The first step of the SEO practices is the Site Audit. Are you looking for the best SEO audit tools? Then, you have come to the right place.
SEO evolves numerous times in a calendar year. Every Google Algorithm update gives SEO experts/consultants an introduction to fixing newer issues. Recently, Google came with a Page Experience update. Preceding this update, SEO audit tools like SEMrush introduced Core Web Vitals.
As per Ahrefs, “68% of the online experience of any business starts with SEO.”
In this article, you will be getting the 10 best SEO tools that we use in our everyday practice. We try to provide unbiased information on all the best tools. Therefore, please don’t consider the following listing of tools as our ranking order.
Kindly comment and share if the content added value to your SEO practice. Also, if you’re looking for Site Audit, check our SEO Auditing Service package.
Why Do You Need SEO Audit Tools?
By performing site audit, you can rank your website in SERP. For this, you require a professional SEO tool (paid or free).
Every tool has its benefits and limitations. Therefore, unfortunately, SEO practitioners must know about all the available tools that diagnose the errors over the website.
The major issues or areas of improvement that an SEO tool provides are the following:
- Content issues – duplication or canonicalization
- Content gap and opportunity
- Website loading speed and Core Web Vital metrics
- Broken links, redirect links, and other HTTP status codes
- Number of backlinks and referring domains
- Domain authority or domain rating, spam score
- Crawling and indexing related issues – no index tags, blocked by robots, etc.
- Duplicate or no title tags and meta description. Also, title and meta tags with low characters
- Low content (words) in web pages
Few SEO tools provide advanced information like the following:
- Site health score
- Keywords ranking with history
- Organic traffic from inspection
- New and lost backlinks and referring domains
- Top pages, top subdirectory, top subdomain, etc.
- Opportunity on content and backlinks by comparing competitors
- Complete competitor analysis of backlinks referring domains and the keywords they rank
- Their competing pages and domains
Best SEO Audit Tools:
Disclaimer: As we have mentioned earlier, the following list of tools is not considered as a ranking of tools. We have listed tools that we familiarly use on a daily basis.
One of the fastest-growing best SEO audit tools is undoubtedly Semrush. The tool’s features and enhancements make every marketer’s work simplified. For example, in recent times, the tool introduced the “Search Intent” for keywords that you research.
This tool is an all-in-one tool for digital marketers majorly focusing on
- SEO audit
- domain overview
- paid advertising management
- organic traffic
- keyword research
- competitor research
- content marketing tools
- log file analyzer
- on-page SEO checker
- SEO content template
- local SEO
- Social media dashboard
- Agency solutions
When it comes to SEO audit, Semrush helps in analyzing
- on-page checklists
- crawlability issues
- robots blockages
- HTTP status code (broken links, redirects, internal server issues, etc.)
- Core Web Vitals
- organic traffic – monthly performance, country wise data, SERP features, etc.
- organic keywords and their position distribution
- keywords by intent
- competitors domain
- backlinks profile
- content gap and opportunity
- keyword gap and opportunity
- backlinks gap and opportunity
Features of Semrush:
- It crawls all the webpages in both mobile and desktop view and figures out 130+ SEO related issues.
- The SEO issues are divided into three categories: errors, warning, and notices.
- Also, even with a free plan, you can download the Site audit report to fix them.
- It has an advanced filter option to sort by pages and individual error types.
- Content marketing tools help in providing the content idea for any key phrase.
- Semrush is the only SEO tool that holds social media dashboard.
- You can integrate Google analytics with Semrush.
Semrush is a paid SEO tool, but it provides an option of 10 searches per day for free. To access site audit or more investigations and to explore tons of features, you should purchase them.
Semrush comes with three plans:
- Pro – $119.95/month
- Guru – $229.95/month
- Business – $449.95/month
Learn the complete comparison between Semrush and Ahrefs to choose the better premium SEO tool.
When it comes to data, there is nothing that can be compared to Ahrefs. It is one of the veteran tools to audit your website. This tool has numerous features that are clubbed under five categories. They are
- site audit,
- site explorer,
- keyword explorer,
- rank tracker,
- content explorer.
