10 Best SEO Audit Tools (Free & Paid)
Audits of the site’s SEO performance should be performed regularly by every site owner. They make it possible for you to detect and fix the primary problems that can have a negative effect on your search rankings. However, if you want to perform this task manually, it may take a significant amount of time. The use of SEO audit software helps to automate the process while also guaranteeing that all of the significant aspects are examined.
In this piece, we take a look at the top 10 SEO audit tools and discuss how using these tools can assist improve your website’s performance in search engines.
10 of the Best Tools for SEO Auditing
1. The Site Audit Tool from SEMrush
SEMrush is one of the most popular options for optimizing websites because of its complete range of search engine optimization (SEO) tools. It offers dozens of tools that cover a wide range of tasks, from researching keywords to monitoring rankings.
One of these tools is a robust SEO audit program that gives you everything you require to perform an in-depth examination of important SEO parameters.
Principal Attributes
The Site Audit tool from SEMrush will crawl your website in order to evaluate any potential technical SEO issues and provide you an overall picture of how well your site is doing.
Your website will receive a score indicating its overall health following each audit, in addition to scores indicating its crawlability, HTTPS, site performance, internal linking, and markup.
In addition, there are charts that display the loading speed as well as any content problems, JS faults, or CSS flaws.
The technical SEO audit program will provide you with a list of the most pressing problems that require your attention. You have the ability to arrange the jobs in an ascending or descending order of significance, and powerful filters let you divide the problems into other categories.
There are notes on how to address issues that occur, but the instructions are not particularly extensive, so it is possible that you will need to do more research in order to discover how to fix the issue.
With the help of SEMRush’s built-in progress tracker, you can monitor whether or not the state of your SEO is getting better. You may use this to assess whether or not your website has improved since a prior crawl by contrasting the results of the two.
Cost
Both a free and a premium edition of SEMrush’s platform are available to users. SEMrush’s free edition will do an audit on up to one hundred web pages at a time, however this number is limited. This cost-free audit can be done as often as once every week.
You will need to subscribe to a subscription plan in order to use the full capabilities of the SEO audit tool. There are three possible courses of action:
• Pro, a monthly fee of $119.95
• Guru, a monthly fee of $229.95
• Business, a monthly fee of $449.95
You have the ability to crawl up to 100,000 total pages every month with the Pro plan (20,000 for each of your projects).
Crawling an unlimited number of pages each month is included in the Guru plan.
SEMrush gives new users the opportunity to test out all of their software’s capabilities with a free trial that lasts for seven days.
2. Google’s Control Panel for Search
The Google Search Console is a tool developed by Google that gives website owners the ability to monitor how well their site performs in the Google Search engine.
The software not only displays where you now stand for specific keywords, but it also includes a number of SEO audit tools that can be used to identify and fix any technical SEO problems.
Principal Attributes
You may check to see if Google’s web crawlers are able to reach your site by using Google Search Console. This will guarantee that all of your newly created pages are being indexed, which will make them available for use in search results.
In addition, the technical SEO audit tool comes with a number of reports that may be used to gain in-depth comprehension of significant search parameters.
Using the Core Web Vitals report, you will be able to examine how the performance of your pages compares to actual world statistics. You’ll be able to see from this which ones load quickly and which ones have room for improvement.
The Mobile Usability study examines your mobile website to determine whether or not it is user-friendly for mobile devices.
You’ll be able to review coverage, mobile usability, and any other concerns associated with individual URLs by using the capability known as URL Inspection.
If there are any problems, Google will provide a list of the pages that are affected, a description of the problem, as well as possible solutions that you may use to fix it.
After you have resolved the issue, you can then finish the validation process on Google’s website to have the company confirm that the problem has been resolved.
Because Google Search Console does not provide a method to begin sitewide crawls on demand, its efficiency is lower compared to that of some of the other SEO audit tools included in this list.
Cost
The Google Search Console is a service that is offered at no cost. To access Google search data and make use of the platform, all that is required of you is to authenticate ownership of your website.
3. SiteChecker Pro
SiteChecker Pro is a web crawler that is hosted in the cloud and gives you the ability to discover any technical SEO issues that are affecting your websites.
A comprehensive technical SEO audit may be generated for your website in a matter of minutes when you use the SEO audit tool.
The software also comes equipped with a broad variety of other SEO tools, such as rank tracking, site monitoring, and backlink tracking, amongst others.
Principal Attributes
When conducting your SEO audits, SiteChecker provides you a significant amount of control over the process. Crawls can be pre-scheduled, and there are a variety of filters available to choose from in order to exclude specific categories and pages from the audit.
Every audit delivers a total score for the site in addition to a comprehensive list of problems at both the site level and the page level.
