Getting Started with Audit

What is Audit?

Audit is a go-to tool if you want to:

• Check if your old content is up-to-date and relevant

• Find SEO errors

• Revise your newly published article in the surroundings of your website elements.

The audit will provide you with a set of suggestions to help you improve your content's rankings. Surfer's suggestions are based on what we find in SERPs for the given keyword and location combination. We use averages for things like word count or number of images, but the relevance of terms is calculated using our own algorithms.

If, upon reading this article, you find some of the terms used difficult to understand, make sure to check out the Audit Glossary.

If you're looking for Content Audit, please note that Audit and Content Audit are two separate tools. Each has its own purpose. If you're after information on Content Audit, this collection is your best bet!

How to create an Audit query?

Surfer's approach is based on finding similarities between the top-performing pages. To fetch those pages, we need you to provide some parameters first – to let us know who your competitors truly are.

To create your query, you will need the following:

• A Surfer Plan where Audit is available. It is a part of the following subscription plans: Pro, Peace of Mind, and Enterprise. Visit our pricing page to learn more.

• A URL of your targeted website. Surfer's Audit will base its suggestions on the exact page you enter in the dashboard.

• A targeted location. You can pick a country or city from the list available when running your query. Surfer will then mimic a query run from that place, so you get results relevant to the location.

• A targeted keyword. What keyword do you want people to find your article by? That's the one you should use.

You can also choose between Mobile and Desktop crawlers and decide whether to include the sentiment for NLP Entities. By default, we use the Mobile crawler because Google prioritizes mobile-friendly websites.

Creating An Audit (Step-by-Step Demo)

Something is not working - I cannot create a query

How can I share my Audit?

You can share your Audit with anyone, even those who don't have a Surfer account, and you do not have to share your own Surfer login to do that.
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Simply go to the Audit report and locate the 'Share' button in the top right corner of the page. The URL will be automatically saved in your clipboard, and you can now send it to others.

How do I choose my competitors?

An audit is a detailed guide on what you can improve to make your page rank better. Even though it's advanced and smart on its own, it still needs the human touch. That being said, before proceeding with the analysis, you should review your competitors' list.

Click on the Gear icon, and based on your knowledge and experience, select the competitors that you do want to benchmark your content against.

Here’s a quick demo to learn more:

Tips And Tricks On Choosing The Right Competitors

1. The most important rule in selecting competitors to get the best Audit results is to select at least 3 competitors.

2. Try choosing competitors who have well-optimized content. Select those that have a Content Score of 60 and up from the list.

2. Avoid selecting domains that have a high ranking place and high authority but a very low Content Score. It will be counterproductive to compare your content to theirs - Even if they are in high rankings within the SERPs, it does not automatically mean they applied good SEO practices; instead, the rankings are because of their domain's high authority - for example, Wikipedia, Quora, or Amazon.

3. Avoid selecting domains that serve a different search intent than your page. If you are running an informative blog, you should not select any e-commerce businesses.

Once your competitor list has been reviewed, you can proceed to analyze the report and implement the changes we suggested. It may seem intimidating at first, but once you take a deeper look, you will actually see it's not complicated at all.

Show me how it works!

Do you still need help? Don't worry! You can contact us at [email protected] or via live chat by clicking the help (?) icon in the bottom-right corner of this Help Center.