Site audit is the simple option to get all the details related to errors and improvement areas. Starting from the pages with low content in words, title and meta tags character, headers, image alt, internal links, backlinks, duplicate content, duplicate title, and meta tags.
Also, it audits the technical issues. For example, it identifies rendering resources like unused Java Scripts, CSS files, and HTML. It also ensures user experience by identifying broken links, orphan pages, hreflang, redirects, and other HTTP status codes.
You can also explore more under “Site Explorer” such as the following:
- Backlinks 2.0 – Backlinks, broken backlinks, referring domains, anchor text, referring IPs, internal backlinks, link inserted
- Organic Keywords 2.0 – Organic keyword, top pages, top subfolder, top subdomains, competing domains, competing pages, content gap
- Pages – Best by links, Best by links growth, top content
- Outgoing Links – Linked domains, anchors, and broken links
- Paid Search – PPC keywords, ads, paid pages
There are only a few changes between Ahrefs and Semrush in terms of site audit. Yet, both of these are considered the most preferred SEO audit tools by SEO experts across the globe.
Ahrefs Features:
- The tool crawls both desktop and mobile versions of a website and diagnoses almost 100+ SEO issues.
- It has a facility of scheduling automatic crawling daily, weekly, and monthly as per the plan chosen.
- It allows you to track the focused keywords and their position and visualize them for comparison.
- Site health is updated periodically, and data are historically stored.
- One of the pros of Ahrefs is filtering multiple parameters.
- Unlike Semrush, it doesn’t have Log File Analyzer.
- In keyword research, this tool is just fantastic in providing tons of data on matching phrases, questions, related terms, and search suggestions (LSI keywords).
Ahrefs comes with 4 plans:
- Lite – $99/month
- Standard – $179/month
- Advanced – $399/month
- Agency – $999/month
Also, you get 7 days trial for $7.
If you’re a beginner, you should explore Google Search Console (formerly known as Google Webmaster Tool). Google Search Console is one of the free and best SEO audit tools available and can be used by SEO marketers, web developers, and website owners to understand the performance and bugs of the website.
One of the best free SEO audit tools that help in figuring out most of the technical SEO issues like
- coverage
- sitemap
- crawl stats
- HTTP status code
- indexing
- security issues
- rich results issues
- internal and external links
- mobile usability or friendliness
- Core Web Vitals
- keywords positions
Recently, Google Algorithm came with Page Experience Update, which focuses on real-world user experience and Core Web Vitals as ranking factors. Since then, Google Search Console has introduced the page experience dashboard.
Organic traffic is reduced in many websites due to Core Web Vitals and other UX issues.
Google Search Console Feature:
Google Search Console allows Googlebot to crawl the complete website every day and provide the HTTP status code.
- These tools highlight the coverage (index) issues for multiple reasons. Most common is the Submitted URL marked “noindex,” Not Found 404, Soft 404, Blocked due to 4xx issues, page with a redirect, and alternate page with the proper canonical tag.
- It helps integrate sitemap.xml and periodically updates the URLs of web pages submitted into the sitemap.
- You can merge a Google analytics account with a Google search console.
- This tool helps you understand how your keywords perform organically (up to 1000 keywords).
- Also, it provides the performance calibrations like organic click, impression, CTR, and position from Google search engine.
- This is the only tool where you can remove the link juice from bad backlinks by disavowing them.
Pricing:
As we mentioned in the beginning, this tool comes free and is developed by Google Team.
Surfer is one of the best SEO audit tools that helps in auditing the content with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP).
Content is the king of marketing and optimizing them to the need of user intent in natural language is what a Googlebot looks for ranking.
Surfer SEO has three free features:
- Keyword Surfer Extension
- Content Editor Extension
- Free AI Outline Generator
Features that are not matched by any existing SEO tools:
- Content Planner – It helps in planning the content strategy.
- Create Online AI content – Search engines are answering machine that don’t have answer; it just ranks the best content that is available in the web.
- Content Editor – It provides AI-based suggestion on the keywords/key phrases to use for any targeted keyword.
