Fast-paced growth in the digital world puts a lot of pressure on business owners and marketers. You need to regularly audit a website for discrepancies and optimize it to improve search rankings.
Frequent search algorithm changes and new SEO strategies make search engine optimization a continually moving target. One that can be difficult to hit. Luckily, there are many SEO audit tools that can save you valuable time and money.
Disclosure: This content has a few affiliate links, which means if you click on them, I will get a commission (without any extra cost to you).
What Is an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit examines various factors that could affect your website’s ability to rank on the SERPs. It can give you insights into your site traffic, page loading speed, and the effectiveness of your web page design.
Doing an SEO audit can help you fix and optimize your website for higher rankings in search results. Through SEO audits, you can identify technical SEO issues, on-page and off-page SEO issues, structural issues, user experience issues, and content gaps.
How Do I Conduct An SEO Audit?
An SEO audit can help you see the big picture of your SEO efforts. Through an SEO audit, you can identify issues that affect your site, goals, and revenue.
So, how can you conduct an audit?
You can conduct an SEO audit manually or hire an expert to check the areas of your site that need improvement. To get a detailed analysis of your website, it is advisable to use the best SEO audit tools.
For your SEO audit, the first step is to check whether Google has penalized your website. You can use the Google Console to check for penalties or see if a recent Google update has affected your rankings.
Penalties affect your rankings and if you find one, you should check the date of the penalty, and then look for reasons as to why it may have happened.
Follow this with an audit of your technical SEO, on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and competitor and keyword research.
What Does A Technical SEO Audit Involve?
Technical SEO involves all the technical aspects of your site like site speed, URLs, site maps, and more.
I recommend using tools like Traffic Travis to uncover technical mistakes in your site structure and core semantics that could adversely affect your search rankings and site traffic.
For an effective technical SEO audit, here are some of the things that you can take care of:
- Make sure your robots.txt files and meta tags are added properly. Mistakes in robots.txt can cause serious indexing issues.
- Register your website on Bing webmaster tools and Google search console. Google console will provide information like the number of pages on your website, keywords you rank for, and more.
- Have one preferred domain to avoid duplicate content issues. Create a perfect URL that is unique. If you also have other versions, make sure only the chosen version is browsable.
- Activate your XML sitemap and ensure that it’s working perfectly. Users should be able to easily navigate from one page to another on your website.
- Enable structured data for your homepage, articles, products, and XML sitemap. Doing this ensures that Google can understand the context and meaning of the content on your site. Structured data also helps Google enhance its presentation of search results.
- Set up a canonical URL to ensure Google identifies important pages on your site. It’s also a great way to find duplicate content issues.
- Be prepared to handle HTTP 404 Errors. Optimize your 404 error pages for a smooth user experience.
- Make sure your site is mobile-friendly.
Tools like Semrush perform end-to-end SEO auditing of your sites. You can do on- and off-page audits, domain tracking, competitor research, keyword profiling, and organic traffic analysis.
What Does An On-Page SEO Audit Involve?
An on-page SEO audit mainly involves the content on your site. It will include:
- Optimize your titles and meta descriptions
- Format your text properly (Use H1, H2 tags correctly)
- Check your content for uniqueness, correct grammar, and proper formatting
- Update dated content regularly and merge similar content.
- Link related pages
- Check your images for accurate descriptions and ALT text. Compress large files to avoid pages that take too long to load.
- Identify broken links
What Does An Off-Page SEO Audit Involve?
An off-page SEO audit mostly involves checking techniques you use to promote your website online or for link building.
It will involve checking:
- Whether you have any toxic links
- If you are using relevant anchor text
- If unique and trusted domains link to your content
- The number of links pointing to your internal and home page
It’s also a good idea to check if you have a presence on social media platforms that your audience is active on.
For backlink analysis, I recommend using Link Research Tools. Their Link Monitoring module has a robust Link Check Tool (LCT). It checks for broken and dead backlinks in your web pages and guest posts. It also alerts you when a link status changes.
Why Is an SEO Audit Important?
The SEO industry keeps changing, and there is always something new happening. What worked 5-months ago may not work today.
For instance, keyword authority for your domain keeps changing with time and location. An audit helps you identify the best-ranking keywords for you to target.
