For many website owners, a website is something static. It’s that thing on the internet that brings in the traffic. But for your website to generate high-quality traffic, it needs constant upkeep. Most of the time, it’s as simple as adding new content, replacing broken links, or simply updating your plugins. So, taking care of it on your own is relatively easy.

However, just like you must keep your website up to date, so should you do with your SEO. SEO trends change constantly. Even if Google doesn’t come up with some drastic new guidelines, the search engine is driven by its user’s behavior. Now, if there is something you can count on, it is that user behavior changes.

Combining your website’s upkeep with the changing nature of user behavior, your SEO is bound to go sideways, regardless of how careful you are. That’s why you need regular SEO audits to put you back at the top of the search engine results.

However, an SEO audit requires time and some experience if you do it independently. That’s why most website owners and SEO experts prefer to use SEO audit tools.

To help you out with this inevitable task, today, we will share our top 5 favorite SEO audit tools that will make your SEO audit a piece of cake. However, before we get to them, let’s discuss what an SEO audit is.

What Is An SEO Website Audit?

By definition, an SEO audit is a comprehensive evaluation of your website’s performance and visibility. Its main goal is to see if your website meets its SEO goals and results. In other words, where are you in the SERP, are you gaining positions, and are you reaching your targeted audience? Naturally, you need to review all aspects of your SEO. It touches on your website’s technical side, as well as on-site optimization, off-page SEO, and user experience.

When it comes to technical SEO, there is plenty to look at. The infrastructure behind your website is crucial for good results. So, naturally, checking if everything with your hosting is OK is integral. Of course, if you use HostArmada‘s services, you needn’t worry. Still, checking your website speed, XML sitemap, robot.txt files, and whether all pages are mobile-friendly is wise.

Next, the audit will focus on your on-page SEO. This includes analyzing individual web pages for relevant keywords, meta tags and data, header tags, and content quality. It ensures that each page is optimized for search engines and users.

The off-site SEO audit focuses predominantly on backlinks. It assesses the quality and quantity of links pointing to the site, as these can significantly impact search rankings.

Finally, the UX side of your SEO should also be examined. Navigation, load time, and mobile responsiveness are just a few of the factors that a good SEO audit considers.

Naturally, this audit aims to identify specific issues that may (and likely will) harm your SEO results.

Now, these audits usually take extra time and resources, so doing them on your own is extremely cost-ineffective. Instead, you might want to go for an SEO audit tool that will help pinpoint SEO-related issues.

What to look for in an SEO audit tool

You will find all sorts of tools across the internet. If you open an SEO agency’s blog, they will instantly flood you with information on how their product is the best. Still, when searching for the right tool, it’s always best to consult impartial third-party users. Like us, for example. However, doing your own research on SEO audit tools is definitely a must. So, to help you with that task as well, let’s share the primary features all SEO tools must have to be effective.

Easy to use

There are countless tools on the market, many of which predominantly target SEO specialists. Now, that’s completely fine, and if you can afford it, we suggest hiring an SEO specialist to do the audit for you. They will certainly give you a much better analysis than you can make on your own.

However, not everyone can afford an SEO specialist, yet everyone needs to do an SEO audit if they wish to retain and enhance their website’s performance. So, look for an SEO audit tool that you can navigate with ease and that gives you ample comprehensive information on your website’s status.

Thorough

Each SEO tool uses crawlers, much like those search engines use to assess your website. So, make sure the tool’s crawlers are actually doing their job. Of course, you can’t be certain what they do, but you can at least see what metrics they provide. For example, do they go through all your pages or just a specific number? Or do they check all links, images, and content to identify problems?

Technical analysis

The most common problems during SEO audits are broken links, messed up content, missing tags and metadata, and, of course, page loading speed. So, when choosing an SEO audit tool, make sure it focuses on these problems.

Recommendations

Detecting all the problems is wonderful, but it’s only half of the job. When it comes to fixing the issues, you’re often left on your own. However, the best SEO audit tools will give you some actionable advice on improving your SEO and dealing with the issues it registers.

