SEO Audit Tool: Which Ones Are The Best?

To stay competitive in organic search results, you need to ensure that all aspects of your website are working properly.

An accurate SEO audit tool is one of the best ways to detect issues on your website that might be holding back your rankings in the search engine result pages (SERPs).

Every business owner or digital marketing professional should understand how to conduct an SEO audit by checking all the important ranking factors used by popular search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.   

An SEO audit tool makes this super easy by scanning your website and revealing the necessary fixes and optimization opportunities.

If you’re looking for the best SEO audit tool to take your SEO to the next level, then you’re in luck.

In this post, you’ll discover the top SEO audit tools (free and paid) for 2021. Whether you’re auditing on-page, off-page or technical elements, these tools will provide clear insights on fixes you need to make to improve your or client’s website’s rankings in the SERPs.

What an SEO Audit Should Be

First, an SEO audit should be thorough and comprehensive. A proper SEO audit should uncover both content and structural components affecting your website’s visibility and rankings.

Also, SEO audits should be easy to interpret. As a business owner or digital marketer, you should be able to easily connect the dots about how the identified SEO issues are affecting your online presence. Likewise, all recommendations should relate exclusively to your overarching marketing goals.  

Finally, the recommendations from your SEO audit should be actionable. There should be a clear path from start to finish, clearing stating efforts associated with each recommendation and the kind of results to expect. You should be able to distinguish between low impact and high impact fixes that will move the needle.

What is an SEO Audit Tool?

An SEO audit tool is a piece of software that helps you analyze your website’s performance in relation to best practices.

Conducting an SEO audit is the first step to creating implementable plans that can help you improve your organic rankings and drive more traffic to your website.

A comprehensive SEO audit can reveal:

  • Technical SEO issues, such as duplicate content, improper redirects and poor mobile experience
  • On-page SEO issues such as title tag issues, meta description, low text-to-HTML, broken internal and external links and broken images
  • Website structure issues, such as navigation issue, and mobile friendliness
  • Potential off-site problems – broken backlinks, no-follow links, RSS feed and inconsistent citations
  • User experience issues – page load speed, mobile friendliness, and navigation issues
  • Content gaps and opportunities
  • Competitive marketplace insights

Why It’s Important to Audit Your Website

Your website is the online equivalent of your physical store or company. So, it’s important to have it checked regularly to ensure that everything is in order.

It’s also important to note that search engines like Google are always rolling out algorithm updates to improve user experience. This means that you need to keep an eye on the latest search engine best practices, and comply with local SEO best practices if you run your own local business that rely on real foot traffic of customers.

Considering the ever changing nature of the SEO landscape, it’s recommended that websites are audited at 3 times in a year. Doing this allows you to spot any issue on time and fix them immediately.

Top SEO Audit Tools in 2021 – Paid

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SEMrush

SEMrush is an industry leader in SEM (search engine marketing) and SEO software. The platform offers a number of SEO auditing tools, including on-page SEO checker, a site audit utility and backlink auditing capabilities.

SEMrush can be used to review your website’s SEO performance. While there are many tools focused exclusively on off-page, on-page or technical ranking factors, SEMrush is one of the few most popular software that boosts multiple capabilities for all the three areas of SEO auditing.

The technical site audit software will analyze your website and spot errors. The on-page SEO checker ensures that your web pages are fully optimized to rank for your target keywords. The off-page audit tool can detect harmful and low-quality backlinks.

Price & Access

Subscription starts at $99.95 monthly for a single user license.

There’s a free trial option that allows you to test out the platform with limited features.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is another market leader when it comes to SEO and SEM solutions. The platform’s SEO audit tools are proven to be effective in testing on-page, off-page and technical SEO performance.

Ahrefs is one of the best and most reliable tools for detecting diverse SEO issues that can hamper your website’s ranking. Businesses and marketers can use it to fix broken links, redirect issues, and spammy backlinks. You can also conduct a comprehensive keyword research.

In short, it’s an all-in-one platform for all your SEO solutions.

Pricing & Access

Subscription options range from $99 monthly to $999 monthly, depending on the number of user licenses and features you’re including in your package.

There’s also an option for a 7-day trial for $7, giving you the opportunity to play round the platform before deciding whether to subscribe or not.

Moz

Moz is another popular SEO platform that you can use to conduct a thorough website audit and discover opportunities for improvement. Just as SEMrush and Ahrefs, Moz offers quality analysis tools that help you carry out effective on-page, off-page and technical SEO auditing.

Moz can be very useful for an SEO professional or agency that needs to audit every aspect of their website’s performance.

This software is a good starting point for detecting issues, even if you may need additional specialized software down the lane to drill down and identify more specific site issues.

Moz is one of the best SEO tools that allows you to schedule regular crawls, track changes in issues over time, and see how each change impacts your website’s performance.

Pricing & Access

The basic subscription package starts at $99/month.

However, the platform offers a 30-day free trial to allow you to test out their SEO audit software before subscribing.

