Search engines are an excellent traffic source for many blogs and indie publishers. Studies suggest that organic search accounts for more than 53% of website traffic on average across all industries.
But you won’t maximize the traffic you can get from search if your website isn’t optimized for it. Errors in indexing, content, or linking can seriously affect performance.
The best way to discover these errors is to use a search engine optimization (SEO) audit tool. These programs analyze all the pages on your website to find problems that can affect search performance.
Fix these issues, and your website will be better placed to take advantage of this high-value traffic source. In this article, I’ll introduce some of the best SEO audit tools available.
Tool Shortlist
Here’s the list of the best SEO audit platforms I’ll cover in this article.
- Netpeak Spider - SEO audit tool with site scraping features
- Screaming Frog - Powerful SEO audit tool with a generous free plan
- SERPwizz - Best SEO audit tool for lead generation
- SE Ranking - All-purpose SEO tool with audit features
- Agency Analytics - Agency reporting tool with features for SEO audits
- Semrush - Powerful digital marketing tool with audit features
- Moz Pro - A complete toolkit for tracking search performance
- ContentKing - Best tool for real-time SEO audit updates
- Ahrefs - SEO tool with a comprehensive feature set
- Google Search Console - Best free tool for understanding search performance
Comparison Criteria
What do I look for when I select the best SEO audit systems? Here’s a summary of my evaluation criteria:
- User Interface (UI): SEO can be complicated. A good UI takes the results of an audit and displays them in a way that is easy for people to understand.
- Usability: The tool needs to be easy to use. Software with many features is typically more complex, although nothing that will phase SEO experts.
- Integrations: Integrations bring the tools deeper into your workflow. Some of the tools on this list integrate with analytics or data software to add further context to reports.
- Value for $: These tools cover a whole range of price points, including free. Costs typically increase when the tool adds other SEO features or increases the crawl budget.
SEO Audit Software Key Features
SEO audit software has a different feature set to regular SEO tools. These are some of the things I look out for.
- Issue Coverage: SEO audits typically search for hundreds of different problems. These can include issues with search indexing, keywords, on-page SEO, robots.txt issues, internal linking, duplicate content, site structure, title tags, and AMP indexing.
- Issue Tracking: Many tools track errors over time so you can see how your efforts to improve your website pay off.
- Automated Audits: Some tools let you set up automated audits that run on your chosen frequency. Look for tools that send notifications to alert you of potential issues in new audits.
- Customized Reporting: Many agencies use SEO tools to provide audits for clients. If you run a digital marketing agency, look for features like the ability to create custom-branded reports.
- Crawl Budget: For the audit to be useful, you need a monthly crawl budget that is large enough to track all the pages on your site at the frequency you need.
- Explainers: If you aren’t familiar with SEO terms, it’s difficult to know what to do with the information provided in website audits. The best tools provide clear in-app explanations and solutions so you can fix the issue.
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Overviews Of The 10 Best SEO Audit Tools
Here’s a brief description of each SEO audit software solution to showcase each tool’s best use case, some noteworthy features, and screenshots to give a snapshot of the user interface.
1. Netpeak Spider - SEO audit tool with site scraping features
Netpeak Spider is an SEO crawler that allows you to audit or scrape data from any website. The audit can flag over 100 issues, from broken links to duplicate content and indexing issues. It then provides further information about each error and some direction for how to fix them.
One feature I like is the PageRank calculator. This allows you to see how authority from external links is spread throughout your site via your internal linking structure. Based on this report, you can make better internal linking decisions—for example, by sending more links to important pages that you want to rank.
Netpeak Spider lets you connect Google Analytics, Search Console, and Yandex.Metrica to provide the tool with more data on things like traffic, keywords, and customer segments. The tool also has a white label feature which allows you to add your own branding to the reports. This is a useful feature for SEO agencies that provide audits to external clients.
Netpeak Spider pricing starts at $78 for three months. The tool also offers a free version you can use to crawl up to 100,000 URLs.
2. Screaming Frog - Powerful SEO audit tool with a generous free plan
Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider is a popular crawler you can use to audit your website. The tool searches for hundreds of common on and off-page SEO errors so you can take steps to fix them and increase your keyword rankings.
The tool can find technical issues such as broken links, duplicate content, and title or metadata problems. It highlights these issues in an easy-to-view way so you can see the issues you need to fix. There’s even a spelling checker you can use to spot typos at scale.
