Are you using the best technical SEO audit tools to optimize your website?
Every digital marketer should know how to conduct a technical SEO site audit, but doing so entirely “by hand” is unnecessarily time-consuming and tedious.
Instead, digital marketers should rely on trusted technical SEO audit tools to help identify and resolve the most important website issues that can negatively impact search rankings.
To help, we’ve created this list of the 10 best technical SEO audit tools that you should know about. We’ll explain the key features behind each one, how it can help you make your website more search-engine friendly, and how to get access.
10 Best Technical SEO Audit Tools
Google Search Console
Overview: Google Search Console is a free tool offered by Google that allows marketers, web developers or website administrators easily monitor their presence in the Google search results.
Features & Benefits: Google search console offers tools and reports that help users diagnose some of the most common technical SEO issues. You can use the console to verify that Google’s web crawlers are able to access all pages on your site, ensure that new pages are being indexed when expected, and receive alerts when Google detects indexing or spam issues on your website. Outside of technical SEO features, the console allows marketers to peruse their website’s entire backlink profile and track all of their keyword ranking positions on the SERPs.
Pricing & Access: Google Search Console is a free service! Just visit the link above and follow the instructions to get started.
GTmetrix
Overview: GTmetrix is a performance analysis and reporting tool that alerts you to technical issues on your website that may impact site speed and user experience. Google is increasingly focusing on user experience as a ranking factor and it’s been shown that improving factors like page loading times can positively impact your search engine rankings.
Features & Benefits: GTmetrix captures performance data from your website, analyzes it using the same rules as Google PageSpeed Insights and Yahoo! Y Slow, then gives you a performance score and an indexed rating that’s relative to other users on the platform. You’ll be able to objectively measure your page speed and see how you compare to other websites. The next step is optimization: GTmetrix helps you visualize how page load times connect to total page size and the total number of requests so you can implement the best strategy to improve user experience for your visitors and climb in the SERPs.
Pricing & Access: A robust free version of this tool is available that lets users monitor up to three URLs with limited access to report filters and additional features. Paid packages start at $14.95/month and include priority access to the analysis server, remote & hourly monitoring, video capture and more diagnostic features.
Screaming Frog
Overview: Screaming Frog is one of the industry leaders in technical SEO auditing, with a customer base that includes Google, Apple, Amazon and Disney. The company’s SEO Spider tool is a website crawler that rapidly analyzes websites of any size and delivers technical SEO recommendations to users.
Features & Benefits: When it comes to technical SEO auditing, a better question about SEO Spider would be: What can’t it do? Use SEO spider to identify broken links on your website, find pages with poorly optimized or missing metadata, generate accurate XML sitemaps that get your pages indexed faster, diagnose and fix broken redirect chains, discover duplicate pages and more.
Pricing & Access: The free version of SEO spider allows users to crawl up to 500 URLs and helps diagnose all of the most common technical SEO issues. The paid version is available for £149/year and offers unlimited URL crawling with additional features like scheduled crawls and integrations with Google Analytics, Search Console, PageSpeed Insights and more.
Page Modified
Overview: Page Modified is an in-browser crawling tool that captures technical SEO data from your website and presents it in a neat spreadsheet along with insights and optimization tips.
Features & Benefits: Page Modified runs inside the browser and provides the back-end computing resources necessary to scrape your site. The crawler detects technical issues such as broken redirects, problems with internal linking, canonical errors, duplicate content and issues with your XML site-map, but it’s also great for diagnosing on-page SEO issues like empty title tags, pages without an H1 header, pages with missing or poorly optimized meta descriptions and more.
Pricing & Access: There’s a free version available with limited features and paid subscription options starting at just $5/month.
SEOmator
Overview: SEOmator is one of the most powerful technical SEO audit tools available in the marketplace today. While most digital marketing professionals use up to four different marketing tools to audit their SEO performance, SEOmator promises to deliver technical, on-page and off-page SEO auditing in a single platform.
Features & Benefits: SEOmator publishes a lengthy list on its website of all issues that can be detected by their web-based software. The list is divided into 10 categories that cover elements of technical, on-page and off-page SEO:
- Crawler Report: Detects technical issues like broken links and redirect chains
- Structured Data: Checks for missing structured data
- HTML Tags: Checks that HTML metatags are present and optimized for website content
- Page Speed: Checks page load speed, a known Google ranking factor connected to user experience
- Internal Links: Audits the number, function and anchor text of links on your website
- Content Quality: Audits content value and accessibility
- Backlinks: Checks whether a page has enough backlinks
- Social Media: Looks at social media mentions and integration on each page
- Multilingual Support: Audits language codes and accessibility for users that speak other languages
- Mobile Usability: Audits for mobile-responsive layout
This combination of technical, on-page and off-page auditing makes SEOmator a great option for digital marketers who need to audit every part of their SEO—not just the technical aspect.
Pricing & Access: SEOmator’s small business subscription plan starts at $19/month, but there’s also a pay-as-you-go model where you can pay $5 for a complete audit whenever you’d like. For agencies, a paid subscription to SEOmator will allow you to host their unlimited free SEO audit tool on your website.
