Site Audits Made Simple: How Both Tools Diagnose Website Issues

In the realm of SEO, content and keywords often steal the spotlight. But behind the scenes, technical health plays a critical role in determining how well a website performs. Issues like broken links, poor URL structure, and crawl errors can silently erode rankings and limit visibility.

That’s where site audits come in—and few tools handle them better than Ahrefs and SEMrush. While both offer robust features for auditing websites, they approach the task with different strengths. In this article, we’ll explore how a real estate company used both tools to uncover and resolve serious technical SEO issues—resulting in a more efficient site and better search performance.

The Problem: Great Content, Poor Performance

The real estate brand had invested heavily in content creation. They maintained a blog, listed dozens of properties with detailed descriptions, and had landing pages for every major location they served.

Despite this, their organic traffic had plateaued. Even well-written blog posts weren’t ranking, and property pages had low visibility—even for branded searches.

They suspected something was wrong under the hood, and decided to run full site audits using both Ahrefs and SEMrush.

Using SEMrush for a Holistic Site Audit

The team started with SEMrush’s Site Audit tool, known for its detailed diagnostics and intuitive recommendations. Within minutes, SEMrush returned a comprehensive overview of their technical SEO health, highlighting several problem areas.

Here’s what they discovered:

• Internal linking issues: Important pages were buried deep in the site’s structure, with no internal links pointing to them. SEMrush flagged this as a priority, noting that search engines may struggle to find or value these pages.
  
  

• Long and inconsistent URL structures: For example, some property URLs used excessive parameters (/property?id=123&city=bangkok) while others followed cleaner formats (/properties/bangkok-condo). This inconsistency hurt crawlability and user trust.
  
  

• Redirect chains: Some outdated pages were being redirected two or three times before reaching the final destination, slowing down load times and affecting SEO.
  
  

• Missing meta descriptions and duplicated title tags: These issues were common across blog posts and dynamic property listings.
  
  

SEMrush didn’t just highlight issues—it prioritized them. The audit tool ranked problems by severity and provided clear action items, making it easy for the real estate team to tackle the most impactful issues first.

Using Ahrefs to Dive Deeper

After addressing the high-priority items flagged by SEMrush, the team turned to Ahrefs to validate and expand on their audit findings—especially around backlinks, internal anchors, and crawl depth.

Ahrefs’ Site Audit tool confirmed:

• Orphaned pages: Property listings that existed but had no links from other pages on the site.
  
  

• Anchor text imbalances: Key pages were being linked with non-descriptive anchors like “click here” or “learn more” instead of keyword-rich phrases.
  
  

• Slow-loading elements: Images without compression and bloated scripts were affecting Core Web Vitals on key landing pages.
  
  

Where Ahrefs truly shined was in visualizing crawl depth and internal link structure. This helped the team spot which pages were too many clicks away from the homepage—and thus underperforming in search rankings.

Action Steps Taken

With a prioritized task list from SEMrush and additional context from Ahrefs, the development and content teams collaborated to implement fixes:

• Improved internal linking: Popular blog posts and key landing pages were updated to link directly to new or underperforming property listings.
  
  

• Standardized URL structures: All dynamic URLs were cleaned and redirected to consistent, SEO-friendly formats.
  
  

• Reduced redirect chains: Old pages were mapped directly to their new versions.
  
  

• Enhanced metadata: Automated templates were applied for titles and meta descriptions on property pages.
  
  

• Optimized page speed: Images were compressed, and unnecessary scripts were deferred.
  
  

The changes were rolled out over four weeks, with performance tracked continuously using both tools.

The Outcome: Faster, Clearer, and More Visible

After implementing the updates:

• Organic traffic increased by 35% over the next two months

• Pages that were previously invisible started ranking for location-specific keywords

• Bounce rates dropped, and average session duration increased

• Google Search Console showed improved crawl coverage and fewer indexing errors
  
  

These improvements weren’t just technical—they had real business impact. More users found the right property listings faster, and conversions through inquiry forms increased as a result.

Final Thoughts

Ahrefs and SEMrush both offer powerful auditing tools—but they serve slightly different purposes. SEMrush excels at diagnosis, prioritization, and broad technical insights. It’s great for marketing teams and content managers who need action-ready data.

Ahrefs goes deeper into structure, internal link mapping, and crawl efficiency. It’s especially valuable for SEOs and developers who want granular insights.

The real estate brand’s success came from using both together—starting with SEMrush to find the issues, then using Ahrefs to fully understand and fix them.

If your site isn’t performing as expected, don’t just look at the surface. Run a proper audit, fix what’s holding you back, and give your content the foundation it needs to rank.