The user interface is clear and provides access to all the features and SEO reports. Although, the sheer amount of data available means it might be overwhelming for beginners at first.
The tool integrates with Google PageSpeed Insights, Analytics, and Search Console. This provides further data straight from Google, increasing the insight you get from your reports.
Screaming Frog has a generous free plan that lets you crawl up to 500 URLs on a one-time audit. This makes it one of the best free SEO audit tools available. The paid version costs $149 per year and has no URL limit, more advanced features, and allows you to schedule crawls.
3. SERPwizz - Best SEO audit tool for lead generation
SERPwizz is an SEO toolkit with plenty of auditing tools. The audit feature checks your website's most important elements, including title tags, links, indexing issues, backlinks, and XML sitemaps.
The tool stands out due to its embeddable audit tool. This lets agencies offer SEO audits as a lead generation tool on their website. If someone requests an audit, you will see this within your dashboard alongside information about their website. You can add your agency branding to reports to provide clients with a personalized experience.
SERPwizz pricing starts at $19 per month. The $99 per month pro plan includes all features, integrations, and the ability to white label reports. You can grab a free trial of the software to test it out, and there’s also a limited free plan.
4. SE Ranking - All-purpose SEO tool with audit features
SE Ranking is a complete SEO platform with features including rank tracking, competitor analysis, and a powerful keyword research tool. Meanwhile, its website audit features have everything you need to learn about your website’s search performance.
The tool shows all the most important metrics from within the dashboard. The overall health score provides a quick overview of the site’s SEO health, while other reports show your most critical issues and problems by category.
Each issue comes with a full description and a guide you can use to fix the problem. The tool tracks progress, so you can see how your efforts improve SEO performance. This is especially useful for agencies that can show clients the impact of their work.
The audit includes other helpful SEO metrics. You can see the number of backlinks and referring domains your site has as well as SE Ranking’s Domain Trust Score, which predicts how likely a website is to rank on Google based on its backlink profile. It’s a useful tool to track the impact of your link building efforts.
Pricing starts at $23.40 per month which provides weekly updates, access to all core SEO tools, and a website audit for up to 30,000 web pages. Costs go up as you add further features or increase the audit schedule. You can also take advantage of a 14-day free trial to test the software.
5. Agency Analytics - Agency reporting tool with features for SEO audits
Agency Analytics is a client reporting tool for agencies. It has several SEO tools, including keyword trackers, backlink trackers, and SEO audits.
The auditing tool can identify over 40 on-site issues. These include redirect errors, duplicate content, and broken links. The tool gives each issue a severity rating so you can prioritize the most impactful changes.
It's easy to automate your crawl frequency so you can spot updates without having to run audits every time manually. Meanwhile, graphs are updated with each crawl to show clients how your efforts to improve their site are paying off.
The tool stands out due to its customizable dashboards. Just choose which metrics to show and then give clients access. This removes the need to create custom reports manually whenever clients ask for them. And the dashboards are white label, so you can add your own branding and change the colors scheme.
Agency Analytics pricing starts at $10 per month for a single custom dashboard. You can sign up for a 14-day free trial to test the software on the website.
6. Semrush - Powerful digital marketing tool with audit features
SEMRush is a popular search engine marketing tool with SEO and PPC traffic features. It also has a powerful site audit tool that highlights potential issues with your website. There’s even a social media dashboard to track marketing on these platforms.
The SEO audit starts by crawling pages on your website. It then highlights any potential errors such as indexing, page load speed, and internal linking.
My favorite thing about SEMRush is that the user interface is super clear. It’s easy to see what you need to do to improve your site. There’s even a prioritization feature that will highlight the most important issues.
You can connect your Google Analytics account with SEMRush to provide the tool with extra data that it can use to make the audit more accurate. And the tool has features that let you track site health improvements to see how your efforts are paying off.
The SEMRush SEO audit is free for websites with under 100 pages. If you want to audit more pages, you’ll need to sign up for a paid plan. These start at $119.95 per month, and you can access a free 7-day trial to test the tool out.
7. Moz Pro - A complete toolkit for tracking search performance
Moz is one of the most well-known SEO tools. It offers a complete SEO toolkit, including powerful site audit features to help you dominate the SERPs. Other features include the keyword explorer to spot ranking opportunities and the link explorer to analyze your competitors.
The crawl highlights all the issues you’d expect to see, such as broken redirects, title and header tag errors, and indexing issues. It then clearly highlights these problems in the report so you can see what you need to work on.
