Site-wide audits — Hydrogen SEO

Hydrogen SEO's site-wide audit scans your entire WordPress site and surfaces the SEO problems that only show up when you look at everything at once: duplicate titles and descriptions, keyword cannibalisation, orphan pages, broken internal links, and metadata that is too long or too short. You run it from Hydrogen SEO → Dashboard, triage the findings, and fix them individually or in bulk.

Per-post checks (see on-page SEO analysis) keep each page healthy in isolation. The audit answers the questions a single page cannot: are two posts competing with each other? Is anything unreachable? Is anything linking into a dead end?

What the audit finds

Duplicate titles and descriptions. Two or more URLs sharing the same SEO title or meta description. Duplicates blur which page should rank for a query and waste the snippet's chance to differentiate. Common causes: identical template variables output across similar pages, cloned posts, and paginated archives. Fix by writing distinct metadata per page, or tightening your templates. If duplicates come from two SEO plugins both printing meta tags, see duplicate meta output.

Keyword cannibalisation. Multiple posts targeting the same query and splitting its potential between them. Neither page accumulates enough signal to rank as well as one consolidated page would. Typical fix: merge the weaker post into the stronger one and add a 301 in the Redirection Manager, or re-angle one post at a genuinely different query.

Orphan pages. Published pages that no other page on your site links to. Crawlers may still find them via your XML sitemap, but with no internal links they receive no context and no internal authority, and real visitors will never stumble onto them. Fix by adding links from related content, or by unpublishing pages that no longer deserve to exist.

Broken internal links. Pages on your site linking to URLs on your site that return 404. Every one is a dead end you built yourself. Fix the link at its source, or redirect the dead target; the full workflow is in find and fix 404 errors.

Metadata too long or too short. Titles and descriptions outside sensible length ranges get truncated in results or waste the space entirely. These are the fastest wins in most audits: each one is a one-field edit in the SEO Settings sheet.

Run an audit

Go to Hydrogen SEO → Dashboard in wp-admin.
Run the site audit and let it complete; larger sites take longer.
Review results grouped by issue type, with the affected URLs listed under each.

Triage: fix in the right order

Not all findings deserve equal urgency. A practical order:

Broken internal links first. They damage user experience and crawling today, and each fix is mechanical.
Duplicate titles/descriptions on important pages. Prioritise pages that already get impressions; fixing their snippets has immediate visible effect.
Cannibalisation. Highest effort, often highest payoff. Decide page by page: merge, differentiate, or deliberately keep both.
Orphan pages. Link them in from relevant content, ideally as part of a broader internal linking strategy.
Length issues whenever you have ten spare minutes; they are the easiest queue to burn down.

Re-run the audit after a batch of fixes to confirm the counts drop, and after any large content change such as a restructure or migration.

Fixing in bulk

For hand fixes, the SEO column and filter on Posts → All Posts let you work down a list without opening each post, and Quick Edit changes the title, description, focus keyword and indexing in place; see SEO on the Posts screen.

Working through fifty missing descriptions one screen at a time is exactly the kind of work Hydrogen AI exists for. With the agent connected, you can issue plain-language instructions from Hydrogen SEO → Dashboard, such as:

"Write meta descriptions for every post missing one."
"Find and fix broken internal links."

The agent works through the plugin's own tools, shows every change it makes, and by default asks before anything destructive. See the Hydrogen AI agent overview and the agent recipes collection for ready-made prompts that map directly onto audit findings. AI features require a free hydrogenseo.com account; everything else in the audit works with no account at all.

FAQ

How often should I run a site audit?

Monthly is a good rhythm for most sites, plus an extra run after any restructure, migration, or large publishing push. The audit is cheap to run; stale audit data is what gets expensive.

Will the audit slow down my site?

The audit runs inside wp-admin against your own content. Your visitors' front end is unaffected; Hydrogen SEO ships zero front-end JavaScript.

Does the audit check external links too?

The audit focuses on internal issues: links between your own pages, your own metadata, and your own structure. For external-facing signals like rich results, use validate rich results.

Can Hydrogen AI fix everything the audit finds?

It can handle the mechanical work: writing missing or duplicate metadata, repairing broken internal links, and similar tasks via agent recipes. Editorial decisions, such as which of two cannibalising posts should survive, remain yours; the agent asks rather than guesses.