Step 1 of 8
Pick the pages to audit
Short answer: audit one or two pages of each page type (homepage, category, product, article and so on), not every URL. A problem on a product page is almost always a problem on every product page, so one ticket for the template does the work of hundreds.
Audit templates, not URLs
A site with 5,000 pages usually has fewer than ten templates. The title, headings, canonical, structured data and head tags are written once in each template and filled in for every page. Fix the template and every page built from it is fixed.
So the unit of an on-page audit is the template. Crawlers are good at finding every URL; this playbook is about looking closely at a few pages, seeing what's wrong and getting it fixed.
List the page types
Click through the site and write down each kind of page you meet. A typical list:
- Homepage
- Category or listing pages, including page 2 of a long list (pagination problems only show there)
- Product or detail pages: one in stock, one out of stock, one with lots of variants
- Articles or blog posts, and the blog index
- Search results and filtered listings, which often need to stay out of the index
- Landing pages and one-offs: about, contact, store finder
- A page that doesn't exist, to see whether it answers with a real 404
The URLs usually give the templates away: /products/…, /collections/…, /blog/…. See URL structure for what the URLs themselves should look like.
Choose which pages
For each type, pick a page that matters: one with search traffic, or one you want ranking. If you have Search Console, sort pages by clicks and take the top one of each type. Add a second page when a template has variations (an empty category, a product with no reviews), since edge cases break templates.
If you're auditing a client's site, agree the page list with them first. It sets the scope of the work and stops "you missed the store finder" later.
Scope: page, template or site-wide
Every SEOSnip ticket has a scope, which tells the developer how far the fix reaches:
| Scope | Use it when | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Page | Only this page has the problem | The about page has no meta description |
| Template | Every page of this type has it | Every product page's title is over 60 characters |
| Site-wide | It comes from something every page shares | The server sends no HSTS header |
The extension suggests a scope from the check and the URL, and you can change it before you submit. For a template ticket, Count template pages counts the site's sitemap by path, so the ticket can say "48 pages" instead of "all products". That number is what gets a template fix prioritised.