An audit gives even better results if you use the right tools. I especially like SEO PowerSuite which comes with a dedicated Rank Tracker that lets you track unlimited keywords and optimize your content for them.
Google also keeps updating its algorithm every year. In such a dynamic landscape, you need to stay updated about the latest trends. What’s more, you regularly add and remove content from your site.
How can you know if you’re going in the right direction?
By performing an audit, you can figure out what’s working for you. It can also help you identify areas that need improvement.
An SEO audit can ensure that Google is not penalizing you for issues that could ruin your ranking. It also offers you comprehensive feedback on best practices in running your website.
Want to conduct an SEO audit of your site?
Let’s check out the best SEO audit tools.
Read on…
Which are the Best SEO Audit Tools You Should Start Using Now?
Ready to find out the best SEO audit tools in the market?
Let’s take a look at the best audit tools for SEO that can make your life easier.
1. Semrush
Competition in the online world is cutthroat. Knowing your top competitors’ moves will be an advantage. This audit tool enables you to know what keywords your top competitors are using, this tool gives you a competitive advantage.
Image via Semrush
Price: Plans start at $99.95 per month for monthly billing and $83.28 per month for annual billing.
2. Linkody
Linkody is one of the most versatile audit tools as well as backlink checker tools that allows you to track your link-building campaigns. It provides an automated process for monitoring, finding, and reporting backlinks.
Furthermore, you can see standard rank metrics that will allow you to fully analyze the quality of your backlinks. By using this tool, you will always be in charge of your link profile.
Image via Linkody
Price: A free 30-day trial is available. After that, their membership plans start from as low as $14.90/month.
3. Serpstat
Serpstat is one of the best SEO audit tools for searching. It has rich features that help SEO specialists, digital marketers, and agencies. It provides services like comprehensive keyword research, content ideation services, ad monitoring, and more.
Image via Serpstat
Price: The basic plan costs $19 per month.
Want to try it before buying? A free trial is also available.
4. SE Ranking
Imagine your key SEO reports being lost to a virus attack or hardware malfunction. It would cost you time and money. SE Ranking can help you avoid that hassle and unnecessary expense by providing cloud-based SEO audit reporting which makes it one of the best SEO audit tools.
Image via SE Ranking
Price: The basic plan costs $7 per month when billed annually.
5. Ahrefs
When it comes to growing your web traffic and analyzing your competition, Ahrefs is one of the best SEO audit tools on our list. It can help you with competitive analysis, keyword search, backlink research, and more.
The online keyword research tool provides keyword density scores and other advanced metrics to help you target the right keywords.
This online tool also provides a rank tracking option that helps you track your rank on your target keywords. You can get weekly or monthly ranking reports as per your requirements.
Image via Ahrefs
Price: Basic plan starts at $82 per month ($990 per year)
Free trial option is available for 7 days.
6. BuiltWith
If you have an ecommerce business, BuiltWith is the best SEO audit tool to keep a tab on your top competitors.
It provides lists of information on ecommerce sites around the world their tech spends. And it has a tool that allows you to generate a list of top sites for a particular keyword.
Image via BuiltWith
Price: Basic plan starts at $295 per month ($2,950 per year)
7. Check My Links
This Google Chrome extension is a handy online tool to check for broken links. Check My Links quickly crawls through your website and tells you which links are working and which are broken. Then you can immediately take action and make your pages SEO friendly through the help of this audit tool.
Image via Check My Links
8. ContentLook
ContentLook has an audit tool for websites that run on WordPress. This online tool gives various tips to resolves issues on the site. It provides weekly SEO audit reports. It also provides you with audit scores for your content strategy and other valuable insights.
Image via ContentLook
Price: Basic plan starts at $29.9 per month
9. Dareboost
This is an online audit tool for checking the speed of your website. It helps you optimize pages and boost the speed of your site.
Dareboost constantly monitors your site for performance and provides top optimization tips. It also provides your website’s rankings and compares them with those of your top competitors.
Image via Dareboost
Price: Basic plan starts at $22 per month
10. Bing Webmaster Tools
This is one of the best SEO audit tools for Bing. It has an assortment of reporting and diagnostic tools to drive traffic to your site. The detailed technical SEO audit reports from Bing Webmaster Tools will help you to optimize your site for Bing.
