Best SEO Audit Tools

Last updated

by

Daniel Wade

 / 

August 30, 2022

You can take as many SEO courses as you want and learn the tricks of the trade, but you will still need the best SEO audit tools to improve rank and results.

As all users know by now, Google’s algorithm is getting more complex and challenging by the day. Recent research revealed that Google considers more than 200 factors in its search results and has made rankings even more difficult for web pages. Additionally, Google is also known to regularly update algorithms and ensure that there is no hack for website owners and content marketers to target.

Some of the best SEO audit tools include SpyFU, SEMrush, Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, GTMetrix, SE Ranking and Google Search Console, to name a few. All of these solutions help audit your SEO campaigns and give you direct insights.

All of the tools mentioned above come with their own utility, purpose and payment plans. Users looking to audit their SEO campaign need to know the benefits of the tool they use so that they are able to pull the best results possible and ensure optimal feasibility in the long run.

This extensive list of the best SEO audit tools has been prepared after years of trials and research. The solutions have been tested by our team and include both simple and advanced solutions, as well as free and paid solutions. Regardless of your SEO background or your budget, you may be able to find something of use from this list.

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SpyFU

SpyFU may not be the first name to come to mind when looking for SEO audit tools, but it definitely is one of the most improved solutions available online.

The platform comes with a full suite of tools and digital marketing solutions which will help you not only audit your SEO campaign but build an understanding of your digital marketing presence.

SpyFU doesn’t have dedicated tools of its own, as it combines multiple tools from different sources and combines them in one place to help drive your SEO campaigns forward.

SpyFU comes with a dedicated Competitor Research tool, which can help you audit competitor websites and find out the flaws they have. This tool can help drive up your own bottom line and give you a chance to up your competitive advantage.

Additionally, SpyFU comes with a tool for SEO Keyword Research, which can help you find out all keywords that you should replace from your content strategy. The tool helps separate the good from the bad and gives you a clear sense of direction with what you need and should do in regards to your SEO campaign.

SpyFU Features:

SpyFU comes with a list of diverse features, which are neatly explained below:

  • Find out the shortcomings in your content strategy and replace them.
  • Get on board with the latest Google updates and replace the problems you currently experience.
  • Vet all backlinks to eliminate cases of bad links in the form of duplicates.
  • Uncover new opportunities to rank well on Google and improve your overall SEO performance.
  • Find out exclusive keywords that your competitors rank well for and which you can target.
  • Highlight all long-tail and short-tail keywords that you should skip
  • Track the trends you have followed for the last decade and find out irregularities in SEO.

The pricing plans for SpyFU are differentiated across three months, with the premium plan offering you a full blend of all SEO auditing services.

SEMrush

The world of SEO would be quite complex and difficult to understand for beginners if it wasn’t for SEMrush. The tool is an industry leader today and is a mainstay in the world of SEO auditing and performance.

SEMrush focuses on SEO brilliance but goes beyond that as well to offer over 40 intelligent tools and resources, which can help you drive your digital marketing campaign forward. The tool specializes in paid ad research, competitor intelligence, keyword research, rank tracking, content optimization and monitoring on social media.

SEMrush does a good job at auditing your SEO campaigns and gives you the red flag over problems with HTTPS security protocols, linking inside the website, SEO content, meta tags, page speeds, crawlability on the website and AMP implementation.

All of these updates can help you improve overall SEO performance and generate positive results.

Features of SEMrush

SEMrush offers a ton of tools and features. A few of them are described below for beginners:

  • SEMrush’s SEO tool can help remove over 130 SEO and technical errors from your website
  • The platform performs periodic reports to help improve SEO performance.
  • The platform utilizes audit results and advanced filters to help sort out results.
  • All SEO issues are systematically compartmentalized on the basis of warnings, notices and errors.
  • SEMrush allows you to compare different crawls and find out the perfect results for SEO audits.
  • The results from SEMrush can be integrated with your Analytics tool.
  • The insights provided on SEMrush help you improve SEO implementation and results.
  • The solution comes with interactive graphs, which are used to display results from the SEO audit.

SEMrush comes with free offerings as well as paid plans. Users can research over a 100 web pages for free.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Screaming Frog SEO Spider isn’t the same as the other SEO auditing tools that we review here. This tool isn’t based on the cloud and comes with an installable variant, which can be installed on your system.

After it is installed, the tool runs through your website, extracts all on-site data, and analyzes the results on a real-time basis. During the crawling process, the tool finds out all SEO discrepancies in real-time and prompts you into action.

All digital marketers and SEO auditors can use the Screaming Frog tool to improve their SEO results and scrape away irregularities in the form of broken links, blocked URLs, redirects and poor meta’s.

Features of Screaming Frog:

Screaming Frog, contrary to the name may suggest, adds a lot of peace to your life and SEO operations. Some of the key features of the platform include:

  • Evaluation of your URL structure and internal linking mechanism.
  • Integration with Page Speed API, Google Search Console and Google Analytics.
  • The platform can reveal all URLs blocked by meta robots, robots.txt and X-Robots-Tag.
  • Can identify all duplicated elements within the website.
  • Can set up sitemaps for Image XML
  • Finds out all redirects and loops.
  • Assesses meta descriptions and page titles
  • Finds all server errors and broken links in your file.

You can use the Screaming Frog for free to crawl through a set number of 500 URLs. However, the paid annual version can help you crawl through an unlimited number of web pages each year.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console might sound new to you, but it is the same as Google Webmaster Tools. Google Search Console is a renamed version of the Webmaster and offers the same performance that SEO experts had come to experience from it.