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is specifically designed to crawl websites and reveal technical and on-page SEO issues.

While it will be incorrect to describe Screening Frog as an all-in-one platform, it does an outstanding job when all you need is to detect technical SEO issues such as redirect issues, canonical URLs, meta descriptions and meta titles.

With the free version of Screaming Frog, you can find broken links, link errors, poorly HTML tags, duplicate pages, and a range of other on-page and technical SEO issues affecting up to 500 URLs.

The paid version, on the other hand, has more features including unlimited URL crawling capability, new customization options and ability to integrate the software with Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

Pricing & Access

There’s a free version, but you can only crawl a maximum of 500 URLs. To crawl more URLs and enjoy additional features, you’ll have to purchase a single-user license starting at £149/year.

Alexa

In the past, Alexa managed its own site ranking system called “Alexa Rank” that ranked websites on the web by popularity. Now, following its acquisition by Amazon, Alexa offers SEO analytics tools for marketing professionals and marketing agencies.

Alexa is a comprehensive, all-in-one SEO auditing tool repurposed to rival longstanding marketing tools like Ahrefs, and SEMrush. The tool provides highly sophisticated functionality for users.

It can be used to check and analyze technical SEO issues, identify and prioritize the most relevant keywords to target, enhance on-page optimization and track backlink profile.

Pricing & Access

The platform offers many different pricing options for its SEO audit software. For digital marketer or marketing agencies, the full marketing suite for SEO tools starts at $149 monthly.

There’s a free 14-day trial option so you can check how the site works before proceeding to make payment.

Free SEO Audit Tools

Google Search Console

Formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools, Google Search Console is Google-owned product that allows you to identify SEO issues and receive recommendations on how to fix them.

GSC has a user-friendly dashboard that allows you to use features such as Insights which provides clear information about your site’s indexation and accessibility issues. The tool also provides insights about your structured data, mobile friendliness, page load speed, and content quality.

Instead of waiting for Google bot to crawl and index your new web page, you can easily submit your pages for indexation, which is much faster.

Google Search Console tool allows to:

  • Monitor, test, and track your AMP pages
  • Review your index coverage
  • Generate customized audit reports
  • Help understand how your keywords are ranking
  • Provide stats directly from Google bot
  • Highlight pages with 404 or 500 errors

Pricing and Access

It’s completely free to use Google Search Console 

GTmetrix

GTmetrix isn’t actually a website crawler. Rather, it’s more of a testing software that reviews your web pages’ performance in the search results page, and provides you with accurate insights about the health of your site.

A test only takes a few seconds to complete, after which you will get to view every piece of information, from the page’s size and the web page loading time to factors such as image scaling, plus scripts and caching.

GTmetrix allows you to test and analyze 25 SEO parameters. For example, you can use the parameters to identify possible issues that might hinder your website’s performance.

It displays performance metrics using four graphs such as Web Vitals, Page Size & Request Counts, Page Timings and Performance/Structured scores.

Additionally, it can simulate page performance on more than 20 different mobile devices and variants.

GTmetrix examines your web page performance from up to 44 servers in about 22 different locations around the globe.

Pricing & Access

GTmetrix is completely free.

 

SERPsim

Have you been interested in checking how your web pages are appearing on Google’s search results page? SERPsim could be the best tool to do the job

SERPsim stands for SERP simulator because it’s capable of generating snippets of your pages’ rankings on Google. It will show how each page is faring in the SERPs and use the insights to optimize on-page data such as page titles and meta tags.

SERPsim features allow you:

  • Save your SERP previews as an image
  • Copy Google snippet tool data to the clipboard
  • Encourage sharing your SERPsim projects with colleagues and clients
  • Download existing page titles, meta titles and meta descriptions
  • Pricing & Access
  • SERPsim is free to use.

WordCounter

WordCounter is an on-page SEO optimization tool that comes handy when you need to determine the word count and keyword density on your web pages.

Essentially, the WordCounter saves you the stress of counting the words in your content manually. All you need to do is copy and paste the content you want to analyze or enter the web page’s URL and the tool will generate information on the number of words it has, the recurring words and their corresponding keyword density.

That way, you can easily compare your website with the top ranking pages, and use the resulting insights to improve the quality of the content on your website.

Summarily, the WordCounter feature helps you to:

  • Count the precise number of words or character on a page
  • Determine the keyword density of a particular page
  • Provide a list of commonly used words on a page

 

Pricing & Access

WordCounter is completely free.

Wrapping up

Each tool on this list has its own unique advantages, some perform better than others in certain departments.  This is why you should consider checking out several options to see which ones help you achieve the best results.

For example, you can run your website through two or the crawlers, examine your web pages with on-page checkers, or optimize your content quality using tools like SEMrush or WordCounter.

Using more than one SEO audit tool can help you validate errors and prioritize what you need to fix right now and what you can expect in terms of positive movements in the SERPs.