Technical Audit
Audit your site's foundation (indexing settings, broken links, load speed, backlinks, competitor domain strength)
Not the articles, the foundation
"Sorabun > Measure / Analyze > Technical Audit" audits your site's foundation rather than the content of your articles (Pro).
Everything checked here shares one trait: the screen still looks fine even when something is broken. The classic example is forgetting to turn off "discourage search engines from indexing this site." Leave that setting on and no amount of writing gets you into search results. The site displays normally, so months can pass before anyone notices.
What gets checked
Click "Run Audit" and Sorabun inspects the following within a few seconds, ordered from the heaviest issue (needs attention) down.
| Item | What it looks at |
|---|---|
| Search engine visibility | Whether the setting to block indexing has been left on |
| Permalink structure | Whether the URL structure is still stuck on ?p=123 |
| HTTPS | Whether the site URL is still on http |
| Sitemap | Whether WordPress itself or an SEO plugin is serving one |
| robots.txt | Whether it contains anything that blocks all crawlers |
| Broken internal links | Internal links with no destination (typically links to a deleted article) |
| Duplicate titles | Whether articles with the same title are competing against each other for ranking |
| Mixed content | Whether an https site still has images or other assets on http:// |
| Image alt attributes | Images with no alt text |
| Title length | Whether the title is long enough to get cut off in search results |
| Orphaned articles | Articles with no internal links pointing to them |
The body scan covers up to 200 of your newest articles. The number scanned is shown with the results.
Any item that finds a broken link or an image without alt text lists a link to the article in question. Open it, fix it, then run the audit again.
Core Web Vitals (load speed)
Sorabun measures the load speed metrics Google uses to judge rankings, on your top page (mobile), using PageSpeed Insights.
- LCP: time until the largest element on the page appears. Up to 2.5 seconds is "good"
- INP: responsiveness to clicks and taps. Up to 200ms is "good"
- CLS: how much the layout shifts. Up to 0.1 is "good"
If real visitor data (CrUX) is available, Sorabun uses it. On sites with too few visits, it falls back to lab data instead, and the screen shows which one was used.
It works without an API key, within a rate limit. If measurements start failing, set up "Settings > Search Data Source > PageSpeed Insights API Key" (psi_api_key), which Google Cloud issues for free.
Backlinks (how the outside world rates you)
SEO rests on three pillars: content, technical health, and authority. Backlinks are that third pillar. Using the same DataForSEO credentials you set up for search volume, Sorabun shows you:
- Referring domains: how many different sites link to you. Check this before the raw link count
- Backlink count: the total, including multiple links from the same site
- Anchor text: what words are used to link to you. Mostly your site name means you're known by brand, and a mix of the keywords you're targeting means those words are gaining authority too
Fetching this costs a few yen per call on the paid API, so it only refreshes when you click the button. Once a month or so is plenty. Sorabun remembers the previous numbers, so you can also see whether you gained or lost ground.
Buying backlinks or trading them excessively violates Google's guidelines and can trigger a penalty. This screen exists to show you where you stand, not to offer a shortcut for growing the count. Writing original material that people want to cite (research, data, real examples) looks like the slow path, but it's the reliable one.
Competitor domain strength
A domain strength number means nothing on its own if all you look at is your own site. You need something to compare it against.
This screen lets you compare yourself against the domains that actually show up on page 1 for the keywords you're tracking. You don't need to type in any competitors. Sorabun records which domains were on top from the search results Rank Tracking already fetches every day, so this adds no extra search cost since it reuses that same response.
Click "Fetch competitor strength" and Sorabun fetches the recorded domains plus your own site in a single call. Your own site goes into that same call because fetching it separately would put the two readings at different points in time, and you couldn't compare them.
There's just one thing to remember when reading the table.
- Keywords where you rank below a weaker domain: these are winnable on article quality alone, and fixing them is the fastest path forward.
- Keywords where every domain on page 1 is far stronger than you: going after these head on won't get you anywhere right now. It can be worth deferring them in favor of more specific keywords instead.
This is also a paid API (a few yen per call), so it only fetches when you click the button.
0 to 1000 is DataForSEO's own metric, not a Google metric. Google has repeatedly said it doesn't use anything like a domain authority score. Don't read the absolute value. Look at the gap to your rivals and your own trend over time instead.