The Search Console by Google is fairly reliable since it comes from the horse’s mouth and can help give you directions laid down by Google itself.

The Webmaster comes with refined capabilities and can help you go back in time to find data from almost 15 months ago and audit it for you.

Once you perform an audit, you can run across the section for insights on the platform and get an idea of the accessibility issues, along with indexation problems faced by most SEO users.

Google Search Console can also go beyond the ordinary to help provide you with details on HTML, broken links, quality issues, HTML and a lot more.

Features of Google Search Console

Google Search Console comes with a number of features that help differentiate it from other tools. These features include:

  • Google Search Control can help test, track and monitor all of your AMP pages.
  • The search console by Google can help crawl your pages and identify any shortcomings present across them.
  • Google’s Search Console can point out all failed attempts at indexing and other pages with multiple errors on them.
  • The console comes with a unique tool for analyzing your keywords and assessing their performance.
  • The tool can help you understand the performance of your keywords and whether you need to rework them.
  • The tool can help bring all indexed pages to the forefront.
  • The customized audit results and reports are different for each brand working with them.
  • The console can review coverage from Google and revamp SEO strategies.
  • The tool can help you come with solutions to pain points, which will eventually drive traffic on the website.
  • All problems in the user experience are covered.

The Google Search Console can be used free of any additional charges and can be accessed for free by all users.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is another popular tool in the category with plenty of features to its name. Ahrefs comes with an all-inclusive toolset for SEO work and directions.

The website comes with a Rank Tracker for tracking your rank and related data, a Content Explorer for exploring flaws in the content, a Keyword Explorer for finding out flaws within your keyword, a Site Explorer for auditing your site and a final Site SEO audit tool.

The Site SEO audit tool is the most comprehensive of all plans offered by Ahrefs and is basically where you can get the best results possible. The site auditing tool gives you clear directions on what is required for clearing the external pages on your website, including CSS and JavaScript resources.

The tool can also highlight articles with a low word count and those missing social tags, so that page-specific performance issues are solved appropriately.

Ahrefs Features

Ahrefs is very similar to SEMrush in the features that it brings. Some of the core competencies and features include:

  • Crawls through both desktop and mobile versions of your site to give you a unique experience.
  • Schedules automatic weekly and monthly crawls on your site.
  • Renders content related to JavaScript on web pages.
  • Rectifies and finds out over 100 issues related to SEO in your website.
  • Gives you a set of custom filters decided by varying parameters.
  • Gives you a crawl log to maintain regularly.
  • Gives you insights and recommendations on what you can do to fix issues in your SEO.

The Webmaster tool by Ahrefs can be assessed by signing in and gives you limited access to the Site Audit and Site Explorer tools for free. Premium versions can vary based on plans, with the most expensive version coming at a thousand bucks per month.

GTmetrix

GTmetrix is different from all of the previous tools we have discussed in this article because it is more of a testing tool than a crawler to run through your web pages.

The tool can look over all of your web pages and give you the insights you need into the technicalities and operations of your website.

The tester by GTmetrix does take a few initial seconds to get running, after which it will give you actionable insights into the size of your pages, the loading speeds of different pages, and how it ranks across different parameters, including image scaling and caching.

The testing tool by GTmetrix can help give you insights into 25 different factors related to SEO. Website owners and SEO experts can utilize these factors to find out problems within their website and how the problems are negatively impacting the website’s performance.

GTmetrix Key Features

GTmetrix is different from the other best SEO audit tools in this article because it primarily operates as a testing tool. The key features of this tool include:

  • The different metrics are displayed in an actionable format to help you find areas where you can improve.
  • Loading issues are highlighted and minimized.
  • The web performance of your pages is replicated on over a dozen devices to see usability across devices.
  • The platform uses graphs and charts to display information.
  • User experience is highlighted.
  • All web pages are gauged through Google’s Lighthouse
  • Page performance is recorded from 20 plus diverse locations.

You can get over 50 on-demand tests on GTmetrix. Increasing this limit to 150 or plus would require a minimal monthly payment.

SE Ranking

SE Ranking comes within the same category as Ahrefs and SEMrush, as it provides a full blend of SEO tools and services. The tool is heavily focused on-page analysis, website auditing, keyword auditing and link tracking.

SE Ranking crawls through each link on your website to give you an indication of user experience and assess your website for SERP, image optimization and headers.

Features of SE Ranking

Some of the features of SE Ranking include:

  • Can gauge all your web pages
  • Identifies all SEO errors based on your defined metrics
  • Offers tips on how to solve issues with SEO
  • Analyzes all internal links
  • Compares different SEO and website audits to help track your progress

SE Ranking comes with a basic plan of $31 per month, with rates for premium plans going upwards.

Almost all of the tools we have discussed and featured in this list come with their own tools and unique attributes. These attributes define them and separate them from the rest. As an SEO expert or a growing business, you should harness the potential of multiple tools at one time.

Combining multiple tools together will help you achieve better SEO results and audits. Almost all of the tools mentioned here do come with a free version as well, which will help you test them without paying anything upfront.

Best SEO Audit Tools

About THE AUTHOR

Daniel Wade

Daniel Wade

After working for multiple digital advertising agencies and managing hundreds of client accounts, spending millions of dollars via Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Native Ads and Direct Media Buying, I took things out on my own and started SparrowBoost. Now, my tight-knit team and I continue to get smarter and more efficient at running our own campaigns and we share our knowledge with you.

Learn more about SparrowBoost