The software will notify you through email whenever there are significant problems with your website and provide you with the relevant information so that you can make the necessary adjustments as soon as possible.
SiteChecker will also undertake daily monitoring of your performance and will add updates to your to-do list for you to attend to.
The comprehensive how-to manuals that SiteChecker provides are another another outstanding feature of this product. You can learn how to fix any of the problems that are hurting your site by using these resources.
Cost
The SEO auditing program known as SiteChecker Pro requires payment to use. It is available in three different plans:
The most fundamental plan costs $29 per month, while the startup and growing plans cost $49 and $99 per month, respectively.
By purchasing a yearly plan instead of a monthly one, you can save 20%.
Every package comes with with an infinite number of site audit reports, in addition to other services like local rank tracking, site monitoring that is available around the clock, daily rank tracking, backlink tracking, and more.
SiteChecker Pro gives users the opportunity to test out their platform with a free trial that lasts for seven days.
4. Ahrefs Search Engine Optimization Site Audit Tool
Another prominent piece of SEO software, Ahrefs, is utilized by a great number of websites in order to improve their positions in search results. It offers, among other things, tools for conducting keyword research, tracking rank, conducting content research, and gathering intelligence on competitors.
Principal Attributes
The Site Audit function will crawl all of your website’s pages in order to examine essential SEO aspects like page speed, HTML tags, incoming links, and outbound links.
This program also does an analysis of the quality of your material, searching for duplicates and identifying pages with low word counts.
Ahrefs provides a list of the main SEO difficulties, as well as a general health score for your website, charts with crawl information, and an overall health score.
You are able to easily filter data, create individualized views and reports, and discover audit information that are most pertinent to your needs thanks to the Data Explorer tool.
Crawls can be scheduled to run on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis depending on your needs. These will be performed automatically by Site Audit, and the findings will be saved.
The tool gives you the ability to monitor the changes that have occurred since the last crawl. If you observe that the score for a page has gone up or down, you can click the Show changes toggle to examine what aspects of the page have changed.
Cost
Because Ahrefs is a premium SEO software, in order to utilize the Site Audit tool, you will need to pay up for one of their plans.
There are four options available:
The Lite plan costs $99 per month, while the Standard plan costs $179 per month, the advanced plan costs $399 per month, and the Agency plan costs $999 per month.
If you pay for your plan in annual installments rather than monthly ones, you will receive a discount equivalent to two free months.
You will receive 10,000 crawl credits per month if you go with the Lite package. Every credit is equivalent to one page of the audit. If you need to crawl more pages, you have the option of paying an additional $50 to receive 500,000 additional credits.
Crawl credits are awarded to you at the rate of 500,000 for the Standard plan and 1.25 million for the Advanced plan.
5. Screaming Frog SEO Spider (Screaming Frog)
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a piece of SEO audit software that, among other things, lets you extract and audit data, allowing you to more effectively correct SEO issues and enhance the SEO of your website.
The application has a very high productivity rate and is able to scan both small and large websites while displaying the results in real time for the user.
Principal Attributes
You may check all significant SEO elements with the assistance of Screaming Frog. You will be able to assess your metadata and site architecture, as well as detect and fix broken links, duplicate content, and redirects.
Additionally, URLs that have been prohibited by robots.txt, meta robots, or nofollow tags are displayed by the software.
You even have the ability to easily construct XML Sitemaps and Image XML Sitemaps with Screaming Frog, and you have advanced control over which URLs are included.
You are able to set crawls to run at particular intervals whenever you use the Screaming Frog SEO Spider, and the data can be automatically exported to any location you choose, including Google Sheets.
In addition, the software enables you to connect your Google Analytics and Search Console accounts, so enhancing the amount of information that can be gleaned from the reports.
Screaming Frog is a desktop application, and its user interface is not as user-friendly as the interfaces of competing SEO audit systems.
Cost
There is a free version and a commercial version of SEO Spider. The free edition includes a restriction of 500 URLs that can be crawled, and there are also limits placed on other capabilities.
For example, there is no integration between Google Analytics and Search Console, and you also are unable to schedule your crawls in advance.
You will have access to all of the tool’s features, including the ability to crawl an unlimited number of sites, if you purchase the commercial version.
There is an annual fee of $199.
6. Bing Webmaster Tools
Even while it is not as widely used as Google’s search engine, the Bing search engine nevertheless has the potential to be a key source of relevant traffic.
Microsoft has developed a platform known as Bing Webmaster Tools that enables website owners to monitor and control how well their pages perform in the Bing search engine.
Crawling your site whenever you want to check for typical SEO concerns is possible with the help of the Site Scan tool.
