click could wipe the whole cached audit, forcing a re-Run on the next visit. Now the fixed page disappears from its issue group, the rest of the audit stays, and severity counts are recomputed automatically. The whole snapshot is only rebuilt when you click Run Audit again.
What the Audit Checks
| Check | What It Looks For | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|
| Missing titles | Pages with no SEO title set | Google shows your raw post title, which may not be optimized |
| Duplicate titles | Multiple pages using the same SEO title | Google cannot tell which page should rank for that title |
| Missing descriptions | Pages with no meta description | Google auto-generates a snippet, which may not be compelling |
| Duplicate descriptions | Multiple pages sharing the same description | Same problem as duplicate titles — confuses Google |
| Low SEO scores | Pages scoring below 50 | These pages are actively hurting your site’s average quality |
| No focus keyword | Pages never assigned a keyword | Without a keyword, the page has no optimization direction |
| Orphan pages | Pages with no internal links pointing to them | Google may never discover these pages; visitors cannot find them through navigation |
| Thin content | Pages with fewer than 300 words | Google considers thin content low-quality, which can affect your entire site’s ranking |
| Missing alt text | Pages with images that have no alt attributes | Missed accessibility and SEO opportunity |
What the Audit Report Looks Like
The results are organized into two views:
Summary Dashboard:A visual overview showing:
- Total issues found, broken down by severity (Critical, Important, Minor)
- Percentage of pages with each issue type
- Overall site health score
- Comparison with previous audit (if available)
A prioritized list of recommendations, starting with the changes that will have the biggest impact on your site’s SEO health. For example:
- Fix 8 pages with duplicate titles (Critical) — These pages compete with each other in search results. The audit lists every affected page and its current title.
- Add meta descriptions to 23 pages (Important) — Nearly 15% of your content has no description. The audit lists every affected page.
- Add internal links to 5 orphan pages (Important) — These pages have zero internal links and are essentially invisible. The audit identifies each one.
- Expand 12 thin content pages (Important) — Pages under 300 words that need to be expanded or consolidated.
- Add alt text to images on 18 pages (Minor) — Images missing accessibility-required alt attributes.
A Typical Audit Workflow
- Run the audit and review the action plan from the top.
- Start with Critical items — fix duplicate titles first, as they directly cause ranking confusion.
- Move to Important items — add missing descriptions, resolve orphan pages, expand thin content.
- Address Minor items as time allows.
- After working through the high-priority items, run the audit again to see your progress and catch any remaining issues.
- Repeat monthly to maintain site health.
How Often to Run an Audit
| When | Why |
|---|---|
| Monthly | Regular maintenance cadence for most sites |
| After adding a lot of new content | A batch of 20 new posts may introduce duplicate titles or orphan pages |
| After a site restructure | Changing categories, URLs, or navigation can create orphan pages and broken internal links |
| Before a marketing campaign | Make sure your SEO is clean before driving new traffic to your site |
| After migrating from another platform | Migrations often introduce missing meta data and thin content |
Real-World Example
You run a site audit on your 200-page e-commerce site and the report shows:
- 12 products have duplicate titles (they all use the manufacturer’s default product name)
- 45 pages have no meta description
- 8 blog posts are orphan pages (published but never linked to from anywhere)
- 15 category descriptions are under 100 words (thin content)
You spend one afternoon fixing the duplicate titles (giving each product a unique, keyword-optimized name), adding descriptions to the 25 highest-traffic pages (prioritizing by traffic), and adding internal links to the 8 orphan posts. The next audit shows a 40% reduction in issues and your site’s average SEO score has increased by 12 points.
> Good to know: Audit results are saved, so you can compare your current audit with previous ones to track improvement over time. This is especially useful when reporting SEO progress to clients or stakeholders.
> Tip: Export the audit results and use them as a task list for your team. Each finding is a specific, actionable item that can be assigned to a team member and tracked to completion.
Common Mistakes
- Running an audit once and never again. New content, URL changes, and plugin updates continuously introduce new issues. Make it a monthly habit.
- Trying to fix everything at once. Follow the priority order. Fixing 8 duplicate titles has more impact than adding alt text to 18 images. Work from the top down.
- Ignoring orphan pages. These are the easiest to fix — just add 2 — 3 internal links from related pages — and the impact on discoverability is immediate.
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