The Ultimate Guide to SEO Audit Tools

The Ultimate Guide to SEO Audit Tools

SEO audit refers to a process of evaluating all aspects of a website that impact its performance in search engines and identify opportunities for improvement. The process involves analysing on-page elements, content, website speed, backlink profile, and technical issues.

SEO audit is important as it provides insights about the website’s performance in search, identifying issues that need to be addressed, and suggesting improvements for enhancing the website’s organic search traffic.

An SEO audit can help you:

• Ensure that your website is adhering to the best practices of SEO recommended by search engines.
• Identify opportunities to enhance your online presence.
• Discover and rectify any issues that may harm your search rankings.
• Adjust your content marketing strategy and link-building approach for long-term success.

Regular SEO audits are an integral part of holistic SEO.

How to perform an SEO audit?

For performing an SEO audit, you need a good checklist and a proper SEO tool:

       1.Choose your tools

SEO audits are impossible without special tools. Audit process massive amounts of data about the site’s traffic, technical elements, backlink profile, content, and rankings, among other things- in addition to competitor insights.

       2.Go over your SEO audit checklist

Basics that need to be checked for any website:

• The pages’ accessibility and indexability in Ahrefs Site Audit.
• Broken links and broken backlinks in Ahrefs Site Audit.
• Duplicate content.
• Manual actions (Google penalties) in Google Search Console.
• Page Experience report in Google Search Console.
• Core Web Vitals metrics in Google Search Console.
• Mobile-friendliness issues in Google Search Console.
• Issues related to basic on-page elements: missing H1 tags, meta descriptions, and title tags in Ahrefs Site Audit.

Technical SEO Audit Tools

     1.Google Search Console

With the use of Google Search Console, you can-

• Track statistics like clicks, impressions, position, and click-through rates (CTRs)
• Check your stats in Google Discover and Google News
• Tracks featured snippets like sitelinks, breadcrumbs, AMP, video snippets, and more.

Additionally, it provides valuable insights into aspects such as Google algorithm updates, site errors, and more.

      2.Google Analytics

Google Analytics tools can be used to track your site’s overall performance data across a wide range of channels, not just Google organic channels. It also helps in creating a story that is easy for your clients to follow due to its highly robust data-gathering mechanism and reports driven by insights.

      3.Google Trends

Google Trends provides a ton of data that aids in informing your SEO strategy, showing you the interest in a search term over the span of months to years. The tool aids in keyword search, with data showing the peak popularity of these terms.

Basically, when you search for a term on Google Trends, the interest over time graph illustrates the relative relevance of a term and how highly important it is. The higher the number, the more traffic it is receiving at that particular moment.

But, as a statistics tool, Google Trends should just reveal what kind of searches you should expect from going after a given keyword.

       4.Google Rich Results Testing Tool

Google Rich Results testing tool enables testing structured data.

Using code input or URL input, enable validating structured data according to Google’s standards.

Google recently took the rich result test out of beta and announced that it would deprecate the older structured data testing tool, adding more and more features to the rich result testing tool.

        5.Google Mobile-Friendly Test

Mobile-friendly test tools enable you to easily carry out a mobile site test, which tells you about a website’s score in terms of mobile responsiveness. The tool is inspired to calculates the score that Google does.

Google recommends the use of this tool as a part of a check-and-repair process for mobile usability issues.

In today’s era, more and more people use mobile devices to access and browse websites. This makes it essential for webmasters to provide full functionality of the website regardless of the screen size or device they are using.

         6.Semrush

Semrush has a comprehensive suite of SEO tools that aid in accomplishing a ton while saving a lot of time, from tools that can assist with SEO audits to link building and content marketing.

Semrush runs through over 120 checks when performing an SEO audit. It further helps in identifying issues with things such as page speed, crawlability, and backlinks, as well as security checks and on-page.

         7.Sitebulb

Sitebulb is a crawler and site audit tool in the same vein as Screaming Frog, providing information and diagnosing things such as crawlability issues, on-page SEO, backlinks, and much more.

         8.Raven Tools

Raven Tools is not just a site auditing tool, but also can help track keywords and ongoing SEO performance. The tools include Google Data Studio integrations, comprehensive marketing reports that you can white label with your agency, competitor research, keyword research, a backlink checker, and social media functions.

The following are the Raven tools pricing plan that includes a set number of domains/campaigns you can use, users, and positioning checks that increase with each specific plan.

• Small Business – $39/month.
• Starter – $79/month.
• Grow – $139/month.
• Thrive – $249/month.
• Lead – $399/month.

          9.Ahrefs

Ahrefs uses a “credits” system in its pricing structure that may not be suitable for those who need to stretch their dollar.

Ahrefs is best known as Semrush’s counterpart in the same space: a comprehensive suite of SEO tools that are designed to help you perform comprehensive technical SEO audits, backlink audits, content gap analyses, keyword gap analyses, and more.

Pricing structure of Ahrefs:

• Lite plan
• Standard plan
• Advanced plan
• Enterprise plan

          10.SEO Pro Google Chrome Extension

The extension is like having a complete SEO toolkit in a browser, which is ready to help you with any SEO task. Getting all essential data for a webpage:

• Metadata
• Canonical tags
• Schema
• Links

On-Page Audit Tools

           1.Frase.io

Frase.io is an extraordinary, comprehensive on-page SEO cloud-based application that enables you to dial on-page SEO to extraordinary levels.

Frase.io is an intelligent automation and content optimization (content editor) tool providing comprehensive insights (like content gaps, target keyword, keyword research tool, and content score) to businesses and content creators globally. This software helps businesses and writers create better content while optimizing it for search engine rankings.

           2.Surfer SEO

Surfer aids in identifying content gaps, adding missing context, and fine-tuning your content around the entities and topics that matter to Google and AI Assistants such as ChatGPT.

            3.Inlinks

Inlinks is the first entity-based Semantic SEO tool that uses a proprietary semantic analyzer and knowledge graph for delivering expert-level data for on-page and on-site optimization. 

When you create a new project, InLinks first performs a semantic analysis of your content to retrieve all entities found. This list of entities can be seen on the "graph" page and are used for internal link & schema automation, and to provide you with detailed guides on how to optimize your content.

            4.Page Optimizer Pro

Page Optimizer Pro is a comprehensive on-page optimization cloud-based application developed by SEO professional Kyle Roof. It uses edge analysis based on your top 10 competitors (rather than just direct competitor analysis, such as other tools).

            5.SEO Minion: Google Chrome Extension

SEO Minion helps in identifying daily SEO tasks like On-Page SEO analysis, Broken Link Checking, SERP Preview and more.

SEO Minion is a free Chrome extension developed by Akash that provides a suite of tools to help with daily SEO tasks. With this extension, you can analyze the on-page SEO of any webpage, check for broken links, preview your website on a real Google search result, and much more.

Another great feature of SEO Minion is the SERP preview tool, which allows you to preview your website on a real Google search result and update it in real-time.