- Content Audit – It optimises existing pages’ content quality and help with suggestions.
Surfer SEO Pricing:
- Basic Plan – $45/month
- Pro Plan – $99/month
- Business Plan – $199/month
Screaming Frog is not a cloud-based website application like other stand-out SEO audit tools. It is a software to be download and tests the technical and on-page SEO errors by crawling the complete website URLs.
It is one of the premium tools that provide a free option to crawl and diagnose up to 500 URLs. If your website has more than 500 URLs, it is better to get the paid version of Screaming Frog. This tool provides advanced auditing on the technical SEO aspects of your website.
It provides tons of data for both SEO marketers and website developers to rectify the bugs and induce best practices. Screaming Frog SEO Spider crawls the web pages and segments them into the following attributes:
- Overview dashboard
- Site structure
- Response times
- API
- Spelling & grammar
- Internal links
- External links
- Security issues
- Response codes
- Directives (Index, Noindex, Follow, Nofollow, None, No Archive, NoSnippet, Max-Snippet, Max-image-preview, Max-Video-Preview, NoODP, NoYDIR, NoImageIndex, translate)
- Page titles (pages with title tag, less than 30 characters, 30–60 characters, more than 60 characters)
- Meta descriptions (pages with meta description, over 155 characters, less than 70 characters, etc.)
- Meta keywords
- H1 & H2 headers
- Content analysis (spelling, grammar, low count, and duplicate content)
- Images (over 100 KB, missing alt text, missing alt attributes, alt text over 100 characters)
- Canonicals (contains canonical, self referring, canonicalized, missing, multiple, non-indexable canonical)
- Pagination
- Hreflang (contains Hreflang, non-200 hreflang, unlinked hreflang URLs, missing return links, inconsistent language & region return links, non-canonical return links, Noindex return links, incorrect language & region codes, etc.)
- AJAX
- AMP
- Structured data (contains structured data, missing, validation errors, validation warnings, parse errors, microdata URLs, JSON-LD URLs, RDFa URLs)
- Sitemaps (URLs in sitemap, URLs not in sitemap, orphan URLs, non-indexable URLs in sitemap, URLs in multiple sitemaps, XML sitemap with over 50k URLs, XML sitemap over 50MB)
- Page speed (eliminate render blocking resources, properly size images, defer offscreen images, minify CSS, minify JavaScript, remove unused CSS, remove unused JavaScript, serve images in next-gen formats, enable text compression, reduce initial server response time, avoid excessive DOM size, etc.)
In this, many features are accessible only to the authorized users (paid subscribers).
Screaming Frog SEO Spider Pricing:
It requires 149 Euros per year to become paid users and explore unlimited features.
Every SEO expert should have come across this tool. In addition, Moz has a chrome extension known as Moz bar that helps marketers check the domain authority and spam score of any website.
However, this tool has features like Ahrefs and SEMrush. It helps in auditing the site with
- Keyword research (keyword overview, keyword suggestions, SERP analysis)
- Inbound links
- Linking domains (page authority, domain authority)
- Anchor text
- Top pages
- Discovered and lost
- Compare link profiles
- Spam score
- Link intersect
- On-page grader
- On-demand crawler
- Rank checker
Options like link explorer, keyword research can be freely accessed for 10 searches for 28 months. Apart from that, you should purchase to explore all the features.
Pricing:
You can purchase the tool for $179/month. You also get 30 days free trial providing your credit card details.
Neil Patel is known for his SEO expertise, self branding, trial, and one of the best SEO audit tool Ubersuggest. Like the premium tools, Ubersuggest comes with multiple options like
- site audit,
- project dashboard,
- keyword rank tracking,
- keywords research (keywords ideas, questions related to keyword, mobile and desktop split),
- competing domains,
- content ideas,
- traffic analyzer,
- backlinks overview and opportunity.
Ubersuggest has also introduced the Chrome extension a year back. This extension is simply excellent like Moz bar. It provides the details of search volume, Searches Difficulty (SD), and Cost Per Click (CPC).
