Site audit

The site audit reviews the pages you already have. Each run crawls the parts of your site you selected, up to 1000 pages, and checks every page for three things: a click-through rate below what its search position should earn, a title outside the recommended length, and a meta description outside the recommended length. Pages that fail a check appear on the audit page, where you may generate a suggested fix for each one.

The audit lives under Audit in the left-hand menu. The page carries two tabs: Page audit, the crawl this article covers, and Cannibalization, a separate audit for pages competing on the same searches, covered by the cannibalization article. Everything on the page audit tab, including the page selection and the title branding list, applies to the page audit only.

Both audits are built on your site's search performance data, so they require a Search Console connection. You should connect it before your first run; without the connection, an audit cannot start.

Selecting pages

Before the first audit runs, you should choose which parts of your site to include. Click Select pages to crawl to open the site tree, which is built from your site's sitemap. RankYak reads the sitemap once a day, so a new page appears in the tree within a day of being added to your sitemap. If a page you expect is missing, your sitemap most likely does not list it. Every section starts checked; you may uncheck a directory to skip it entirely, or open a directory to include or exclude individual pages. A more specific choice always wins, so you may exclude a directory and still keep one page inside it. The homepage sits at the top of the tree with its own checkbox, so you may leave it out, which is common when its title is deliberately brand-shaped, while the rest of the site stays selected.

Once a selection is saved and Search Console is connected, click Run crawl now to start the audit. An audit only runs when you start one, so you decide the rhythm: after a batch of title changes, before a redesign ships, or simply whenever you would like a fresh look at your pages.

The checks

Each audited page is fetched from your site and checked.

• Click-through rate. Using your Google Search Console data from the past 30 days, the page's click-through rate is compared to what a page at its average position would typically earn. A page falling well short is flagged, since a weak title or description is usually what loses the click.
• Title length. Titles well outside roughly 30 to 60 characters are flagged: Google truncates longer titles, and very short ones leave the search snippet mostly unused.
• Meta description length. Descriptions well outside roughly 70 to 155 characters are flagged for the same reason.

A finding stays open until a later crawl no longer detects it. So when you fix a page, whether through RankYak or by hand, the next crawl you run confirms the fix and resolves the finding automatically.

Title prefixes and suffixes

Most sites add a brand name to every page title, for example "Pricing | RankYak" or "RankYak | Robots.txt Validator", which would push almost every title past the recommended length through no fault of the page. The audit accounts for this: your first audit detects the branding your site adds, before or after the title, and records it on the audit page, and from then on titles are measured without it. Fix suggestions leave room for it too, so a suggested title still fits once your site adds the brand.

Each entry carries its separator on the side that touches the title, so "| RankYak" is ignored at the end of a title and "RankYak |" at the start.

You may also set the list yourself, before any audit has run or afterwards, by clicking it on the audit page. Once you save a list, it is yours: detection never overwrites it. Changing the list re-checks your existing findings immediately against the pages already crawled, so a correction updates the audit without waiting for the next run and without using any page audit credits.

Fixing a page

Clicking a flagged page opens its details, where Generate fix writes a suggestion covering what the findings implicate: a flagged description gets a new description, a flagged title a new title, and a low click-through rate both, since either half of the snippet may be losing the click. Whatever the findings did not implicate is left as it is. The suggestion is based on the page's content and on the search queries the page already earns clicks for, so the query users actually click on leads the copy.

Nothing changes on your site when a suggestion is generated. You review the suggestion next to the current title and description first, and then decide.

• Pages RankYak published. When the page is an article RankYak wrote for you, Apply & republish updates the suggested fields on the article and pushes the change to your site through your integration, the same way editing an article does.
• Other pages. For pages outside RankYak's control, you may copy the suggested title and description into your own CMS and click Mark as resolved. The next crawl verifies the change landed.

If you would rather leave a page as it is, you may dismiss its fix; the page moves out of the list until you return to it.

Cannibalization

RankYak can also audit your site for cannibalization: several pages competing for the same searches and splitting the clicks between them. This audit is separate from the page audit and needs no page selection; it lives on the Cannibalization tab of the audit page and produces a consolidation plan and a watch list in one run. The cannibalization article covers how it works and how to resolve an entry.

Credits

The audit page shows two allowances, each refilling with your billing cycle: page audit credits, one per page crawled, and fix credits, one per generated suggestion. When a run would exceed your remaining page credits, it audits as many pages as the balance covers.