Image via Bing Webmaster Tools
11. DeepCrawl
DeepCrawl offers services to help you audit your site or recover from penalization. It is one of the best SEO audit tools which helps you understand your site architecture and helps you launch an international site.
Image via DeepCrawl
Price: Starter plan starts at $89 per month ($979 per year)
Want to try it before you buy it? Avail their free trial option.
12. Found
This free online audit tool is effective to solve technical SEO issues. Found helps audit the site and identify problems related to metadata, content, link building, canonicalization, and more.
Image via Found
13. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is by far the top free online SEO site audit tool. It provides insights into your page views, the demographics of your website visitors, and much more.
The graphical representation of data helps you organize your site to improve SEO. Google Analytics provides a wide number of SEO metrics that can help you optimize your website and content. This is a top-notch online tool for any SEO expert.
Image via Google Analytics
14. Google Lighthouse
Lighthouse was developed by Google as an open-source tool for web page optimization. This automated technical SEO site audit tool provides performance audit reports and top tips to fix issues.
It is an effective online tool to improve the quality of your web pages. Do you know the best part? It is an absolutely free tool.
Image via Google Lighthouse
15. Google PageSpeed Insights
This is another one of Google’s online SEO site audit tools developed for faster performance of web pages on various devices. It is one of the top tools to test page load speeds of your webpages.
It categorizes page load speeds as fast, slow, and average. The tool gives you suggestions by analyzing the content of each page. This is also a free tool that you can use by simply copy-pasting the URL of the web page that you want to test.
Image via Google PageSpeed Insights
16. Google Search Console
With its array of functionalities, The Google Search Console is the best online SEO site audit tool for small businesses. It enables you to check the pattern of clicks on your site.
And it allows you to check whether the content on your site is Google-friendly or not. It also sends you alerts when you need to solve errors on your site.
The search analytics feature provides valuable information and metrics on your site’s performance. And, it also provides suggestions to improve your content to help you rank well in organic search results.
And the best part is, that it is absolutely free to use.
Image via Google Search Console
17. Google Structured Data Testing Tool
This technical SEO site audit tool helps you to test your structured markup and optimize it accordingly. Correct structured data can improve Google’s ability to fetch your page quickly.
What’s more, you ask? With this online tool, you can generate the markup code and validate it on your page.
This is another free tool that you can use to optimize your structured data and help search engines understand your page better.
Image via Google Structured Data Testing Tool
18. GTmetrix
GTmetrix is another technical SEO site audit tool available for measuring page load speed. It analyzes the loading performances from different devices and from different regions. And, it also gives you top recommendations on how to optimize your page load speed.
Image via GTmetrix
Price: Basic plan is free, pro plans start at $14.95 per month.
19. Kerboo
Kerboo is an online SEO audit tool that you can use to improve your backlinks. It gives scores and ratings to your links and provides top actionable suggestions through its link audits. It helps you identify risks and create a disavow file.
Image via Kerboo
Price: Starter plan for a small agency starts at $249 per month.
20. Keylogs
Keylogs is a versatile online tool that enables you to analyze Google’s Search Console data. Through the analysis, you can get great insights to optimize your site and increase rankings and that’s why this tool is also considered one of the best SEO audit tools.
Image via Keylogs
Price: There is a basic free plan for one user. Paid plans start at $19 per month for monthly billing and $15 per month for annual billing.
21. Lipperhey
Lipperhey is one of the best SEO audit tools available for free. It office a complete SEO optimization package for free. Some of the technical SEO services it provides are analytics, keyword suggestions, and a backlink checker.
Still not sure? Let’s see some of its other features.
It helps you analyze your website on SEO, technical, and popularity aspects. And it also provides suggestions on how to improve these for better conversions.
Image via Lipperhey
22. Majestic
Being the largest link index database in the world, Majestic is the best tool online for an index search. It is a marketing search engine. The SEO audit tool enables you to search URLs, find potential clients, check backlinks, audit services, and much more.
Image via Majestic
Price: The Lite plan starts at $49 per month
23. Google Mobile-Friendly Test
In this era of mobile internet, making your pages mobile-friendly is absolutely necessary. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool comes in handy for SEO specialists who want to check whether their website is mobile-friendly or not. This is also a free online SEO audit tool that anyone can use.
