12 Best SEO Audit Tools List In 2023
Auditing your website SEO performance is crucial to succeeding in today’s competitive online environment. You can have a beautiful new website with the latest in design and development features, or spend a fortune in SEO services, but if you don’t use strong SEO website audit tools to monitor your search performance, you may miss problems or changes that impact your business.
Keeping track of Google’s continuous algorithm changes alone can be a monumental task and conducting periodic SEO website audits can be tedious and time consuming. That’s why finding impactful SEO audit tools can be extremely helpful when it comes to keeping your search results front of mind. Here we offer the eight best overall audit tools, plus the four best tools for local search.
8 Best SEO Audit Tools for Websites
We’ve put together our list of the eight best free SEO audit tools that are available to help you keep up-to-date analytics on your website’s performance. Whether you are a business owner, digital marketer, or SEO specialist, these top SEO audit tools can help you stay on top of where your organization ranks on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
With this SEO audit tools list, our goal is to provide you with the best tools for an SEO audit that will give you actionable insights that you can act on immediately to improve your results.
Since Google accounts for more than 90% of searches, they land at the top of the list. While Google plays it ‘close to the chest’ with specifics on what criteria they use to rank websites, they’re outstanding at supplying tools to help you monitor your site’s performance.
Google Search Console (a different, but complementary, platform to Google Analytics) is a collection of tools and reports that can assess and help diagnose most SEO technical issues, including:
- Verifying that Google’s web crawlers are accessing all of the pages on your site.
- Allowing you to submit new pages or content to be indexed.
- Analyze all backlinks.
- Track keywords and their ranking positions.
- Post-click data such as bounce rate, site engagement, and conversion rates for ecommerce.
- Set up notifications where you receive emails if new issues are found on Google Search Console.
Screaming Frog is an industry leader in analyzing technical SEO and, in fact, is used by Google, Amazon, Disney, and Apple. Offering both a free (up to 500 URLs per crawl) and a premium version (unlimited URLs), Screaming Frog offers an SEO spider tool that will analyze websites at lightning speed and deliver solid recommendations about a whole host of issues, including:
- Identify broken links.
- Find missing or poorly optimized meta data (title tags, meta descriptions).
- Identify proper use of H1 and H2 heading.
- Generates XML sitemaps that can allow your pages to be indexed more quickly.
- Audit redirects.
- Identify duplicate content, pages, or copy.
- Identify errors or warnings.
One of the best all-in-one SEO marketing platforms available, SEMrush offers both a free (up to 100 pages per audit report) and a premium version (unlimited pages). The SEMrush site audit tool diagnoses 130+ on-page and technical SEO data points, including:
- SEMrush has a state-of-the-art dashboard, as well as reporting capabilities.
- Custom reporting that can include international SEO, site crawlability, overall site performance and more.
- Intuitive reporting with suggested remedies broken down by ‘errors’, ‘warnings’, and ‘notices’, including:
- Loading speed,
- Content issues,
- Meta tags,
- HTTPS security protocols,
- Internal linking,
- JS and CSS errors, and more.
A free tool from Google, PageSpeed Insights analyzes key speed analytics for both mobile and desktop devices. Page speed is a part of Google’s Core Web Vitals where a major push has been taking place over the last year in relation to SERPs. Slow speed leads to poor performance, lower conversions, and higher bounce rates. Google PageSpeed Insights measures impactful speed analytics like:
- First Contentful Paint
- First Meaningful Paint
- First CPU Idle
- Time to Interactive
- Speed Index
Another leading SEO marketing company, Ahrefs is an SAAS service that runs entirely in the Cloud. The Ahrefs audit tool detects 100+ technical and on-page SEO components that are aggregated and have full-color charts that are straightforward, easy to digest, and based on issues such as:
- Speed performance
- HTML tags
- Quality of the content and duplicative issues
- Meta tags
- Internal and external links
- Broken images
Offering both a free and paid service, GTmetrix captures user experience, loading times, and performance data like the other services, but compares your scores to other websites for a fully objective discussion and actionable recommendations that can be used to improve your site performance. GTmetrix has global test server locations to offer fast, reliable results.