Principal Attributes
You are able to manually start scans from within your Webmaster account while using the Bing Site Scan feature. Your website can be crawled using scans, or you can use the program to scan your sitemap instead.
After you have finished a scan, the results will be available for viewing on a page that contains thorough reports. It gives a concise summary of important facts like the current scan status, the number of pages that have been scanned, the number of mistakes, and the number of warnings.
The next section of the report details all of the problems, faults, and warnings that were discovered during the crawl.
You are able to view the overall number of pages that have been impacted by each error, and by clicking on the problem, you can view the individual pages that have been damaged.
There is a lack of detail provided by Bing Webmaster Tools in comparison to other SEO audit tools, and you are unable to automate or plan your audits using this tool.
Cost
The use of Bing Webmaster Tools is completely free. After you have signed up, you will be able to connect your website and immediately begin monitoring the state of your site’s SEO.
7. The Lighthouse by Google
Google Lighthouse is a free and open-source software application that improves the search engine optimization (SEO) of web pages.
It is possible to execute the tool either within ChromeDevTools, as a Node module, or directly from the command line. In addition, there is a Chrome extension that may be used to execute the utility.
In order to carry out an inspection utilizing ChromeDevtools or the Chrome extension, you will first need to navigate to the website that you wish to examine. After that, you can begin the audit, and you can view the findings without leaving the page.
Principal Attributes
A score ranging from 0 to 100 is provided by Lighthouse for each of the following categories: performance, accessibility, best practices, and search engine optimization.
You are able to view specific insights into each category by drilling down into the audit further.
During the SEO audit, the software checks for certain aspects of the website, such as whether or not: • The meta title is present
• A meta description is present
• The page has a successful HTTP status code
• Links are crawlable
• The page is not blocked from indexing
• The robots.txt is valid
• Image elements have alt attributes
• The website is mobile-friendly
There is currently no time-saving technique to examine a large number of pages all at once using Google Lighthouse; nonetheless, it is useful for scanning individual web pages.
Cost
Google Lighthouse is a piece of free software that does SEO audits. Downloading a Chrome extension is all that is required to use the tool; then, navigate to the page you want to examine.
8. PageSpeed Insights (PageSpeed)
Another SEO auditing tool developed by Google is called PageSpeed Insights. Similar to Lighthouse, the tool examines the URLs you provide and assigns a score to your site depending on the results of the tests it runs.
PageSpeed Insights places an emphasis not only on load times but also on the overall user experience.
You will need to go to the PageSpeed website in order to use the tool. Once there, you will need to enter the URL that you want to scan and then start the audit.
Principal Attributes
PageSpeed Insights gathers its information from field data, which is based on the experiences of actual users when they browse your website using Google Chrome.
The audit report is divided into three parts: audits that were passed, diagnostics, and potential possibilities.
Audits that have been passed will highlight all of the aspects of SEO in which the URL performs adequately.
The diagnostics section displays the specifics on certain areas of your page’s performance along with suggestions on how to improve those elements.
In the section titled “Opportunities,” you will find a list of the elements that have the most impact on the performance of your website and that, if addressed, will result in the highest gain.
PageSpeed Insights is an excellent tool for doing an audit of a single URL in a short amount of time, however it does not perform well when applied to a whole website.
In addition to this, unlike some of the top SEO audit tools available today, it does not have the capability to edit or compare data.
Cost
PageSpeed Insights is a free auditing tool that may be used for SEO.
9. SERanking Website Audit
The all-in-one SEO software known as SERanking comes equipped with a tool for conducting technical audits of websites. Using the audit tool, you will have access to a solution that provides you with all of the capabilities required to analyze the important search factors associated with your website.
Principal Attributes
The SEO audit tool that SERanking provides enables you to initiate audits directly from your account by merely inputting the URL of the website. The tool can crawl up to 1,000 pages in less than two minutes, and it compiles the most important data into a report that provides an overview.
You may view a health score, the number of pages that have been crawled, the top five issues that need to be addressed in order to optimize the SEO of your site, and more there.
The software consists of various reports that provide additional insight into the audit’s findings in greater depth.
For instance, there is a chart that provides a comprehensive overview of the total number of pages that are not currently indexed by search engines, in addition to the factors that contribute to the pages’ exclusion from indexing.
You will be able to study the dynamics of the health of your site by using the data comparison function, which allows you to compare any audit data with past reports.
You can also use SERanking to produce an XML sitemap that you can submit to Google in order to indicate which sites it should crawl.
Cost
Because SERanking is a commercial service, in order to use the web audit tool, you will need to sign up for a plan that gives you access to all of the software’s SEO features.
