To ensure your website is up-to-date with the latest SEO best practices, auditing and monitoring your website at regular intervals is of utmost importance. A well-optimised website can help boost search ranking, thereby driving organic traffic to your website. There are several paid and free SEO audit tools available to make this task easier. So, let’s check out these website audit tools that will help improve your website’s performance considerably.
A. Steps to Optimise Your Website
- SEO Audit: The SEO audit provides a detailed report of the issues on your website, recommendations to rectify these issues and highlights the opportunities to improve your website’s performance.
- Keyword Research: Keyword research is an important part of website optimisation. You need to research and pick a relevant set of keywords for each target page. Competitive keyword analysis can help you identify keywords your competitors are ranking for. Also, use LSI keywords and phrases to make your website content more engaging to users. (LSI keywords are words and phrases that Google sees as semantically-related to a topic)
- Content Optimisation: Keeping your website up-to-date is important to increase its ranking, and it begins with optimising the existing content on your site. Content optimisation includes adding relevant keywords, interlinking, and updating the meta tags. Improving the blog/website page structure with proper implementation of H-tags is also important. Adding content along with images and using alt tags are a few other elements that help with content optimisation. Optimised content helps enhance user experience, increasing your site’s ranking on SERPs and leading to more traffic and sales.
- Monitoring Website Performance: Consistently monitoring your website helps identify issues before they become a major problem that can impact your ranking and traffic. From website speed to reasons for high bounce rate, monitoring your website provides you with insightful information about all these issues and more.
B. Top SEO Audit and Monitoring Tools (Free and Premium)
1. Google Search Console (formerly Webmasters)
A free Google SEO analysis tool, Google Search Console makes it easier for web marketers to monitor their site’s performance on the Google search result. It helps track and provide information on the site’s keyword ranking position on the SERP. You can use this tool to verify if new pages/blogs are getting indexed by web crawlers. It also allows you to check your website’s backlink profile. It provides information on 404 errors and failed attempts at indexing. It provides detail about content quality, broken links and the site’s structured data. What’s more, it also allows you to monitor, track and test all your Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).
2. Google Analytics: Web Analytics Service
Google Analytics is a free SEO analytics tool that provides valuable data such as page views, traffic stats (organic vs non-organic), demographics of your website visitors, among others. When paired with Google Search Console, it provides a complete overview of your website’s performance, helping you optimise your website for users and search engines. It also has a paid version. However, for beginners, the free version is ideal.
3. Ahrefs: SEO tools & resources to grow search traffic
Ahrefs is a cloud-based website review tool that helps with keyword research, backlink research, competitive analysis, etc. It helps identify technical SEO issues, flags off duplicate content pages, broken pages, highlights page performance issues, among others. Some of its primary features include:
- Keywords Explorer: With this feature, you can check the monthly search volume and click-through-rates of specific keywords.
- Site Explorer: This feature provides information about the performance of your site’s web pages.
- Content Explorer: This feature provides detail about high-performing web pages for specific keywords and blog topics.
- Site Audit: This feature helps you crawl each page and identify technical issues at the page level.
4. SEMrush: Online visibility management platform
SEMrush is one of the most popular SEO audit software solutions that provides performance reports for individual web pages or the website as a whole. It provides free SEO audits for the first 100 web pages. For more pages, you need to subscribe to the paid version. This tool helps identify technical and SEO errors. It helps with keyword research and makes backlink analysis easy. It also provides integration with Google Analytics and helps with paid ad research, rank tracking, content optimisation, and social media monitoring.
5. SEOquake: A powerful SEO toolbox for your browser
SEOquake is a free chrome extension that provides an instant summary of the key SEO parameters of a web page. This SEO tool helps you review on-page SEO elements in a flash. It helps with web page keywords analysis and makes reviewing internal & external links on a web page easy. It also allows you to compare domains and URLs in real-time. The best part, all reports can be easily exported into a .CSV file.
6. Siteliner: Find duplicate content on your site
This tool helps you detect duplicate content on the website. Apart from duplicate content, the Siteliner tool scans your web pages for broken links and provides details about page speed.
7. Check My Links: Chrome extension for broken links
Another Google chrome extension, Check My Links is often used for a quick website analysis for broken links. It helps you identify & fix broken links instantly and is an ideal tool for developers and web designers. The good links are highlighted in green colour while the broken links are marked red. It also allows you to copy all bad links in your clipboard with a click.
