Comparing SEO audits over time without misleading yourself
How to compare two technical SEO audits fairly: like-for-like crawl settings, stable issue identity, new vs resolved vs not re-checked, and coverage changes.
SEO monitoring
Scheduled SEO monitoring that tells you what changed
Put each client site on a daily, weekly or monthly audit schedule. Every completed audit is compared with the previous one, so a broken redirect after a release shows up as a new issue, not as one more row in a spreadsheet.
Schedules per client website
- Daily, weekly (pick a day) or monthly (pick a date) at a local wall-clock time. Daylight-saving changes are handled, and “the 31st” runs on the last day of shorter months.
- Optional page limit per schedule, so monitoring audits stay like-for-like.
- No duplicates, one catch-up. If runs were missed while the service was stopped, the site gets one catch-up audit, not five, and the activity log records what was skipped.
- Run a scheduled audit now to test the full path without waiting for the next slot.
Comparisons that don’t overclaim
An issue’s identity is its type plus the affected, source and target URL. Each one lands in exactly one group:
| Group | Meaning |
|---|---|
| New | Found in the newer audit, and the older audit checked the same thing and it was fine. These are regressions. |
| Resolved | Found in the older audit; the newer audit re-checked it and it’s gone. |
| Still present | Found in both audits. |
| First seen | Found on pages the older audit never checked, for example after raising the page limit. Not counted as new. |
| Not re-checked | Found in the older audit, but the newer audit didn’t check it again (page not crawled, or it now redirects). Not counted as resolved. |
The comparison also explains anything that limits it: different page limits, cancelled audits, limits being reached, and URLs crawled by only one audit. It lists URLs whose HTTP status improved or regressed, and warns when check settings changed between audits.
There is deliberately no overall health score. A score that goes up when a crawl reaches fewer pages would reward the wrong thing.
Notifications and an activity log
Scheduled audits create notifications in the dashboard:
- Important: new errors, or URLs that started failing
- Warning: new issues, or a scheduled audit that failed or was interrupted
- Info: issues resolved, or the first (baseline) monitored audit
The Monitoring page lists every monitored website with its next run and latest changes, and an activity log records every schedule change, start, completion, failure and missed run.
What it does not do
- Not real-time. Changes are detected when a scheduled audit completes, and audits may start a little after their scheduled time if another audit is running.
- No email, Slack or SMS alerts yet. Notifications live in the dashboard.
- No automatic retries. A failed or interrupted scheduled audit waits for its next slot (or a manual “run now”).
- No uptime monitoring. SEO Sentinel audits SEO signals; it is not an availability or performance monitor.
Learn
Related guides
Technical SEO audit checklist: a practitioner’s workflow
A step-by-step technical SEO audit checklist: crawl setup, status codes, indexability, canonicals, sitemaps, internal links, structured data and hreflang.
How to find broken internal links and fix the right ones first
Find broken internal links with a crawl, separate real 404s from fetch failures, group them by destination and prioritise by linking pages and click depth.
See monitoring and comparisons in the demo
Open a fictional client project to see its schedule, notifications and a full audit comparison.
SEO Sentinel is in private beta. Nothing is for sale yet and no card is ever requested.