SEO audit tools are vital to any search engine marketing tool stack.
The best tools can help you easily identify the issues hurting your site’s performance in search results.
Whether you’re a site owner, SEO professional, or content manager, you can leverage these tools to prioritize the most urgent fixes for your site. You’ll also help boost rankings, generate more traffic, and capture more conversions.
Let’s jump right into the best tools for the job.
Every website needs a regular checkup. Think of it like preventative care—audits let you take care of minor issues before they can become major problems.
Plus, audit tools will recommend easy ways to maintain or improve your current rankings, helping your site get more exposure and traffic year-round.
Here are our topic picks for the best SEO audit tools.
The Semrush Site Audit tool makes it easy to run an SEO audit and fix over 140 potential issues.
The Site Audit report breaks down the full SEO audit into seven thematic reports:
To run a website audit using Site Audit, follow these steps:
From Semrush, click “Site Audit” under “On Page & Tech SEO.”
Type in the URL of the website you want to audit. Click “Start Audit.”
Note: If you already have a project set up in Semrush, you’ll need to click “+ Create project” to add a new project and run a new audit.
Then, from the “Site Audit Settings” box, choose the number of pages you want to check in your audit and click “Start Site Audit.”
You can crawl up to 100 pages with a free account. With a Pro account, you can crawl up to 20,000 per audit and up to 100,000 per month.
Pro tip: Once you’re comfortable running Site Audit, you can customize crawl and output in settings.
Let the report run. It will take some time for the Site Audit crawl bot to check your pages, content, images, and links.
When it’s finished, you’ll receive a report like the one below. You’ll also see a list of the top issues.
Click “Number of issues” for any of these items to see a detailed list of the uncovered SEO errors or issues.
If you’re unsure of where to start, look at the prioritization widgets at the top of the report.
This section breaks issues down into three categories:
This will help you easily prioritize the most critical issues before they become major headaches.
Use the Semrush On Page SEO Checker tool to generate a comprehensive list of improvements to your site’s on-page SEO.
This tool analyzes pages, content, and competitors and provides data-driven recommendations like:
This tool allows you to import specific URLs or keywords on your website and receive customized, data-driven recommendations for improving your site’s SEO and performance.
It breaks down the recommendations into seven groups:
Here’s how to use On Page SEO Checker:
Inside Semrush, click “On Page SEO Checker” under “On Page & Tech SEO.”
Now, enter the website you want to analyze and click “Get ideas.”
Note: If you already have a project set up in Semrush, you’ll need to click “+ Create project” to add a new project and run a new report.
Next, you’ll see the “Select target location” dialog box.
Here, you can modify variables that impact how Semrush views your site for the analysis. Click the drop-down to choose a location, language, and device that matches how you want to audit your site. Then click “Continue.”
Pro tip: Need help determining which settings to select? Leave the drop-down as the default setting and click “Continue.”
You’ll see the “Add pages to optimize” screen. This is where you’ll select the pages you want to audit and provide target keywords.
Start by reviewing the options under “Auto import.” You can remove any automatically suggested options by clicking the remove button that looks like a trash can.
Add your pages to the analysis by clicking the “Manually” tab at the top of the screen. Then, type or paste the URL of the page you want to analyze and your target keyword. Click “Add Page.”
Pro tip: You can upload a file to add a list of URLs, pull URLs from Google Search Console, or use the Organic Research option to help you find pages to analyze using the other tabs at the top.
Once you’ve selected the relevant pages you want to analyze, click “Collect ideas.”
Now, the On Page SEO Checker will analyze your selected pages. Once the audit is complete, you’ll see the On Page SEO Checker report page.
To dig into the suggestions provided, click the number next to one of the categories listed under “Total Ideas.” Or click the number of ideas shown for a specific page under the “TOP pages to optimize” section.
Once you’ve clicked into the report, you’ll see a detailed list of specific ideas for each page, broken down into seven categories. Each one contains an action item and information on how to address an issue or implement an idea.
If you’re looking for free SEO audit tools, Google Search Console (GSC) is a great option. It provides you with data from Google about your site’s crawlability, indexability, and search performance.
This information will help you address any issues and optimize your site.
However, GSC is not as comprehensive as other tools and won’t provide you with a list of action items or ideas like Site Audit and On Page SEO Checker.
Using the provided reports, you can see how your website is crawled and indexed by Google, the XML sitemaps it’s discovered, keyword rankings data, website speed and performance, and even backlink information.
GSC data integrates directly with Google Analytics. The API also allows you to pull the data into many third-party tools, including the Semrush On Page SEO Checker.
Your site’s load speed, performance, and usability affect your rankings. Learn what search engines and users experience on your site with the free SEO audit tool PageSpeed Insights.
You can use the analysis and detailed suggestions to resolve website performance problems and improve user experience and rankings.
PageSpeed Insights assesses the performance of a webpage for both desktop and mobile devices. It provides a score indicating performance, with suggestions on how to improve page speed.
Using PageSpeed insights, you can understand the following metrics:
The tool suggests ways to improve site performance, such as eliminating render-blocking resources, minimizing HTML and CSS file sizes, optimizing images, and more.
PageSpeed Insights provides an API to pull the data into many other tools, including Looker Studio.
JetOctopus is a scalable audit tool used primarily for large websites. Rather than crawl limits, they offer unit pricing based on the size of your website (number of pages).