I like that Moz doesn’t simply tell you problems with your site. It also provides further information about the problem so you can assess its impact and then fix it. Once fixed, you can mark the issue as complete, and Moz will recrawl the page to confirm the problem is solved.
Moz also has plenty of tools to track your progress. Audits run automatically every week, and the overview page includes a graph that shows the number of errors you have over time. If your site gains any new errors, the tool will notify you as soon as it finds them so you can fix the problem.
Pricing for Moz starts at $99 per month. You can also access a 30-day free trial of all the tool’s pro features.
8. ContentKing - Best tool for real-time SEO audit updates
ContentKing is an SEO auditing and monitoring tool. It measures and tracks all the important SEO issues such as descriptions and titles, links, and redirects. And it shows all this within the tool’s easy-to-view dashboard.
Real-time audit updates are my favorite feature. They highlight important changes to pages on your site as soon as they occur. This ensures you can take action before the problems turn into major errors.
The tool also has built-in resources you can use to learn about problems and find out how to solve them without leaving the platform. And you can track fixes in the dashboard to see how your efforts are paying off.
ContentKing integrates with tools like Google Data Studio, Search Console, Slack, and Adobe Analytics. You can also access the tool’s open API to create your own integrations when needed.
ContentKing doesn’t promote pricing. But you can sign up for a free trial on the website to test out the software.
9. Ahrefs - SEO tool with a comprehensive feature set
Ahrefs is a powerful SEO tool with plentiful features and an easy-to-use interface. The SEO audit provides all you need to find and fix over 100 technical SEO issues, including site performance, HTML tags, link analysis, and content quality.
The overview page highlights top-level metrics such as your overall site health and the number of errors in different categories. It’s easy to view each error to find further details about how to fix it.
Audits can be overwhelming if you have a lot of errors. But the tool allows you to order issues based on importance so you can choose which ones to solve first.
There are also powerful filtering features that let you see issues based on multiple factors. For example, you could choose to see pages with organic traffic but no meta description. Adding a better meta tag could result in more people clicking on your site from Google.
Ahrefs also has plenty of other SEO features in keyword research, competitor analysis, website ranking tracking, and backlinks. Pricing starts at $99 per month and includes 10,000 crawl credits. You can buy additional credits for $50 per 500,000.
10. Google Search Console - Best free tool for understanding search performance
Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) is an essential tool for discovering website errors that can affect website performance. And because the tool is created by Google, you can trust it will point you towards the issues that truly matter.
The tool highlights several kinds of errors. The coverage report shows you how many pages on your website Google has indexed and any errors. If it finds a problem, the tool will explain what it is and provide more details about fixes. You can also see pages that Google has excluded and the reasons why.
The page experience tab is another important feature. It measures factors that affect website user experience, such as mobile usability, load time, and your Core Web Vitals. These are factors the Google algorithm considers when making ranking decisions, so it is important to fix any issues you see in these reports.
Beyond this, you can see information about your search results and keywords, site security, incoming links and anchor text, and whether you have any manual actions that could affect page rankings.
Search Console is free, so there are very few reasons not to sign up for an account.
Other Options
Here are a few more tools that didn’t make the top list.
- HubSpot SEO Marketing Software - SEO tool that’s best for HubSpot customers
- Boostsite - Affordable SEO audit tool
- SEOquake - Chrome extension that lets you perform SEO audits while browsing
- SEO Site Checkup - Create actionable white label SEO audit reports
- SEOmator - Easy-to-use SEO audit tool
- DeepCrawl - Technical SEO audits for enterprise businesses
- OnCrawl - SEO crawler with BI tool integrations
- Seolyzer - SEO audits with log analysis tools
What do SEO audit tools do?
SEO audits tools crawl all the pages on your website to look for errors that can impact your website’s ability to rank on Google. These tools typically organize errors into groups and then provide information about the next steps you can take to fix them.
The best SEO tools audit tools regularly check your website over time so you can track how your fixes are affecting your website and spot new issues. Common issues SEO audit tools look for include broken links, short or duplicate content, and indexing issues.
What do you think about this list?
This list contains some of the best SEO audit tools available. The information provided by each audit is generally quite similar, so the tools stand out due to the added extras or the cost.
I recommend deciding on the features you need first—specifically whether you just need SEO audits or whether you also want a complete SEO toolkit. You can try out some of the platforms that meet this criteria.
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