# SEO Audit Crawler: On-Page Checks for Every Page (`kelp_forest_labs/seo-audit-crawler`) Actor

Crawl a website and audit every page for on-page SEO: title and meta description length, H1 and heading structure, canonical, noindex, lang, viewport, image alt text, Open Graph and schema.org. Finds duplicate titles. Failed pages are free.

- **URL**: https://apify.com/kelp_forest_labs/seo-audit-crawler.md
- **Developed by:** [kelp forest](https://apify.com/kelp_forest_labs) (community)
- **Categories:** SEO tools, Developer tools
- **Stats:** 2 total users, 1 monthly users, 100.0% runs succeeded, 0 bookmarks
- **User rating**: No ratings yet

## Pricing

from $6.00 / 1,000 page auditeds

This Actor is paid per event. You are not charged for the Apify platform usage, but only a fixed price for specific events.

Learn more: https://docs.apify.com/actors/running/actors-in-store.md#pay-per-event

## What's an Apify Actor?

An Actor is a serverless cloud program that runs on the Apify platform. It has two run modes.
In Batch mode, an Actor accepts a well-defined JSON input, performs an action which can take anything from a few seconds to a few hours,
and optionally produces a well-defined JSON output, datasets with results, or files in key-value store.
In Standby mode, an Actor provides a web server which can be used as a website, API, or an MCP server.

Apify vocabulary and the platform model are defined once, in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md.

## How to integrate an Actor?

If asked about integration, you help developers integrate Actors into their projects.
You adapt to their stack and deliver integrations that are safe, well-documented, and production-ready.

Do not guess an integration path. Every one of them is in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md: the Apify MCP server, Agent Skills with the Apify CLI, the JavaScript and Python clients, the REST API, and the account-free path for an agent with no human to sign in. It also carries the rule on stating cost before the first paid run.

For examples already wired to this Actor's own input schema, see the [API](#api) section below.

Each client library has reference documentation the quickstart does not restate: [JavaScript/TypeScript](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs.md) (`npm install apify-client`) and [Python](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs.md) (`pip install apify-client`).

# README

Crawl a website and get an on-page SEO audit for every page: title and meta description length, H1 and heading
structure, canonical, noindex, language, mobile viewport, image alt text, Open Graph and schema.org markup, with a
plain-English list of issues per page and the duplicate titles across the site. You pay only for pages that were
audited; broken, blocked and skipped pages are free.

### Use cases

- **Site owners and marketers:** find the pages with a missing title, a missing H1 or no meta description in one run.
- **Agencies and freelancers:** a quick technical on-page check of a client site before a proposal or a launch.
- **Before a launch or a seasonal sale:** check new landing pages for noindex left on by mistake, wrong canonicals and missing previews.
- **Developers:** run it on a schedule or through the API and compare the issue counts after each release.

### What it does

- Starts from your URLs and follows links on the **same site** (the start host, plus the host it redirects to, such
  as `www.`), breadth-first, up to the depth and page limits you set. Links to other sites are counted, never crawled.
- For each HTML page it records: HTTP status and redirects, title and length, meta description and length, the first
  H1 and the number of H1-H6 headings, skipped heading levels, canonical (self, other or missing), meta robots and
  `X-Robots-Tag` (indexable or not), `lang`, viewport, images without an `alt` attribute, word count, hreflang links,
  Open Graph and Twitter card tags, schema.org types (JSON-LD and microdata) and invalid JSON-LD blocks, and the
  number of internal and external links.
- Each page gets a list of **issues** (`error`, `warning` or `notice`) with a short explanation, for example
  `title_missing`, `h1_multiple`, `canonical_points_elsewhere`, `noindex`, `images_missing_alt`.
- The `SUMMARY` record adds totals per issue and the **duplicate titles and meta descriptions** across the pages.
- Pages answering HTTP 4xx/5xx are listed as free error rows, so you also see broken internal pages.

