What Is Website Scanning and How Does It Help Find Technical SEO Issues?

Website scanning is the process of using a crawler to automatically fetch your pages, follow the links between them, and build a complete inventory of what search engines can see. It helps find technical SEO issues because the crawler records the exact status of every URL it visits — response codes, titles, redirects, link targets, image sizes — and then lets you filter that data to isolate problems. You should run a scan whenever you need a repeatable, site-wide picture of technical health rather than spot-checking individual pages. SiteAnalyzer is one tool built for this job: it is described as a website crawler for fast technical audits and SEO optimization, with 60+ pre-set filters for detecting common SEO errors.

How a crawler scans a site

A scan works in three stages, and understanding them tells you what the results actually represent.

1. Seeding. You give the crawler a starting URL (usually the homepage). That page is the entry point into the site.
2. Fetching and parsing. The crawler requests each URL, receives the HTML, and parses it — extracting the title, meta tags, headings, links, and image references.
3. Following links. Every internal link found is added to a queue and fetched in turn. The crawler keeps going until no new internal URLs remain, producing a full inventory of the site.

The output is a table of URLs with their attributes. That table is the raw material for every audit decision you make afterward.

What scanning reveals

SiteAnalyzer's SEO Statistics block ships with 60+ pre-set filters designed to detect the most common SEO errors. The issues it can surface with a few clicks include:

• Duplicate page titles — multiple URLs competing with the same title, which dilutes relevance and confuses which page should rank.
• Broken links (404 errors) — links pointing to pages that no longer exist, wasting crawl budget and hurting user experience.
• Redirect chains — a URL that redirects to another URL that redirects again, slowing down both users and crawlers.
• Pages with oversized external links or images — heavy assets that slow page load and can drag down performance signals.

The built-in filtering tool then narrows results so you can focus on one issue type at a time instead of scrolling a single giant list.

Running a scan and prioritizing fixes

The practical workflow is: scan once, filter by issue type, fix in order of impact.

1. Run the crawl from your starting URL and let it complete. The result is your site inventory.
2. Open the SEO Statistics filters and work through categories rather than the full URL list.
3. Prioritize by blast radius. A broken link on a high-traffic template page affects many URLs; a duplicate title on two orphan pages affects almost nothing. Fix the issues that touch the most pages or the most-linked pages first.
4. Re-scan after fixes to confirm the issue count drops. Because the crawler rebuilds the inventory from scratch, the before/after comparison is direct.

A useful habit: export the filtered list before you start fixing, so you have a baseline to measure against.

Connecting scan data to analytics

Scanning tells you what is technically wrong; analytics tells you whether it matters. SiteAnalyzer integrates with Google Search Console, Yandex Webmaster, and Yandex Metrica via their APIs. Through that integration you can:

• Check indexing status for the pages your crawl found.
• See incoming traffic to those pages.
• Read bounce rate and page view depth.
• Pull the list of queries a given page ranks for.
• Export everything to Excel for further analysis.

The value here is triage. If a page with a broken canonical or a redirect chain also has steady traffic and rankings, it moves to the top of your fix list. If a page with the same defect gets no impressions at all, it can wait.

Reading the link graph and internal PageRank

Two features go beyond issue-hunting into site architecture.

Interactive link graph. SiteAnalyzer visualizes a site's link structure as an interactive graph, presenting the architecture in a clear format so internal linking patterns are easier to understand. Use it to spot pages that are buried deep, sections that link to each other in loops, or important pages that few others point to.

Internal PageRank calculation. The tool calculates an internal PageRank value for each page. This estimates how much internal link equity flows to a given URL. Pages with high internal PageRank but thin content are candidates for consolidation; pages with low internal PageRank but strong content may need more internal links pointing at them.

Together, these turn a flat list of URLs into a hierarchy you can reason about — which is what lets you fix architecture, not just errors.

What to check before you rely on a scan

• Scope. Confirm the crawl covered the sections you care about. A scan that stops early gives an incomplete inventory.
• Robots and noindex. Pages blocked from crawling won't appear in the inventory, so a "missing" page may simply be excluded rather than broken.
• Timing. Scan after major template or navigation changes, since those alter link structure site-wide.
• Licensing. SiteAnalyzer offers a free trial to explore core features and a licensed version for full control over the optimization process; check the current pricing page for what each tier includes before committing to a workflow that depends on it.