Image via Google Mobile-Friendly Test
24. Moz
Moz is a leading SEO audit tool that is preferred by many SEO specialists. With its numerous service offerings, all of the needs of an SEO specialist are fulfilled. The Moz Local tool helps you manage your local business listings to optimize them to rank well in local search results.
MozPro has a link analysis feature and also provides live metrics about your web pages’ performance. It also has a keyword explorer tool that helps you find and target the best keywords for your website.
Image via Moz
Price: Available on request.
Free trial is available for 30 days.
25. MySiteAuditor
The MySiteAuditor can be embedded into your site. Using this SEO audit tool, you can check your SEO score, get your site audited, and more in real time.
Image via MySiteAuditor
26. Netpeak Spider
Netpeak Spider is one of the best SEO audit tools in the market. Their pro version will audit your entire website and check for all SEO issues. It checks for broken links, duplicity in content, and allows you to set your own crawling rules.
Image via Netspeak Spider
Price: Paid plans start at $14 per month for monthly billing and $9 per month for annual billing.
27. Nibbler
Just type in your URL into Nibbler and get a report about your site. Nibbler also provides a sales tool called Silktide Prospect for digital marketing service providers. Using this SEO audit tool, you can optimize your website.
Image via Nibbler
Price: The basic version is available for free. The price for the pro version is available on request.
28. OnCrawl
This SEO audit tool offers a variety of SEO auditing services and helps with daily monitoring. It has its own site crawler that analyzes your website like search engine crawlers. It also analyzes the influence of each ranking factor on your search rankings.
Image via OnCrawl
Price: The basic plan starts at $39 per month without the log analyzer and $149 per month with the log analysis feature.
Happy with the list of tools provided so far? Ready to see more?
Read on then.
29. Barracuda Digital’s Panguin Tool
The Panguin Tool offered by Barracuda is a free SEO audit tool. It helps you audit whether or not your site is impacted by Google’s algorithm updates. And it suggests changes if impacted by the updates. This is a useful tool that helps you avoid Google penalties.
Image via Barracuda Digital’s Panguin Tool
30. Pingdom DNS Check
Having a properly set domain name is of vital importance for a site. Pingdom Tools provides a tool called DNS Check to help you check whether your domain name is set up properly. The SEO audit tool conducts various tests and determines which DNS server is used for the domain.
Image via Pingdom DNS Check
Price: Paid plans start at $14.95 per month for monthly billing and $11.95 per month for annual billing.
Want to try it first? A free trial is also available.
31. Raven Tools
Raven Tools is a useful set of SEO audit tools that provide automated technical SEO audit reports. It specializes in providing technical audit reports on Google AdWords, Bing ads, and Facebook ads. It creates white-label reports using this data.
Image via Raven Tools
Price: Paid plans start at $49 per month for monthly billing and $39 per month for annual billing.
A free trial is also available.
32. Remove’em
Bad links on your site can get you penalized. Remove’em is an effective tool for removing bad links that could damage your site. This SEO audit tool helps you monitor backlinks, take control of them, and reclaim lost ground to Penguin penalties.
Image via Remove’em
Price: Subscription for one website costs $99 per month.
33. ReportGarden
ReportGarden is specifically for SEO specialist agencies that want to monitor multiple clients’ websites. This SEO audit tool provides a thorough analysis of web pages.
Image via ReportGarden
Price: The basic plan costs $299 per month when billed monthly ($2,990 per year).
34. Ryte
Ryte provides a plethora of tools for website monitoring. It has a useful SEO audit tool called Content Success for managing content.
Image via Ryte
Price: Paid plans start at $119.9 per month for monthly billing and $107.91 per month for annual billing.
35. Screaming Frog
One of the best feature-rich SEO audit tools is Screaming Frog. It can crawl websites like a search engine crawler and provides valuable insights.
Image via Screaming Frog
Price: The basic plan is available for free. Paid plan costs $149 per year.
36. SEO Analyzer
This free online SEO audit tool provides you with an analysis of your website’s traffic and other SEO metrics. All you need to do is enter your URL and this tool will provide you a detailed SEO report for your website.