SEMrush Site Audit
Overview: SEMrush is one of the world’s most trusted and powerful all-in-one search engine marketing software platforms. The platform delivers its technical SEO auditing capabilities through a single site audit tool that diagnoses over 130 technical and on-page SEO issues.
Features & Benefits: Just like SEOmator and other tools that appear on this list, SEMrush covers the full gamut of technical SEO performance concerns when executing a website audit. The key difference between SEMrush and these other tools lies in their dashboarding and reporting capabilities. SEMrush offers thematic reports, custom reports that users can access which are specific to one aspect of technical SEO. There are custom reports for crawlability, site performance and international SEO – just to name a few. The tool also points out the top technical issues impacting performance, which makes it easy for digital marketers to prioritize their optimization workflow.
Pricing & Access: SEMrush lets you audit 100 pages of your website for free and includes all of the main reports and features so you can get a full look at the platform before purchasing. After that, the basic subscription starts at $99.95 per month. SEMrush is an all-in-one tool for marketers, so despite the hefty price tag, there’s a lot of additional value included that goes beyond technical SEO auditing.
Google PageSpeed Insights
Overview: Google PageSpeed Insights is a technical SEO audit tool that focuses on optimizing page speed. Simply enter a URL and Google PageSpeed Insights will analyze its contents and deliver actionable recommendations for making that page load faster.
Features & Benefits: Page loading speed is becoming one of the most important technical SEO factors used by search engines to determine ranking in the SERPs. When pages take a long time to load, visitors are unlikely to stick around and wait for their content to load and more likely to leave the page without interacting. That means poor conversion performance, a higher bounce rate and an underwhelming experience for customers.
One of the great things about this tool is that it measures page speed using field data that it captures whenever someone visits your website on Google Chrome. Field data reflects the experiences of real users accessing your pages on real devices, providing more accurate insight into how your optimizations impact real performance.
Pricing & Access: Google PageSpeed Insights is free to access and use for everyone.
Ahrefs Site Audit Tool
Overview: Ahrefs is competing for the top positions among the best and most trusted all-in-one SEO tools. To its credit, Ahrefs provides one of the most comprehensive and user-friendly technical SEO audit tools you’ll encounter on this list.
Features & Benefits: For starters, Ahrefs runs entirely in the cloud. That means that for the price of your subscription, Ahrefs will provide all the computing resources necessary to execute your audits and other services. The Ahrefs site audit tool automatically detects over 100 technical and on-page SEO issues that could be negatively impacting your rankings in the SERPs. The best part is that these issues are grouped by type and aggregated into reports with full-color charts that you can print and either review with your team or show to customers. The categories used here include performance, HTML tags, social tags, content quality, incoming and outgoing links and broken images or scripts.
Pricing & Access: Subscriptions to Ahrefs start at $99, but there’s a 7-day trial plan that gives you full access with all features for just $7.
DeepCrawl
Overview: DeepCrawl is an enterprise-level technical SEO auditing and crawler software with advanced features and customized reporting capabilities.
Features & Benefits: DeepCrawl offers all of the normal functionalities that you should expect from a technical SEO audit tool. You’ll be able to find broken links, test your XML sitemaps, monitor page speed and performance, verify content quality and ensure that your website is structured optimally for search engine crawlers. The best thing about DeepCrawl is its historical data view, which makes it easy to compare audit results over time and see what still needs to be fixed.
Pricing & Access: $14 monthly for a single project, $62 monthly for up to 3 projects and custom packages available on-demand for users that require additional resources.
OnCrawl
Overview: The OnCrawl platform features a range of useful SEO and website administration tools, including a log analyzer, search rankings monitor, backlinks tracker and a technical SEO audit tool.
Features & Benefits: There are a few things that set OnCrawl apart from the competition when it comes to technical SEO audit. One is simply capacity: OnCrawl was designed to audit the largest eCommerce website in Europe with over 70 million pages, so there’s no crawl too large or cumbersome for it to manage. Another factor is crawl comparison, which gives users the ability to compare separate crawls and identify technical issues still needing to be resolved.
Beyond that, we loved the attractive visualization and the ability to segment and customize crawls with advanced settings. Digital agencies and enterprise organizations with large websites are in the best position to benefit from everything that OnCrawl offers.
Pricing & Access: The lowest-level subscription plan for OnCrawl costs €49/month and includes up to 100,000 URL crawls per month on a single domain. Larger subscription packages are intended for small teams or agencies with several projects on the go and who need to crawl millions of pages or more on a monthly basis. There’s a free 14-day trial available so you can test out the technical SEO audit tool before purchasing.
Summary
As the digital landscape continues to evolve, you have to keep up with the latest trends and technologies to remain competitive. With the right technical SEO audit tool, your can gain insights into your website’s performance, identify areas for improvement, and ultimately improve your search rankings and online presence. Whether you’re a seasoned SEO expert or just starting out, incorporating a top-rated technical SEO audit tool into your arsenal is a smart move that can pay off in spades.
If you need a team of SEO experts to unleash the full potential of your digital presence, let’s get on a call. We’d love to show you how we leverage our proprietary Customer Generation methodology to meet our tech clients’ revenue goals, every time.
- CEO Garrett Mehrguth
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