To secure the on-page quality within larger scaling sprints, special SEO tools such as that from Audisto are needed. In this experience report, I would like to provide insights on how the Audisto Crawler and Audisto Monitoring supported us in quality assurance since we opted for this toolset.
The year 2024 was marked for us by the scaling of our project TutKit.com. On the one hand, at the end of January, we brought our self-programmed multilingual features online, enabling us to display our pages in 26 languages – more to follow this year. On the other hand, we scaled the content through several content sprints, where we published valuable content for our website visitors, including text tutorials for our video courses. A year ago, we had a modest 1,800 pages online, today we have over 150,000 URLs. Such immense growth comes at a cost. Scaling an online project at this speed has a significant impact on on-page quality, structure, and page speed. Therefore, we needed a testing tool for TutKit.com that would allow us to continuously see what is happening, what the measurement results are, where there is disorder at the code level, where things are simply going off the rails.
We chose Audisto because the crawler has a strong tech focus and is specialized in large websites with over 100,000 URLs.
Audisto works somewhat differently than the more well-known SEO tools we also use (e.g., SISTRIX and Seobility). After the first crawl, as a user, we are overwhelmed by the abundance of hints that the tool found for our project. Here are the results of the first crawl from July:
Tobias Schwarz, CTO of Audisto, conducted onboarding with us and showed us how Audisto's concept is structured and how the tool is optimally used for content, structure, and tech analysis.
One of the big advantages is that with Audisto's Monitoring, I can set up my own monitoring dashboard with exactly the measurement results that are particularly relevant to us.
Another key feature is the ability to cluster certain page structures and limit the crawling and evaluations to that. This makes sense because technical changes due to new features, refactoring, or special sprints often occur only in a specific area, such as our help center or tutorial section. This way, I receive dedicated analyses specifically for the area where I need evaluations.
One peculiarity that became apparent to us thanks to Audisto was, for example, our unfavorable content hierarchy. Many URLs were only on the seventh and eighth levels for the bot – clearly too deep:
By making adjustments to our structure, we were able to improve the hierarchy so that our content is more easily accessible for users and bots. Here is a view from a weekly crawl comparison where the hierarchy levels were compared. Now, most of the content is on levels 3 and 4 – much better:
There is a correlation between multilingualism and page speed. Audisto pointed out to us that our TTFB values deteriorated with each new language variant. Only when we identified and fixed the cause did the values for our server response time improve again.
The crawl history in particular showed us well when new deployments had an impact on the response time.
It was only through Audisto that we realized that up to that point, we had not fully understood the concept of nofollow/noindex within our internal linking structure and were wasting 0.8 percent of our PageRank through internal NoFollow links.
As a result of our work with Audisto, we have checked all hints and extracted 47 tasks from them. Here is an excerpt from our task list in the project management tool Jira:
We are still in the process of completing the final tasks. Using a tool like Audisto also requires the time and personnel resources of the team to check and resolve the hints. It is important for us as a company to actually work on these points. Our focus on quality assurance through clear analyses and evaluations was crucial in enabling us to expand our pages and multiply our visibility in 2024 compared to the previous year.
In conclusion, it can be said that the SEO tool Audisto is a very good solution for website operators who need deeper analyses. Small problems with large websites with hundreds of thousands of pages can otherwise grow into stumbling blocks that hinder their own visibility and scaling plans. We are glad that we have found the tool, because although we already use some tools, with Audisto we were able to identify many more to-dos for TutKit.com and also expand our knowledge of Technical SEO.