### Polite by design

- Identifies itself as `KelpForestLabs-SEOAudit` with a link to this page; it never pretends to be a browser.
- Honours robots.txt (its own token `KelpForestLabs-SEOAudit`, else `*`) and `Crawl-delay` up to 10 seconds. robots.txt
  is checked for every redirect hop, on the host the redirect points to; a redirect into a disallowed path is not
  followed and not charged. If robots.txt answers 5xx or 429 or cannot be reached (network error, timeout), the whole
  host is treated as disallowed (RFC 9309). "Same site" means the same host name and port.
- Waits between requests to the same host (0.5 s by default) and does not follow links with query strings unless you ask.
- Never logs in, never sends cookies, and only reads public pages. Private and internal network addresses are refused.

### Pricing (pay per event)

| Event | Price |
|---|---|
| `page` (one HTML page fetched and audited) | US$0.006 |

**Failed pages are free:** pages answering HTTP 400 or higher, timeouts, DNS and network errors, pages robots.txt
disallows, private addresses, non-HTML files and pages that redirect to another site give a free row.

Each run also has Apify's run-start charge of US$0.00005, once per run for up to 1 GB of memory plus once per extra GB (US$0.00005 at the default 512 MB),
charged when the run starts, even if every page fails. `maxPages` caps the number of page requests, so 50 pages cost
at most US$0.30 plus the start charge. You can also set a maximum charge per run in the Apify Console.

### How to use

1. Add one or more start URLs (for example your home page).
2. Set **Max pages to request** and **Crawl depth** (0 = the start pages only).
3. Run the actor. Open the **Pages** view for one row per page, or the **Issues per page** view for one row per issue.
4. Open the `SUMMARY` record in the key-value store for totals and duplicate titles.

### Input example

```json
{"startUrls": [{"url": "https://docs.apify.com/"}], "maxPages": 10, "maxDepth": 1}
```

### Output example (local fixture run, Oct 12, 2026; trimmed)

```json
{"url": "https://example.com/guide", "status": "ok", "event": "page", "httpStatus": 200,
 "title": "Kelp care guide: grow healthy kelp at home", "titleLength": 42, "metaDescription": null,
 "h1": "Kelp care", "h1Count": 1, "headingSkips": ["h1->h3"], "canonicalStatus": "self", "indexable": true,
 "lang": "en", "viewport": true, "imagesCount": 1, "imagesMissingAlt": 1, "schemaTypes": ["Article"],
 "issues": [{"code": "meta_description_missing", "severity": "warning",
             "message": "No meta description; search engines will pick a snippet themselves."},
            {"code": "images_missing_alt", "severity": "warning", "message": "1 of 1 images have no alt attribute."}],
 "errorsCount": 0, "warningsCount": 2, "noticesCount": 3}
```

### FAQ

**Which thresholds does it use?**
Title 30-60 characters, meta description 70-160 characters, at least 200 words of visible text, one H1. These are
common SEO-tool defaults, not rules from any search engine; treat warnings and notices as hints.

**Does it run JavaScript?**
No. It reads the HTML the server sends. Pages that build their title or content in the browser may show as missing.

**What does a failed page cost?**
Nothing. Only pages that were fetched (HTTP 200, HTML) and audited are billed.

**Why was a page skipped?**
The row's `error` field says why: robots.txt, a private address, not HTML, or a redirect to another site.

### Limits: what this actor does not do

- It does not render JavaScript, measure page speed or Core Web Vitals, or check backlinks and rankings.
- It does not check links to other sites (use a link checker for that) and does not crawl other hosts.
- It does not validate structured data against Google's rich-result rules; it lists the schema.org types it finds.
- It does not log in, solve captchas or use proxies; pages behind a login or bot protection show as error rows.
- It does not collect personal data: only page metadata (title, headings, tags) is kept.