Another strong contender in the SEO audit category is UberSuggest. Like several of the other entries, UberSuggest will crawl your site and provide you with a report detailing where your site ranks for overall SEO health, site speed, backlinking, keyword ranking, content ideas, and SEO opportunities. UberSuggest is also a great site for reverse engineering competitors’ sites, learning their successful strategies, and boosting traffic and performance on your site.
Offering technical, on-page, and off-page SEO analytics in one single platform, SEOMator is an SEO tool that can manage a lot of tasks effectively and notify you when a problem is identified. SEOMator reports can be customized to include:
- Structured data
- HTML tags and meta tags
- Page speed and mobile responsiveness
- Technical issues like broken links and redirects
- Content value and accessibility
- Backlinks
- Social media mentions
4 Best Local SEO Audit Tools
Now let’s look at Local SEO. All websites need overall or universal SEO site audit tools to measure and manage their SERP performance, but businesses that have a physical presence and want to attract customers to their product or service locally (whether a physical location or a product or service that is delivered to a home or business), will want to also consider tools for SEO audits that focus on local results.
Listing Management Tool by SEMrush
Developed as a collaboration with Yext, this platform with an interactive dashboard focuses on managing pages, listings, and reviews for local pages. This program allows you manage your information once and then publish it across multiple listing services, including Google My Business, Yelp, Facebook, Google Maps, Yahoo, Apple Maps, and more.
A powerful website SEO audit tool, Moz Local will boost your local visibility while ensuring your business listings are correct across the internet. Through the dashboard, you can sync your directory and data aggregators to gain key insights into their performance and reach.
You can also monitor reviews and ratings across the various directories and manage Google reviews directly through the dashboard.
Specifically for local sites, Whitespark generates SEO audit report tools that allow you to track rankings and listings across local packs, maps, and local finders, grow and manage your online listings and reviews to build your reputation and garner testimonials, and find local citations that are key with your competitors.
Another SEO platform that is specifically for local results, Synup manages and reports on how your business is performing on local directories, review sites, and SERPs/local packs, including:
- Managing locations.
- Niche specific industry results.
- Monitoring reviews and social comments.
- Tracking web rankings, traffic, any data inconsistencies.
Leveraging Free SEO Audit Tools to Improve Performance
Today, there are some powerful and informative free SEO site audit tools available for your business to use as a way to monitor changes, see how effective they are, and improve overall site performance.
By using free SEO audit report tools, your business can have definitive evidence of the effectiveness of your current SEO program. However, keep in mind, SEO is a soft science and results can take several months to show on the SERPs.
On the other hand, changes like Google’s Core Web Vitals had an almost immediate negative impact on many businesses, but only those that kept an eye on their analytics were able to respond quickly. Others just experienced a drop in business without really understanding the cause.
While most of our entries on the free SEO audit tools list also offer a paid premium service which may be more in line with your business’ needs, the free service will get you started in the right direction.
What Can You Gain with SEO Technical Audit Tools
When you effectively employ on-page, off-page, and technical SEO audit tools (and local tools if they apply), you gain major insights into user experience and ways to improve search results. However, fully utilizing the large amount of data that’s available on these free SEO audit tools online can be a tall order for many companies that run lean.
To take full advantage of the information available, as well as the ongoing monitoring, you may want to consider engaging a full-service SEO company. An SEO agency will provide an experienced team of experts who can perform an initial audit, make the required improvements, changes, and alterations, and then monitor the results for any further issues that arise.
Most organizations rely on their website and their search engine presence to grow and nurture their business. SEO should be a part of a dynamic branding and website marketing strategy and a key component of SEO is auditing to ensure your efforts are paying off.
Contact Lounge Lizard to learn more about our SEO auditing services and how we can help your business thrive.
