8 tools to help you perform an SEO audit (and how to use them)

Want to perform an SEO audit and fix your website issues but don’t know where to start?

Here are 8 SEO audit tools that will help you in your journey.

And there is a bonus tool at the end!

1. Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is one of the most popular web crawling tools out there. It can crawl your website as search engines do and help identify major and minor issues that you need to fix on your website during the SEO audit.

Screaming Frog offers a free plan for websites with up to 500 URLs. So if you have a website with less than 500 pages, you can use Screaming Frog for free. If you want to crawl more than 500 pages on a website, you will need a paid version. That’s why Screaming Frog is considered the perfect SEO audit tool for smaller websites and blogs.

Recommendation: We recommend Screaming Frog to smaller website owners who want to crawl their websites and identify crawling, indexing, and technical SEO issues on the site.

Click here to download Screaming Frog.

One con of Screaming Frog, however, is that its user interface is not the most helpful. If you find it difficult to navigate the tool, you’ll need an application with better UX/UI — like SEMRush.

2. SEMRush

SEMRush is an extremely popular keyword research tool for SEO and SEM, but it is much more than just a keyword research tool.

SEMRush also features a full-fledged site audit tool that can help you perform an SEO audit, identify almost all on-page, off-page, and technical SEO issues, and share actionable insights into how to fix each issue.

Recommendation: We recommend SEMRush to website owners with a bit more budget and a larger website with more URLs. Other than the SEO audit, you should also use SEMRush for on-page optimization, keyword research, and competitor analysis.

3. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a good alternative for SEMRush. It also offers a very robust website audit tool that compiles and reports on-page, off-page, and technical SEO issues clearly and concisely. Like SEMRush, Ahrefs also offers excellent actionable tips on how to fix each issue.

Recommendation: Ahrefs is a very capable and feature-rich SEO software. You can use it for almost everything, which includes website audit, on-page optimization, competitor analysis, and keyword research. 

However, we recommend Ahrefs particularly for off-page SEO and backlink analysis. In that area, Ahrefs has a clear competitive edge over its direct competitors.

4. All in One SEO

All in One SEO is an excellent WordPress plugin that can help you identify and fix on-page SEO optimization issues.

After you do the initial SEO audit and fix the glaring issues, you want to keep your website clean and free of errors. That’s where All in One SEO comes into play. Apart from helping you fix obvious issues and optimize your web page, the plugin also helps you grow your website traffic.

Recommendation: We recommend the All in One SEO plugin for:

• Easily adding title tags, meta descriptions, and keywords on each page.
• Adding schema markup so your web page becomes eligible for rich results on Google’s search engine results pages.
• Generating XML sitemaps for your websites.
• Adding relevant internal links to and from web pages
• Create and manage redirects to avoid confusion for search engines and save crawl budget.
• Analyzing each web page as per the SEO audit checklist to ensure maximum optimization.

An alternative to All in One SEO is the equally popular Yoast SEO plugin.

5. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool by Google that helps you monitor website traffic and visitor engagement. 

Recommendation: We recommend Google Analytics to:

• Identify how much traffic you drive from search engines.
• Monitor organic traffic before and after the SEO audit.
• Identify the top organic pages on your website.
• Monitor visitor engagement after they land on your website and metrics that can affect search engine rankings, e.g., bounce rate, average on-page time, etc.
• Identify pages that generate the highest revenue so you can focus more on them.

6. Google Search Console

Google Search Console is one of the best SEO audit tools out there. In fact, it is a must-have. It gives you valuable insights into how Google views your website and its different pages and whether there are any issues or even manual penalties that might be affecting your website’s search engine rankings.

Recommendation: There are plenty of things that you should do with the help of Google Search Console while performing an SEO audit. Here are a few of them:

• See if Google can crawl and index all the web pages on your site that you want it to.
• Find out the exact reason why Google isn’t indexing a web page.
• Identify the search queries or keywords that drive the most traffic to your website.
• Submit a sitemap to Google.
• Submit a newly published web page for indexing to Google.
• Identify mobile usability issues on your website.
• Check your site’s performance and user experience in terms of core web vitals.
• See if Google has issued any manual penalty against your website.
• Check the average organic click-through rate of your website.
• Check the organic click-through rate of important web pages on your site and see if you can improve that. A higher CTR means more traffic and improved search rankings in the future.

7. Google PageSpeed Insights

Website loading speed has been an important search engine ranking factor for a while now. How long your website takes to load often helps determine its search engine rankings. If it takes forever to load, Google is less likely to rank it in the top position.

With Google PageSpeed Insights, you can find out exactly how fast your website loads, see what the core web vitals are, and note down actionable tips on how to fix speed-related issues on your site.

Recommendation: We recommend Google PageSpeed Insights to monitor and fix issues related to website loading speed and core web vitals.

Tip: You can also use other tools like GTMetrix and Pingdom for a more comprehensive report on website loading speed, along with Google PageSpeed Insights.

8. Meta Tags Optimization Tool

Optimizing meta tags (meta titles and meta descriptions) is a key part of any SEO audit and on-page SEO optimization.

When creating or editing meta titles and meta descriptions, it’s important to keep in mind their maximum width. Otherwise, Google will truncate meta titles and descriptions that are too long.

What’s important to note is that it does not depend on the character count. Instead, the maximum width depends on pixels. That’s why it’s harder to calculate, which is why you need a tool like Google SERP Snippet Optimization.

Recommendation: We recommend using the SERP Snippet Optimization Tool to create meta titles and meta descriptions and to view exactly how your web page would appear in the search result. You can use its live editor to make changes on the fly.

9. BONUS: SEO Site Checkup SEO ToolBox

Here at SEO Site Checkup, we have created an SEO Toolbox that can help instantly analyze your website SEO issues in one place — instead of juggling between multiple tools. 

In addition, you can also keep track of weekly changes for more than 30 variables to see exactly how your website’s performance is improving over time. Moreover, with our SEO Toolbox, you can also do side-by-side comparisons with up to 5 competitors to see how your website is performing against your competitors.

With actionable reports and insights, you can easily perform SEO audits, fix SEO issues that are holding back your website, outdo your competitors, and increase traffic and revenue.

Check out the free SEO tools we have and sign up for a free trial today.