Image via SEO Analyzer
37. SEO Workers
SEO Workers help you look into the issues of HTML markup codes. It also provides other common SEO analysis services. This SEO audit tool is free for use by anyone.
Image via SEO Workers
38. SEO SiteCheckup
This SEO audit tool provides comprehensive solutions for your SEO problems. Real-time reports, instant analyzing of issues, white-label reports, and more are all available in SEO SiteCheckup‘s toolbox.
Image via SEO SiteCheckup
Price: The basic plan costs $24.95 per month.
39. SEOptimer
SEOptimer is a useful SEO audit tool available at an affordable price. This tool is available in various international languages too. SEOptimer also provides a number of free tools to improve your SEO.
Image via SEOptimer
Price: The basic plan called DIY SEO costs $19 per month.
A free trial is also available.
40. Site Analyzer
Site Analyzer provides an easy-to-access SEO toolkit. This SEO audit tool enables you to compare your site with your rivals’. The suite of tools offered by Site Analyzer is really useful and one of the best in the market.
Image via Site Analyzer
Price: The basic plan costs $29 per month ($348 per year).
41. Sitebulb
This SEO audit tool is a crawler that provides context-specific tips for SEO problems in real-time. Its highly visualized technical SEO audit reports make it easy to understand the various data points.
Image via Sitebulb
Price: Plans start at $35 per month for monthly billing and $378 per year for annual billing.
42. SpyFu
Did you know that SpyFu is the best SEO audit tool to learn about your top competitors? By using SpyFu, you can learn what profitable keywords your top competitors are using. SpyFu also provides a monthly domain overview of your rivals.
Image via SpyFu
Price: Plans start at $39 per month for monthly billing and $33 per month for annual billing.
43. SpySerp
This SEO audit tool gives you the most accurate ranking date. SpySerp also has a bunch of tools to manage your technical SEO requirements.
Image via SpySerp
Price: The basic plan is free. For paid plans, you can customize your plan as per your budget.
44. Squirrly
This SEO audit tool increases the performance of your site and generates traffic. It provides weekly site performance reports. It helps you audit blogs, traffic, SEO, backlinks, social media, and domain authority.
Image via Squirrly
Price: The basic plan is available for free. Paid plans start at $29.99 per month.
45. The HOTH
The HOTH provides SEO auditing and gives a score to your site. This web-based free SEO analyzer is a great tool for small sites. This is a free SEO audit tool.
Image via The HOTH
46. UpCity
UpCity provides you with deeply analyzed SEO report cards. With the help of this SEO audit tool you can check your own SEO performance and also compare it with the performance of your top competitors.
Want to know the best part? This tool is free to use, all you need to do is fill in your details and get your SEO report.
Image via UpCity
47. Varvy
This SEO audit tool measures how your web pages follow Google guidelines. Varvy checks for accessibility, page speed, security, and more in its audits. It also gives you insights into various other SEO requirements for your site.
This is a free tool.
Image via Varvy
48. WebCEO
WebCEO is the best SEO audit tool for technical audits of sites. It provides an SEO road map for your site. Also, you can opt for automated checks of your site.
Image via WebCEO
Price: Plans start at $39 per month for monthly billing and $29 per month for annual billing.
49. WebPageTest
This is a simple free SEO audit tool for your site. WebPageTest can be used to run on-site optimization checks. It can do speed checks from multiple locations.
Image via WebPageTest
50. Website Grader
The Website Grader online SEO audit tool analyses your site on several metrics. It checks your site for mobile readiness, SEO friendliness, and security. And it gives you timely technical SEO audit reports so that you can make the necessary changes.
Image via Website Grader
51. WooRank
WooRank is one more example of an SEO audit service provider. This SEO audit tool gives you in-depth reviews, competitive analysis, marketing checklists, and more.
Image via WooRank
Price: The basic plan costs $59.99 per month.
Want to try it first? A free trial is available.
52. Wpromote
The Wpromote SEO audit tool brings you the benefit of fast analysis and technical reports in great detail. It helps you understand what ranking factors contribute most to your organic search rankings to help you formulate your SEO strategy.
This is a free tool.
Image via Wpromote
Bonus Tool #1: Zadro Web
This SEO audit tool looks into many technical aspects of your site. Zadro Web looks for sitemaps, robot texts, and boosts your on-site SEO.