### Changelog

- 0.2 (October 15): robots.txt is checked on every redirect hop (also on another host a start URL redirects to);
  an unreachable or rate-limited (429) robots.txt now means "disallow everything"; another port is another site.
- 0.1 (October 2026): first version. Update (October 13): the home page linked as `https://site.com` and
  `https://site.com/` is audited and billed once, and the SUMMARY totals are always filled.
- Update (October 14): with several start URLs, each one follows links to its own `maxDepth`, even
  through pages another start URL already audited (those are not requested, audited or billed again).

# Actor input Schema

## `startUrls` (type: `array`):

Pages to start from. Only the start URL's own site (its host, plus the host it redirects to) is crawled.

## `maxPages` (type: `integer`):

Total page requests in this run (audited or not). Only pages that are fetched and audited are billed, so this also caps your spend.

## `maxDepth` (type: `integer`):

0 = audit the start pages only; 1 = also the pages they link to; and so on.

## `includeQueryUrls` (type: `boolean`):

Off: links such as /search?q=x or /list?page=2 are not followed (they are often endless filter pages).

## `delaySecs` (type: `number`):

Politeness delay per host. A larger robots.txt Crawl-delay (up to 10 s) takes precedence.

## `timeoutSecs` (type: `integer`):

A page that sends nothing for this long, or does not finish within twice this time, is reported as a free error row.

## Actor input object example

```json
{
  "startUrls": [
    {
      "url": "https://docs.apify.com/"
    }
  ],
  "maxPages": 10,
  "maxDepth": 1,
  "includeQueryUrls": false,
  "delaySecs": 0.5,
  "timeoutSecs": 15
}
```

# Actor output Schema

## `results` (type: `string`):

One row per requested or skipped page: on-page SEO facts and the issues found. Only audited pages (status ok) are billed; error and skipped rows are free.

## `summary` (type: `string`):

Counts of audited, error and skipped pages, issues by severity and code, duplicate titles and meta descriptions, and why the run stopped (stopReason).

# API

You can run this Actor programmatically using our API. Below are code examples in JavaScript, Python, and CLI, as well as the OpenAPI specification and MCP server setup.

## JavaScript example

```javascript
import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

// Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
// Replace the '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token
const client = new ApifyClient({
    token: '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>',
});

// Prepare Actor input
const input = {
    "startUrls": [
        {
            "url": "https://docs.apify.com/"
        }
    ],
    "maxPages": 10,
    "maxDepth": 1
};

// Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
const run = await client.actor("kelp_forest_labs/seo-audit-crawler").call(input);

// Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if any)
console.log('Results from dataset');
console.log(`💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/${run.defaultDatasetId}`);
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
items.forEach((item) => {
    console.dir(item);
});

// 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs

```

## Python example

```python
from apify_client import ApifyClient

# Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
# Replace '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token.
client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")

# Prepare the Actor input
run_input = {
    "startUrls": [{ "url": "https://docs.apify.com/" }],
    "maxPages": 10,
    "maxDepth": 1,
}

# Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
run = client.actor("kelp_forest_labs/seo-audit-crawler").call(run_input=run_input)

# Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if there are any)
print(f"💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/{run.default_dataset_id}")
for item in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items():
    print(item)

# 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs/quick-start

```

## CLI example

```bash
echo '{
  "startUrls": [
    {
      "url": "https://docs.apify.com/"
    }
  ],
  "maxPages": 10,
  "maxDepth": 1
}' |
apify call kelp_forest_labs/seo-audit-crawler --silent --output-dataset

```

## MCP server setup

```json
{
    "mcpServers": {
        "apify": {
            "type": "http",
            "url": "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=fetch-actor-details,kelp_forest_labs/seo-audit-crawler"
        }
    }
}
```

The hosted server signs you in with OAuth on first connect, so no API token belongs in this config. Clients without OAuth support can send an `Authorization: Bearer <APIFY_API_TOKEN>` header instead, using a token from API & Integrations in Apify Console (https://console.apify.com/settings/integrations).

## OpenAPI specification

Download the OpenAPI definition: https://api.apify.com/v2/actors/145L90sZL0qirdQ8q/builds/lRKaE90NurvbiN7o5/openapi.json