There are plenty of online SEO tools available in the market that can help you with the site audit. Regular website audits are essential to track the issues preventing your website from ranking in the SERP. Moreover, it gives you clarity on how to expand the online reach and drive traffic to your site. SEO audits are useful for analyzing your own website performance and tracking the performance of any website. For link building activities, such as guest post service, webmasters analyze websites before reaching out to them. This is to ensure that they receive maximum benefits from such activities.
With SEO audit tools, you can significantly reduce the amount of time and resources spent on your website and boost its organic ranking. In this post, we have listed the best SEO audit tools that every business owner must utilize.
1. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the most popular SEO tool used by webmasters from all over the world. This tool’s popularity can be attributed to the fact that it is created by Google and is free to use. If you have a Gmail account, you can set up your Analytics account using the same email ID. The robust dashboard of Google Analytics lets you view the number of visitors on your site, the amount of time they spend on your site, which pages have the most visitors, the bounce rate of your web pages, and a wide variety of data related to your website. You can even analyze which channel is contributing to how much traffic on your site. The “Behavior Flow” feature of this tool tells you exactly how visitors interact with your website. This will help you understand whether your visitors take time to explore your site or leave it soon enough. Installing Google analytics tracking code to a website is very easy. If you are setting up an Analytics account for the first time, ensure that you allow a few week’s data to be accumulated before you start auditing.
2. Google Search Console
Google Search Console is another useful tool to audit websites. However, it is not the same as Google Analytics. The Google Search Console is a free tool that lets you discover your web pages’ indexing status and optimize for visibility. Using this tool, you can discover broken links on a website, including 404 and 403 errors, and fix them. You’ll be able to see the cause behind those errors and either choose to replace those links with new ones or give 301 redirects to similar pages. GSC further helps to improve your site by suggesting possible HTML fixes on your site, such as issues with duplicate or lengthy meta descriptions, missing title tags, etc. Using this tool’s “Mobile Usability” feature, you can further check whether your site is mobile-friendly or not.
3. Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is an SEO crawler that allows you to audit the technical SEO. It helps you understand how search engine spiders view your website. You can use this freemium desktop tool to discover broken links and server errors, crawl XML sitemaps, analyze the meta tags and review no-follow links, canonical URLs, etc. You can integrate Screaming Frog to Google Analytics or Search Console APIs to retrieve performance data in a crawl, find permanent and temporary redirects and view URLs blocked by robots.txt. The free version of this tool can crawl up to 500 URLs. However, there’s no such limit for the premium version available at £ 140.00/year.
4. Deepcrawl
Deepcrawl lets you manage a vast network of websites to ensure that your site content resonates with the regional audience. You can also use the tool to check your website’s meta tags, review whether canonical tags have been implemented correctly, discover low-quality web pages, analyze site architecture and schedule, and compare crawls over time. Depending on your business requirements, you can choose different pricing plans for this tool or request a custom plan.
5. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is one of the popular SEO audit tools to conduct keyword analysis and review backlinks for websites. It was founded in 2011. Using this tool, you can quickly analyze why your competitors are outranking you and what steps can be taken to outrank them. It is overall a handy tool for on-page optimization. You can use this tool to extract comprehensive backlink data of your site, such as the websites linking to your pages, the anchor texts being used, the strength of the backlinks, etc. Such reports also give you valuable insights on your site issues and suggest improvements. You can use Ahrefs to monitor keywords that your competitors are ranking for and the exact amount of traffic driven by them. The content-gap feature lets you discover keywords for which they rank, but you don’t. Ahrefs has four pricing plans at $99, $179, $399, and $999 per month in USD.
6. SEMrush
SEMrush is another popular tool for on-page SEO optimization and website audit. The tool lets you find keywords to rank for and enables you to compare your top-ranking keywords to those of your competitors. You can also use this tool to get insights into their paid search strategies, display advertising, and link building strategies. SEMrush also has a social media tracking tool that lets you track your social media performance and schedule posts on various social media platforms. The SEO Writing Assistant feature helps you optimize your content based on your top ten competitors on Google. SEMrush SEMrush offers three options for monthly subscriptions: Pro for $99.95, Guru for $199.95, and Business starting at $399.95.
7. Moz
Moz is one of the well known online SEO tools in the market for keyword planning and website audit. Using this tool, you can evaluate domain authority and discover page link metrics, optimize your existing on-page content for target keywords, detect broken links, find unlinked mentions, track keyword ranking data, and improve your site visibility in SERPs. You can also use Moz to discover malicious links on the website, crawl errors, duplicate content, and missing page elements. The powerful Domain Authority (DA) metric by Moz helps you identify your site’s growth over time. Moz also has a huge online community of SEO experts and webmasters who participate in forum discussions on SEO optimization. Moz pricing starts at $129/year for its Basic Plan.
8. Searchmetrics
Searchmetrics is keyword research and SEO audit tool. The tool boasts a Visibility Guard feature that protects your web pages 24X7 so that there’s no loss in your valuable data. The Content Performance feature helps you conduct a content-gap analysis and discover scopes of improvement on your site. The mobile SEO feature lets you analyze mobile traffic and rankings for better mobile optimization, while the backlink analysis feature of Searchmetrics takes care of the off-page optimization of your website. The price of this tool starts at $79/month.
9. Majestic
Majestic is an SEO audit tool that comes with loads of interesting features. The Site Explorer tool by Majestic helps you discover the best websites and track them. Their Link Context feature helps you discover links, analyze your competitor’s backlinks, find new link opportunities, and look for mutual links between sites. Majestic pricing starts at $49.00 power month for the Lite Plan.
10. Sitechecker
Sitechecker is All-in-One SEO Platform that allows you to perform a detailed audit and constant monitoring of your website. The Web crawler tool will help you make a full technical SEO audit. You will be able to detect all errors both at the page-level and at the site-level. This tool allows you to use flexible scanning settings. You will be able to configure rules for crawling all pages and types of errors. The Web crawler tool’s alert system will send you an email every time there is a critical problem or warning. Another feature of this tool will allow you to audit internal and external links. You can check the HTTP status code of internal and external links and explore the anchor list of internal backlinks for a particular page. This platform’s pricing is very flexible, with a minimum pricing plan at $29/month and a maximum pricing plan at $499/month.
Conclusion
Using these tools mentioned above, any business or enterprise can leverage their performance and improve the user experience on their websites.