Integration

The best SEO auditing tools will be able to integrate seamlessly with other SEO tools like Google Analytics, for example. This way, they can actually give a clear and data-driven analysis of your website page by page. Moreover, that’s how they will find out your backlink portfolio and its quality.

With this in mind, let’s talk about examples of excellent SEO audit tools, their pros and cons, and what makes them so good.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console (GSC) is the obvious first choice for SEO audit, as it’s developed by the same organization you are trying to impress. By all means, search engines follow roughly the same patterns when assigning you an SEO score. So, using a console built by the company that holds about 82% of the search engine market is truly a no-brainer. The best part – it’s absolutely free.

GSC will allow you to identify technical issues in real-time promptly. This will give you the opportunity not to conduct a full SEO audit to get to the bottom of your failing SEO performance. Instead, you can focus on the technical problem at hand.

Moreover, since it’s a Google tool, you can submit sitemaps directly to the source and request indexing of a new (or an updated) page.

GSC is great at finding and showing your page’s performance levels. In other words, it will show you whether your pages are indexed and how they are doing for particular keywords.

However, GSC has some downsides you definitely need to consider as a non-SEO specialist.

For starters, GSC has a learning curve. True, it’s not hard to understand how everything works, but you must learn some basic SEO strategies and terms to understand what they mean.

Moreover, GSC will tell you where the problem is but won’t give you hints on how to fix it. This can be frustrating if you are not proficient with SEO.

So, while GSC is a genuine must for every website, you might want to check one of the other four choices, especially if you are a beginner.

SemRush Site Audit

SemRush is a well-known name in the SEO market. They are among the most authoritative brands in this field. Naturally, their SEO website auditing tool is highly recommended.

Arguably, the biggest benefit of SemRush’s tool is its clean, responsive, and utterly gorgeous interface. You need little to no understanding of SEO to get all the information you need so you can enhance your website’s organic traffic. The Dashboard is highly intuitive, and you will easily find all the necessary metrics.

The reporting is just fantastic. It shows you all the results in detail. More importantly, you can easily follow an issue back to its source. The best part is that you get a detailed explanation of what the problem is, how to fix it, and where to start.

Once you’re done with the fix, you can do an audit for the specific page where the problem occurred just to see if you actually managed to fix the issue.

The most helpful feature of SemRush’s tool is the ability to measure your improvement over time. Your website’s audit should not be all about keeping it from catching fire. No. You should strive to better your performance and reach a bigger and better audience.

On the downside, SemRush is rightfully one of the most expensive tools on the market. The price is definitely worth what you are getting, but the question remains whether you can afford it at that moment. If you are just starting your business, such an expense can be a bit over the top for your marketing budget. So, consider your needs. SemRush offers 100 URL audits with your account for free. Thus, depending on your needs, you can even get SemRush’s help for free.

Screaming Frog 

Versatility and depth. That’s what Screaming Frog is all about. Its biggest strength lies in the tool’s ability to uncover more than just broken links and missing metadata. It also highlights advanced technical issues, such as if you have mistakenly indicated the wrong version of your page to the search engines. Moreover, it will dig deep and show all errors in the hreflang tags. These tags tell search engines which languages and regions you target and are crucial for international websites. For example, if you target the United States with a page in German, your SEO score will be horrendous. So, while other tools will show you there is a problem with the page, Screaming Frog is among the few that will tell you precisely what the problem is and how to fix it.

Furthermore, the tool excels at providing a detailed overview of all SEO problems and gives you a comprehensive list of how to deal with them one by one.

To top it all off, Screaming Frog has one of the most generous free-use policies for an audit tool. They offer up to 500 free URL crawls for a user. This is perfect for small business owners with just a small website needing an audit and a comprehensive overview of the problems hindering their online growth.