Also, it provides the search volume on devices, age-based. Apart from this, on the right side of the window, it telecasts the other keyword ideas with search volume, SD, and CPC up to 10 keywords.
The site audit offered by this tool briefs all issues or bugs around the technical, on-site, and off-site SEO.
Features:
- You can add your website as a project and get full access to site audit.
- Neil Patel’s team will also support you in rectifying the errors if you don’t find the solution.
- The issues are classified into three types: critical errors, warnings, and recommendations.
- Ubersuggest’s Chrome extension will help you understand any website’s performance like organic traffic, keywords ranking with segmentation, top pages, and top countries in a single click.
Pricing:
This tool has a few free options of three surfing for a login per day. Yet, it provides only limited information. As a bonus, they provide seven days free trial by providing your credit card details.
If you prefer to purchase the tool, you can select two billing structures across 3 plans.
Monthly Billing:
- Individual – $12/month
- Business – $20/month
- Enterprise – $40/month
Annual Billing:
- Individual – $120/month
- Business – $200/month
- Enterprise – $400/month
SpyFu is one of the best SEO audit tools that is underrated among SEO specialists. We often used to get pools to choose the best SEO tools in LinkedIn. The options will have Ahrefs, SEMrush by default and a few others, but we haven’t found SpyFu in the list.
Why is this tool remarkable to mention in our list, does your preferred SEO tool figure out negative keywords your website is ranking for? SpyFu does that. As the brand message clears, it is a compact tool for SEO and Pay Per Click (PPC).
This tool helps any marketer to
- perform SEO marketing campaigns,
- perform PPC analysis,
- access historical data,
- perform competitive analysis,
- perform backlink outreach,
- perform unlimited keyword research,
- perform unlimited domain projects,
- create custom reporting.
What can an SEO specialist explore with this tool?
- Historical keyword changes with graphical representation
- Top organic competitors in terms of keywords
- Shared organic keywords with our competitors
- Most valuable keywords that bring huge traffic to the website
- Newly ranked keywords
- Backlinks details
- SEO report with custom template
SpyFu SEO tool Features:
- It maps keywords ranking and organic traffic history regarding Google Algorithm updates.
- It evaluates duplicate and junk backlinks to disavow them.
- It helps you discover the possible ranking opportunities where you can through your workload.
- SpyFu compares content, keyword, backlinks with your competitors.
- It helps in removing the negative keywords.
- It tracks the website performance up to the last 15 years.
Pricing:
It comes with three plans:
- Lite – $9/month
- Basic – $39/month
- Professional – $79/month
Woorank is yet another best SEO audit tool that SEO professionals can have as an option. It is an SEO analysis and website review tool that helps in exploring
- SEO audit with recommendations
- keyword tracking
- advanced website analysis
- competitive analysis
- marketing checklists
- technical SEO issues (crawling, coverage, mobile friendliness, asset minification, cacheability, compression, and loading speed)
- on-page SEO (title, meta description, header tags, inbound links, external links, image alt, content quality, content counts, etc.)
- off-page SEO (backlink profiles and referring domains)
- Core Web Vital metrics
- Details of social media
- Technologies that embedded into the website
Pricing:
It provides 14 days of free trail. Post that, purchase any of the following three plans to explore more.
- Pro – $79.99/month
- Premium – $199.99/month
- Enterprise – Custom Pricin
GTmetrix is one of the best SEO audit tool to examine the website’s performance from the loading speed standpoint. However, it’s not a crawler to inspect the corners of the website.
Yet, SEO specialists still prefer this tool to analyze website performance. The dashboard provides six details
- GTmetrix Grade
- Performance Percentage
- Structure Percentage
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
- Total Blocking Time (TBT)
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
Following that, you will find the details on speed visualization like
- TTFB (Time to First Byte)
- First Contentful Paint (FCP)
- Time to Interactive
- LCP
- Onload Time
- Fully Load Time
Apart from this, you can go a little deeper in understanding all the parameters contributing to performance, structure, and waterfall.
You can access the video recording of the performance and historical data if you’re a subscriber of the premium plan.