8. Moz Pro Tools: All-in-one suite of SEO tools
The Moz Pro tool is a popular SEO tool that helps with keyword research, link analysis and technical SEO. It detects and highlights crawl issues on your website. It helps you find the right keywords for target pages. Its Link Explorer feature is excellent for link building activities as it lets you track new links and brand mentions. It provides information about key SEO metrics such as page authority, domain authority, and spam score. It also offers MozBar Chrome extension, which brings all the features from the Moz Pro tool right into your browser. Moreover, it allows you to create custom reports that you can download and send directly to clients and stakeholders.
9. SpyFu: Competitor keyword research tool
While not a website audit software, SpyFu is an excellent tool for competitor research, backlink tracking and PPC tracking. It helps you track your domain’s performance over a period of time. It helps you vet backlinks to eliminate low-quality, irrelevant and spammy links. It provides you with a list of keywords your competitors are ranking for. It also provides keyword suggestions for your PPC Ad campaign.
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10. Screaming Frog SEO Spider Website Crawler
Screaming frog SEO spider helps crawl specified websites and examine the URLs for common SEO issues. It provides real-time information that can help you to improve your on-page SEO. This website auditing software is excellent for small & large website analysis and helps save a lot of time. It also allows you to export the required data in excel for further analysis.
11. Raven Tools: White Label SEO reports and SEO tools
One of the best SEO audit software, Raven tools provide full site audits, identifies on-page SEO issues and helps with reporting. As a site auditor, it helps evaluate the different website metrics such as website speed, meta tags, image optimisation, and visibility issues. Based on the evaluation, it provides a detailed report of issues which is labelled based on priority. This will help you to rectify issues faster, thereby improving the overall performance of your website. Apart from site audit, it helps with keyword research, competitor research, backlink analysis, social media management and much much more.
12. Mangools: Bundle of powerful SEO tools
Mangools is a comprehensive SEO toolkit that is great for bloggers and SEO agencies. It is easy to use and offers a bundle of 5 tools that cover the basic website needs. This includes:
- KWFinder: It helps you to find long-tail keywords with low and high-level competition and provides quality keyword suggestions.
- SERPChecker: For any given keyword, the SERPChecker tool provides a detailed analysis of the web page in the SERPs. This includes their page authority, domain authority, trust flow, citation flow, Alexa ranking and more.
- SERPWatcher: This is a rank tracker tool that allows you to track your search engine rankings for target or related keywords.
- LinkMiner: This is a backlink analysis tool that provides quick, real-time information about the links on a particular web page. It also has a website preview feature that highlights the exact section where a specific link is placed.
- SiteProfiler: This provides a quick analysis of the SEO metrics on a web page along with the number of backlinks and total Facebook shares.
13. WooRank: Website Optimisation Tool
As a comprehensive website SEO analysis tool, WooRank provides a detailed SEO audit report of all URLs and helps you find and fix errors that are hurting your search rankings. It also provides seamless integration with Google Console and Google Analytics and allows you to track your site’s keywords. Beginners can make use of the free trial to get to know the features of this tool. But, to access all features that this SEO tool offers, you need to subscribe to the premium plan.
14. Seolyzer: Free SEO crawler and Log File Analyzer
SEOlyzer is a free crawler, log analysis SEO tool that helps you see how search engines view your website. It pulls out information that the crawling bots leave on your server files while creating SEO KPLs. The tool identifies the error code, page speed and performance of your website. It also monitors your website for any SEO issues. Additionally, it helps you to compare your site’s web pages to other sites that rank higher on Google.
15. SEO Site Checkup: Website SEO checker & audit tool
SEO Site Checkup is a suite of tools that check your site’s backlinks, helps create sitemaps, aids with competitors analysis, and monitors keywords ranking. This SEO monitoring tool also tracks your website performance while auditing the site for common SEO issues such as page loading speed, missing meta tags, mobile usability, etc.
16. GTMetrix: Website performance testing and monitoring
One of the best SEO site audit software for testing the performance of your website, GTMetrix provides quick, real-time results on website speed and page load time. For an enhanced user experience, faster website speed is important. Thus, this tool helps analyse your website’s speed and provides suggestions on how to improve it.
17. Google Structured Data Testing Tool
Google structured data testing tool is a simple, no-fuss tool used for data testing. This tool checks your website’s structured data code and flags off errors that need to be fixed. It also helps you validate your site’s structured data. Google Support recommends that you use this tool to check your site during the development stage.
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18. PageSpeed Insights: Website speed checker tool
PageSpeed Insight is another website audit tool by Google specifically built to run speed tests on URLs and assign scores based on their performance on both mobile and desktop devices. It not only tracks your page’s speed but also provides helpful suggestions on how to improve user experience. As it identifies issues, it places them in three categories:
- Passed audits: web pages that have performed well on all parameters
- Opportunities: issues you need to work on to improve the site’s performance
- Diagnostics: provides insights into web development best practices
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