In addition to traditional website audits, they also offer website log analysis to help uncover strange patterns or potential issues with your site’s crawlability or indexability.
It features:
One of the classic tools used by technical SEO experts, Screaming Frog provides a comprehensive (albeit complex) set of tools to crawl and audit your website.
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider audit tool can identify issues like:
This tool provides a detailed analysis of the technical health of your site and opportunities for on-page optimization.
Spider SEO also generates a visual sitemap of your pages and integrates with Google Analytics, GSC, and PageSpeed Insights. You can audit up to 500 URLs for free with this tool.
Ahrefs offers a suite of SEO reports, keyword research tools, and a backlink checker. Their site audit tool provides insights you can use to identify and fix SEO issues that could be affecting users and causing a drop in rankings.
Use their audit tool to look for common SEO issues like broken links, empty H1 tags, missing meta descriptions, and slow pages. Ahrefs categorizes issues as “Errors,” “Warnings,” and “Notices.”
Ahrefs’ tool also provides an overall “Health Score” based on the number and severity of SEO issues discovered in the audit. Integrations include DataBox, Supermetrics, and Whatagraph.
You can schedule regular crawls to run automatically. This tool is free for up to 5,000 pages.
Moz is known for offering a suite of digital marketing tools, including Site Crawl.
This site audit tool can crawl and monitor your website for common SEO problems like missing title tags, broken redirects, and long meta descriptions. It includes a breakdown of each issue and how to fix it.
The tool also provides prioritization levels for which issues to fix based on potential impact. It groups issues into low, medium, and high priority, so you know which ones could affect your site the most.
Moz offers an API and a range of third-party extensions. Popular options include HubSpot Marketing Grader, Linkody, and WordPress.
Moz Site Crawl is included with a paid subscription, which starts at $99 per month.
SE Ranking provides tools for website audits, rank tracking, and competitor analysis. They also offer white-label options available for agencies and consultants.
Their Website Audit tool can crawl up to 1,000 pages on your website in two minutes.
The provided report includes:
The tool can also monitor specific pages that you choose and alert you to any changes. Pricing for SE Ranking starts at $55 per month.
Billed as a tool for “webmasters, small business owners, and SEO agencies,” SEO Site Checkup offers features like:
SEO Site Checkup audits your site for over 70 SEO factors that could impact your rankings, from loading speed to keyword position tracking.
You can also create automated checkups that regularly crawl your website for new issues or changes.
Pricing for this tool starts at $29.95 per month.
Audit tools make it fast and easy for you to check your site’s health on a regular basis. Here’s a look at their biggest benefits.
SEO audit tools help you identify and fix issues on your website that may impact SEO.
For example, they can help uncover issues like broken links to pages that no longer exist, missing H1 or title tags, and orphan pages that may not be crawlable by search engines.
Any of these issues could cause your website to miss out on organic traffic—which means missing out on potential leads, customers, and revenue.
But SEO audit tools help you uncover these issues, understand how they impact your site, and teach you how to fix them.
Audit tools also improve user experience by alerting you to slow pages, clickable elements that are too close together, and much more.
SEO issues can be complex, but audit tools help simplify them for users.
They help you track and fix a wide range of issues that could otherwise be difficult to understand or measure on your own.
Many of these tools look at a variety of ranking factors and best practices, including:
Audit tools provide real-time alerts to inform you if a website change creates an SEO issue you should fix.
Without regular audits, these problems could go unnoticed indefinitely, which could harm your rankings or create even worse issues over time.
But with audit tools, you’ll get notifications when these issues pop up, ensuring you can take action as soon as possible.
SEO audit tools help you understand which SEO issues are urgent and which ones can wait.
In each report, you’ll get an explanation of why the task is urgent and information on how to fix it. You can work through the tasks, starting with the ones that could have the greatest impact on your site, until you’ve addressed all errors.
Fixing these errors is an easy way to improve or maintain rankings and boost your site’s visibility in search engines.
If you’re considering using an audit tool, you’ll want to ensure it has the following features:
A great audit tool should analyze on-page SEO factors:
You’ll want an audit tool that can perform deep technical SEO analysis, checking things like:
Additionally, your site’s speed and performance (e.g., page load speed) also affect SEO.
Ideally, your SEO audit tool will benchmark your site on performance metrics that correlate with Google’s Core Web Vitals (CWV).
For example:
Lastly, a critical feature of an effective website audit tool is prioritization.
The tool should help you understand the severity and impact of the issues it uncovers so you can work strategically to resolve the most important problems.
It’s easy to become overwhelmed with hundreds or thousands of issues your site may face. Having a clear understanding of which ones to tackle first makes handling SEO issues much more manageable.
Before you get started, you should know a few best practices for running SEO audits.
Depending on how frequently you update your website and publish content, once per month or quarter is a good benchmark.
SEO is a continuous process and regular auditing helps you identify new issues and fix them in a timely manner.
Some of the metrics shown in an audit report are unique or proprietary to the tool you’re using.
For example, the Semrush Site Audit tool provides an overall “Site Health” score derived from the number of Errors and Warnings detected in the latest audit.
Taking the time to understand each report’s metrics will help you make critical decisions about your site’s SEO.
Integrations can make your audit more comprehensive by providing helpful data from third-party tools.
Many SEO tools, including Semrush’s Site Audit and On Page SEO Checker, offer integrations with other platforms such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Looker Studio.
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