Fatrank Podcast

Dan Grant: Hey you guys, it’s Dan here. Today I’m going to be showing you how to use the Site Audit tool on Surfer SEO.

The first thing you want to do is make sure you’re selected on the SERP Analyzer section at the top. Then you want to enter your keyword — the one you’re trying to rank for and want to analyse the site audit on. For this example, I’m going to use the keyword tennis court maintenance. You can select desktop scrape or mobile scrape depending on your needs, and then choose your location. As I’ve shown before, for this one we’ll go nationwide in the United Kingdom and press Enter.

That’s going to load down here, and once it’s fully loaded — similar to the SERP Analyzer — you’d usually click on it and see all the graphs and data. But for the Site Audit, there are a few more steps, which I’ll show you once this is fully loaded.

Once it says Analysis is ready, click on your keyword and it’ll open up just like the SERP Analyzer. You’ll see the familiar graphs and metrics. If you’re not sure what all of that means, check out the Surfer Analyzer video where I go through that in more depth.

Next, scroll down and find your website in the rankings. This will be the particular site you’re auditing. For this example, we’ll pretend that Sports and Safety Surfaces is our website. Once you find it, click the Audit button next to it.

If your site is ranking outside the top 10, you can keep scrolling — as long as you’re in the top 50 for that keyword, you should be able to find your site and run an audit. If not, you might want to look at different keywords or work on getting into the top 50 first. For now, we’ll stick with position eight, Sports and Safety Surfaces, and press Audit.

What the Audit does is pull out the correlations between why you might not be ranking as high as you want and what you might need to change for that specific keyword — in this case, tennis court maintenance.
The first thing you’ll see is a summary that says something like: “3 errors and 4 warnings identified for this URL for the phrase ‘tennis court maintenance.’” The first item might be something like Missing common backlinks. This means that a certain number of backlinks that many of your competitors share are missing from your URL.

If you click into that, it will show you the specific URLs that other ranking pages are getting links from, but your page isn’t. This is really handy because you can now reach out to these sites and say, “We noticed you’ve linked to similar businesses; would you consider linking to us as well?” It won’t always work — some might be partnerships or industry-specific relationships — but many, like online magazines or directories, may be open to it.

When you’re done reviewing that, go back to the main audit and scroll down to True Density. This section shows you which important terms need your attention. For example, it might show you that you’re using the word maintenance 13 times, while your competitors use it between 5 and 38 times, and the tool suggests 55–129 instances.
I wouldn’t take these numbers literally, because you don’t want keyword stuffing, but it gives you a guideline: maybe you need to use the word a bit more often, in the right places, to match what top-ranking pages are doing. Likewise, it might tell you that you’re using another term, like surface, too many times compared to competitors and suggest dialling it back.

It also shows terms where you’re already doing well and don’t need to change anything. The idea is to tweak usage — adding some keywords, reducing others — to mirror what’s working in the SERPs.
Scrolling further, you’ll see Quantity metrics. For example, it might say you have 2,154 words in your article, while top competitors sit between 700 and 1,500. It will suggest lowering your word count, but again, don’t just blindly chop your content in half. Instead, ask yourself: is the content bloated? Can you tighten it up, remove filler, and keep it focused?

You’ll also see recommendations about words in paragraphs, words in bold, and so on. For example, maybe you currently have no bold words, but your competitors regularly bold important phrases. You don’t want to bold half the article, but adding some emphasis to key terms could help.
Then there’s a section on Exact Keywords — how many times the exact phrase appears per 100 words. It might say you’re using too few exact matches and suggest increasing that slightly. This ties in with the True Density data above, so you can cross-check and make smarter edits.
You’ll also see checks for things like:
Keywords in image alt tags
Keywords in paragraphs
Keyword in title
Keywords in H1
These tell you whether you’re making good use of the keyword in key on-page locations.
The tool also looks at Partial Keywords — variations or parts of the main keyword. If you don’t have enough partial keywords per 100 words, you can go back up, look at the suggested terms, and weave more of them into your content naturally.

There’s a section for Number of elements — headings, images, etc. This is more structural, showing whether your page has a reasonable number of elements compared to competitors. It’ll also show Characters in title and Characters in meta description. For instance, maybe your title is too short compared to the competition, and your meta description is too long. You can adjust both to fit better within the suggested ranges.

Next, you’ll see technical performance metrics like Time to First Byte and Load Time. If these are within the optimal range, you’re fine; if not, the tool will flag them. You can click Show Details on any of these sections to see graphs comparing your page to top competitors.

For example, clicking Show Details under “Exact keywords per 100 words in body” will show you a graph of who ranks at the top, what their keyword usage looks like, and where you sit in comparison. This helps you decide whether certain changes are worth prioritising.

A really handy feature is the Share with everyone button in the top right. If you click that, you can copy a shareable link to your clipboard. You can then send this link to a VA, a member of your team, or your SEO/content person and say, “Here’s the audit for this keyword — focus on fixing these areas first.” You might, for example, ask them to start by adjusting keyword density and content length, then review the impact before changing anything else.

It’s a really helpful tool, really easy to use, and easy to find — just make sure you’re in the SERP Analyzer section first, because Surfer SEO doesn’t have a separate “Site Audit” tab; it lives inside the SERP Analyzer view.
Thanks a lot for watching, guys. Hope you enjoyed the video and learned something, and I’ll see you later.