Image via Zadro Web
Bonus Tool #2: Sitechecker
Sitechecker is an easy-to-use platform to track and improve search visibility. It is a toolkit for website owners, marketing agencies owners, SEO specialists, marketers, and product managers.
Image via Sitechecker
Price: The Basic plan costs $29 per month, Startup costs $49 per month, and Growing costs $99 per month.
Want to try it first? A 7-day free trial is available.
FAQs
Q1. What is an SEO Audit Tool?
A. SEO audit tools are ones that you can use to conduct an SEO audit of your website. These tools can help you check the on-page, off-page, and technical SEO optimizations of your website and help you figure out what steps you need to take to improve your SEO.
Q2. How do I do a SEO audit?
A. There are two ways of conducting an SEO audit. The first is the manual method, which typically takes a long time. The second method is by using SEO audit tools such as Semrush and Ahrefs that can help you get detailed insights into your website’s SEO.
Q3. How to add an SEO audit tool to your website?
A. The procedure for adding an SEO audit tool to your website will vary with each tool. However, when it comes to most tools, all you have to do is enter your website in the tool and it will start scanning it. Then, based on the analysis, it’ll give you the results.
Q4. What is the best SEO audit tool?
A. The best SEO audit tools that you can use are:
- Semrush
- Ahrefs
- Serpstat
- SE Ranking
- Bing Webmaster Tools
- BuiltWith
- Check My Links
Q5. What does an SEO audit tool include?
A. SEO audit tools can include features such as on-page SEO checker, off-page SEO checker, and technical SEO audit. These features can help you analyze the page loading speed, URLs, backlinks, content optimization, and more.
Q6. Are SEO audit tools useful?
A. Yes, SEO audit tools are extremely helpful and can give you detailed insights into how well your website is optimized for SEO. These tools can take the hard work out of SEO audits and can present valuable insights to you based on which you can optimize your website even further.
Q7. What are some of the best free SEO Audit tools?
A. Some of the best free SEO audit tools that you can use are:
- Semrush
- Ahrefs
- Google Analytics
- Google Lighthouse
- Bing Webmaster Tools
- WebPageTest
Q8. Which SEO audit tools or online website is trustworthy?
A. The most trustworthy SEO audit tools are:
- Semrush
- Ahrefs
- Moz
- Google Search Console
- Google Lighthouse
- Bing Webmaster Tools
Q9. What are the best on-page SEO analysis tools?
A. The best on-page SEO analysis tools are:
- Semrush
- Ahrefs
- Moz
- Serpstat
- Google Lighthouse
- DeepCrawl
Q10. Which tools/software do you use for website SEO audits?
A. For my website’s SEO audit, I use:
- Semrush
- Ahrefs
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Google Structured Data Testing Tool
Which of the Best SEO Audit Tools Will You Use in 2021?
These are some of the best SEO audit tools available. This list is quite comprehensive and can help you find a tool for all of your SEO needs.
Did you pick your favorite yet? If not, go through the list again and take your pick.
Do you know of any other technical SEO audit tools that you think should be added to this list? Please share them in the comments section below.
Disclosure: This content has a few affiliate links, which means if you click on them, I will get a commission (without any extra cost to you).
Considerable article. Thank you for sharing.
I’m glad you loved it!
helloooo, I adore your post. will visit again
Thank you so much!
Great post with such a big SEO information.
Thank you! I’m glad you liked my article about best seo audit tools.
Thanks for this highly informative blog piece.
My pleasure. Glad to help!
It’s great that you have given a shout out to some of the lesser known sites and tools. It’s appreciated.
Thanks for the shout out Rank! I’m glad you liked my article on the best seo audit tools.
Thanks 🙂 I would implement it in my websites a soon as possible.
Great! Do let me know how it works for you.
Your posts are so informative and easy to read.
I’m glad you feel that way. Thank you so much!
Another great guide. I took a bunch of notes into my checklist so that I can systematize the process when things are ready.
I’m glad my article on the best seo tools was helpful to you.
Thanks for sharing this great information.
The pleasure is all mine. I’m glad you liked my post about the best SEO audit tools.
Really informative!
Hey Alethia, than you so much! 🙂