If you are struggling to rank your website on Google despite publishing high-quality content, the culprit is likely hidden technical SEO issues. Semrush’s Site Audit Tool is an industry-standard feature that crawls your website, detects underlying glitches, and provides an overall Site Health Score.

However, simply running a report won’t fix your rankings; the real work begins when you start resolving those issues. In this step-by-step guide, we will break down how to fix the most critical Semrush audit errors and boost your website health score to 90%+.

Understanding the Website Health Score

Semrush grades your website out of 100 based on its technical optimization. The issues found during a crawl are categorized into three levels of severity:

• Errors (Red): Critical issues that severely impact your SEO and crawlability. Fixing these yields the highest jump in your health score.
• Warnings (Yellow): Medium-severity issues that should not be ignored, as they can hurt your overall optimization over time.
• Notices (Blue): Minor recommendations or observations. They don’t actively hurt your score but fixing them refines your technical setup.

How to Fix the Top Semrush Audit Errors

1. Crawlability and Indexing Issues

If search engine bots cannot crawl your pages, your content will never show up in search results.

• Common Error: Pages couldn’t be crawled or Robots.txt file has format errors.
• How to Fix It:
  1. Check your [yourdomain.com/robots.txt](https://yourdomain.com/robots.txt) file to ensure you haven’t accidentally blocked search engines using a Disallow: / command.
  2. Ensure Semrush’s bot isn’t blocked. You can explicitly allow it by adding:PlaintextUser-agent: SiteAuditBot Disallow:

    3. Audit your pages for any accidental `<meta name="robots" content="noindex">` tags that might be preventing Google from indexing important landing pages.

### 2. Duplicate Content and Duplicate Meta Tags
Search engines penalize websites that confuse their algorithms with repetitive content or duplicate tags across multiple URLs.

*   **Common Error:** *Duplicate title tags*, *Duplicate meta descriptions*, or *Pages have duplicate content*.
*   **How to Fix It:**
    1. **Implement Canonical Tags:** If you have tracking parameters or similar product pages, use the `rel="canonical"` tag pointing to the master version of the page.
    2. **Write Unique Meta Data:** Ensure every page has a unique Title (50–60 characters) and Meta Description (105–150 characters) targeting specific primary keywords.
    3. **301 Redirects:** If you have identical older pages, merge them into the primary page and set up permanent 301 redirects.

### 3. Broken Links and 404 Errors
Broken links create dead ends for both users and search crawlers, resulting in poor user experience and wasted crawl budget.

*   **Common Error:** *Broken internal/external links* or *Pages returned 4XX status code*.
*   **How to Fix It:**
    1. Go to the "Issues" tab in your Semrush Site Audit and filter by "Broken Links" to get the exact URLs.
    2. Update the broken URLs to point to active, live pages.
    3. If the external website you linked to no longer exists, safely remove the link entirely.
    4. Set up a 301 redirect for any of your deleted internal pages to a highly relevant live page.

### 4. Slow Page Load Speed and Performance Issues
Page speed is a core ranking factor. A slow website frustrates users and causes them to bounce back to search results.

*   **Common Error:** *Slow page speed* or *Large HTML page size*.
*   **How to Fix It:**
    1. **Optimize Images:** Convert heavy image formats (PNG, JPEG) to next-gen formats like **WebP** and use tools like TinyPNG to compress them without losing quality.
    2. **Enable Caching:** Use a robust caching plugin (like WP Rocket or LiteSpeed Cache) to serve pre-loaded pages quickly.
    3. **Minify Code:** Clean up and compress your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files to reduce overall file weight.
    4. **Upgrade Hosting:** If your Server Response Time (TTFB) is consistently poor, it might be time to move away from cheap shared hosting.

### 5. Missing Viewport Tags (Mobile Usability)
With mobile devices driving the majority of web traffic, a non-responsive layout will instantly tank your rankings.

*   **Common Error:** *Pages have no viewport tag*.
*   **How to Fix It:**
    1. Ensure your website’s HTML `<head>` section contains the following responsive viewport meta tag:
       ```html
       <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">

2. Ensure that text sizes, spacing, and buttons are large enough to be easily clickable on mobile touchscreens without zooming in.

Pro Tips to Achieve a 90%+ Health Score

1. Prioritize Red Errors First: Always tackle the red “Errors” column before moving to warnings. This yields the fastest and most noticeable jump in your health score percentage.
2. Automate Weekly Audits: Set Semrush to run an automated audit every week. This helps you catch code bugs, plugin conflicts, or broken links before they can affect your live Google rankings.
3. Exclude Irrelevant Notices: If Semrush flags a specific issue that is intentionally designed that way for your business model (e.g., blocking certain URLs on purpose), you can “Hide” or “Exclude” that check so it stops artificially lowering your score.
4. Fix Warnings in Batches: Dedicate one day a month to knocking out “Warnings” like missing Alt tags on images or low text-to-HTML ratios.

Conclusion

Fixing Semrush Site Audit errors is not a one-time task; it is an ongoing maintenance routine. Resolving these technical blockades makes your site seamless for Google bots to crawl and index. A clean, error-free technical foundation combined with great content is the ultimate formula for unlocking explosive growth in your organic traffic.