On the downside, Screaming Frog is a desktop-based tool, which makes it a bit more complicated. Sure, this gives the tool significantly better processing power than your browser. Still, it also means that all your audits must be done from the same device, which can be pretty inconvenient, especially for larger companies.

Still, if you are searching for an SEO auditing tool that can dig deep into your technical problems, Screaming Frog is by far the best pick.

SE Ranking

SE Ranking may not be the best SEO auditing tool on this list. However, it’s the most cost-efficient choice that will still give you everything you need to conduct a thorough SEO audit. It provides you with all the information you need and more for a price sometimes ten times lower than what you will have to pay its competitors. Naturally, with such a price, this SEO auditing tool is targeting predominantly small and micro businesses.

What we love most about SE ranking, however, is not the price. Sure, having a premium auditing tool with a vast range of capabilities is nice, but that’s not why we put it on this list. It’s an extremely clean and intuitive data presentation. You can see an auditing tool for the first time in your life, yet you will be able to tell what’s what. You will understand complex metrics like the Core Web Vitals as well as all page performance stats.

SE Ranking, however, is not all looks. It also does an outstanding job of finding critical SEO issues like missing metadata, broken links, duplicated content, and lagging speed. Best of all, you needn’t understand how to fix the problems. All you have to do is check the highly comprehensive instructions, and they will guide you through the process.

The only downside to this outstanding tool is the vast range of functionalities. No, that’s not a joke. For beginners, having such a huge choice can be overwhelming, and you can easily panic about choosing the right feature for what you need.

Still, SE Ranking remains one of the most powerful SEO auditing tools available. So, if you are looking for a cost-efficient solution to your auditing needs, this tool is definitely for you.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is the go-to tool for SEO professionals. The tool offers an unparalleled range of features that can accommodate both beginners and experts alike. Perhaps the best feature Ahrefs can offer is the extensive breakdown of the website audit categories. The tool allows users to dive deep into various aspects of their website, from crawl logs and indexability factors to performance metrics and individual page insights. This may sound like nothing special, but in fact, it helps determine technical SEO issues that can otherwise remain invisible. For example, by breaking down audits by the site’s hierarchy, Ahrefs makes it easier to pinpoint and address complex structural issues.

Still, this feature would be pointless for beginners without the easily comprehensible actionable resolution recommendations.

One standout feature is its Internal Link Opportunities tool, which suggests anchor text and target URLs to optimize internal linking across the website. While not always 100% accurate, this feature is incredibly useful for improving link equity and boosting SEO performance. Moreover, Ahrefs integrates seamlessly with other essential SEO tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and Core Web Vitals, enhancing its auditing capabilities with real-time performance data.

The downside of Ahrefs is its complicated interface. The platform is definitely not among the most user-friendly tools, and the learning curve may push many beginners away. Still, once you get how the tool works, everything becomes much easier.

So, if you are looking for an advanced SEO auditing tool that goes deep into the problems and sniffs out every little thing, Ahrefs is definitely your tool. Still, make sure you can handle the learning curve and, more importantly, you can allocate the time to learn how to use the tool properly. Otherwise, the steep cost of the auditing tool won’t pay itself in the end.

Some final words

SEO audit is an essential part of your overall website maintenance. It’s one that can make or break your business, so don’t hesitate to get a good tool that will help you do it. Each of these five tools can do a pretty good job, but of course, they all have downsides. Make sure to do your thorough research before choosing which one to use, as your business size, industry, and niche may require capabilities that some of these platforms may not have.

Before you get to choosing your SEO auditing tool, you need to ensure your website has a fast, secure, and reliable infrastructure behind it. HostArmada offers precisely this – lightning-fast website loading speed, state-of-the-art security, and a 99.9% uptime guarantee. So, make sure your website’s hosting is up to the task before you invest hundreds of dollars in finding out the problems with your website. This will save you a lot of time once the analysis is done.

So, check out our plans and pick the best fit for your needs. Remember that your SEO efforts begin with choosing HostArmada as your hosting partner.