Essential, Pro, and Business are the three tiers of available plans. The amount that you are required to pay for each plan is determined by the refresh period that you choose for the search rankings check feature, in addition to the type of payment installments that you choose to make.
For the rankings check frequency, you have a choice between once per day, once per three days, or once per week.
If you choose to pay for it in monthly installments and choose for daily checks, your cost will be $39 each month. Although less frequent ranking checks bring down the cost, this also brings down the number of pages that may be audited in a given month.
Using the daily check plan that was just described, you will be able to examine up to 7,000 pages for each of your websites and up to 40,000 pages overall every single month.
This number increases to a total of 250,000 and 700,000 pages, respectively, when using the Pro plan and the Business plan.
When you sign up for SERanking for the first time, you are given access to a free trial that gives you access to test out the platform for a period of 14 days. During the course of the trial, you will be able to perform an audit on a maximum of 5,000 pages overall and 1,000 pages each day.
10. SEO Analyzer
A well-known authority in SEO, Neil Patel, developed the Ubersuggest SEO software, which includes the SEO Analyzer. In addition to the tool for doing site audits, Ubersuggest also includes tools for conducting keyword research, tracking ranks, and monitoring backlinks.
Principal Attributes
The user interface of SEO Analyzer is intuitive, and it allows you to set up separate projects for each of the websites that you wish to examine.
Although it does not provide the same capabilities as other platforms to schedule or filter your crawls, it is possible to launch them by rapidly entering the URL and hitting a search button.
Multiple components, such as overview metrics, a list of pages detected, and a list of SEO concerns, are included in the report that was generated from the SEO audit.
The list of errors that the program generates is accompanied by detailed instructions on how to correct each one.
The tool also includes a component for site performance, which displays the typical amount of time required for your most frequently visited pages to load. In addition to that, there are measurements for both visual stability and interactiveness (how much your page layout shifts while loading).
Cost
There is a free version and a paid version available of SEO Analyzer. You are only allowed three search queries each day with the free edition.
Additionally, it restricts data, as you are only able to observe a few SEO concerns and whether or not an SEO audit was passed.
There are three different levels of paid subscriptions available:
The individual rate is $29 per month, the business rate is $49 per month, and the enterprise and agency rate is $99 per month.
People who only need to administer a single website should select the Individual plan. You are able to manage and audit up to seven different locations with the Business plan.
You can also get a lifetime license for SEO Analyzer, which grants you access to the program for an unending period of time in exchange for a single payment. The price for the Individual plan is $290, while the price for the Business plan is $490.
For first-time users, SEO Analyzer offers a free trial that lasts for seven days.
Are the Costs Justifiable for SEO Audit Tools?
You can ensure that your website has the greatest possible rankings by using SEO audit tools, which let you assess critical SEO parameters.
There are a large number of aspects that can have an effect on search engine optimization (SEO), and SEO audit tools allow you check them in a much more efficient manner.
The following is a list of some of the most common characteristics that are assessed by a decent SEO audit tool:
• Track crawlability to ensure that Google is able to reach your pages.
• Check for broken links
• Look for duplicate material
• Make sure pages aren’t being blocked by robots.txt
• Perform an analysis of the metadata and page titles
In addition to analyzing your website, SEO audit tools also quantify the results of their research, which makes it much simpler for you to comprehend the state of your website as a whole.
In addition, the top website audit solutions integrate with additional important platforms, such as Google Analytics, and they allow you to automate and pre-schedule your website crawls.
SEO Audits Done By Hand Vs. SEO Audits Done By Machine
You may check the SEO health of your website in a number of different ways besides using SEO audit tools.
A manual SEO audit is something that many site owners opt to have done. In most cases, they are carried out by SEO professionals who have a comprehensive understanding of all of the significant SEO considerations.
Manual SEO audits may take longer to complete, but they have some advantages over their automated counterparts. Automated SEO audits can be completed considerably more quickly.
An SEO practitioner will conduct a manual SEO audit, during which many of the same features as an automated SEO audit will be checked, in addition to factors that software cannot evaluate.
One of the tasks that an SEO expert might perform is to examine the way in which human visitors interact with a website. The quality of the user experience will eventually have an impact on how well users engage with your sites, and as a result, it will have an impact on your search rankings.
Conclusion
The field of search engine optimization (SEO) is becoming increasingly competitive; nevertheless, all of the tools that are currently available to site owners are making it easier to ensure that one does everything possible to optimize their own website.
Experiment with a few of the tools provided in this article to determine which ones work best for you. Many have the same capabilities, and some can even be combined with one another. But because everyone has different tastes in design and workflow, you might discover that some of them are a better fit for you than others.