Guides

Practical walkthroughs for the SEO tasks you run most often. Each guide notes which product to use for each step and when it makes sense to escalate from a single-page check to a whole-site crawl.

Choosing the right tool for the task

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On-page SEO fixes

On-page issues — missing title tags, duplicate meta descriptions, thin content, broken heading structure — appear at the page level in all three products. The workflow below applies wherever you find them.

1. Spot the issue. In the Chrome extension, open a page and click the Metadata/Technical or Content panel. The panel lists every check in that category with a pass/fail badge and a one-line reason. On the Spider or Cloud Platform, open a page report and navigate to the relevant category tab.

2. Understand the impact. Before fixing, check the Overview tab. If the extension is connected to a Digispot account, or the Spider has GSC linked, pages with failing checks are ranked by organic traffic so you fix the highest-impact ones first.

3. Make the fix. For headings, the Chrome extension lets you edit live: click Apply next to any heading change to update the element in the DOM and see the revised score immediately. For title and description changes, the edit happens in your CMS or HTML — the extension shows a real-time preview in the SERP preview section.

4. Confirm the change. After deploying, reload the page and run the extension again. The score for that category should update to reflect the fix. On the Spider, run a re-crawl or re-audit of the affected URL to verify.

5. Sweep the site. A fix on one page rarely stands alone. On the Spider, use Issues → filter by check name to find every other page with the same problem and batch the work. On the Cloud Platform, the audit report groups identical issues across all URLs in one view.

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Fixing crawl errors

Crawl errors fall into three types: broken links (4xx), redirect problems (chains or loops), and blocked pages (robots.txt, noindex). The Spider is the primary tool here because it finds these across an entire site in one pass.

Broken links (404s)

1. Run a Spider crawl with JS rendering enabled so dynamically inserted links are caught. After the crawl, open Issues → Links → Broken links (4xx).
2. Each broken link shows the source page and the broken destination URL. Fix by updating the link in your CMS, or add a 301 redirect on the server if the destination URL has changed permanently.
3. After fixing, re-crawl to confirm the issue count drops. The Spider's Comparison view overlays two crawls so regressions are visible at a glance.

Redirect chains and loops

1. In Issues → Links → Redirect chains, the Spider lists every multi-hop redirect. A chain of three or more hops loses link equity at each hop and slows page load.
2. Collapse each chain to a single 301 pointing directly to the final URL.
3. Redirect loops (A→B→A) appear in Issues → Links → Redirect loops — they cause crawlers to abort and users to see a browser error. Fix by correcting one of the redirect rules on the server.

Blocked pages

1. Open Issues → Technical → Blocked by robots.txt and Blocked by noindex. These are pages the crawler found but that Googlebot cannot index.
2. Cross-reference with GSC data (if linked) to find blocked pages that are actually receiving traffic — a sign of a misconfigured rule rather than an intentional block.
3. Fix robots.txt errors by editing the rule in your server config. Fix noindex errors by removing the meta tag or the X-Robots-Tag header.

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Structured data

Structured data (schema markup) helps search engines understand page content and enables rich results — FAQ accordions, product ratings, recipe cards, and breadcrumbs in the SERP. The extension validates markup at the page level; the Spider sweeps the site.

Validate a single page

1. Open the page in Chrome, click the extension icon, and open the Schema panel. The panel lists every detected schema type (e.g. Article, Product, FAQPage) with a pass/fail status for each required and recommended property.
2. Warnings in orange are missing recommended properties — rich results are possible but may not show. Errors in red are missing required properties — the type is invalid and will not produce a rich result.
3. Use the one-click AI Audit on the Schema panel to get a specific, actionable fix for each error, including the corrected JSON-LD snippet.

Find schema errors across a site

1. On the Spider, run a crawl and open Issues → Schema. Errors are grouped by check — for example, "Article: missing datePublished" — across all affected pages.
2. Fix the template or CMS field that generates the markup rather than editing pages one by one. After deploying, re-crawl to confirm.
3. For sites with many schema types (e.g. an e-commerce site with thousands of Product pages), use the Spider's AI tab to generate a bulk fix plan targeting the highest-priority issue first.

Verify in Search Console

After fixing, submit updated URLs through Google Search Console's URL Inspection tool to request re-indexing and confirm the rich result is eligible.

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Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals (CWV) — LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift), and INP (Interaction to Next Paint) — are Google's user-experience ranking signals. Poor scores can suppress rankings even when technical SEO is otherwise clean.

Diagnose a single page

1. Open the page and click the PageSpeed panel in the Chrome extension. The panel shows both Lab data (Lighthouse, run on demand) and Field data (CrUX, real-user data from Chrome).
2. Field data requires a Digispot Extension Key — it reflects actual user experience. Lab data is available without a key and is useful for debugging but does not match what Google sees in the field.
3. Each failing metric shows the contributing elements: the LCP element (usually a hero image or above-fold text), the CLS-causing shift (often a banner, late-loading font, or ad slot), or the INP trigger (a slow event handler).

Fix LCP

• Preload the LCP element using <link rel="preload"> for images.
• Serve images in modern formats (WebP, AVIF) sized to the render dimensions.
• Use a CDN to reduce server response time. Target LCP under 2.5 s.

Fix CLS

• Set explicit width and height attributes on all <img> elements.
• Reserve space for ad slots, embeds, and banners using min-height.
• Avoid inserting content above existing content after page load. Target CLS under 0.1.

Fix INP

• Break up long tasks (over 50 ms) using setTimeout or the Scheduler API.
• Defer non-essential JavaScript. Target INP under 200 ms.

Find CWV failures across a site

On the Spider (Tracker or Leader plan), the Devices report shows CWV scores per page, per device type. Filter by Failing to see the full list. The Cloud Platform surfaces the same data aggregated with GSC traffic so the most-visited failing pages sort to the top.