Best SEO Audit Tools (2024) – Improve Your Websites Technical SEO
Optimizing your website for SEO might seem a daunting task for many, but it doesn’t have to be. SEO audit tools like the ones from Semrush and Ahrefs provide you with a comprehensive list of technical SEO issues that could be affecting your website’s rankings in search engines like Google.
If we were to try and figure out all the missing SEO elements manually, it would take us weeks, months even years to find all of the issues that these types of SEO software can find in minutes. Plus, you’ll get actionable results, letting you know what you need to do to fix that particular issue.
Some fixes might take longer than others, but you’ll often find some quick SEO wins in there, like meta titles being too long, low word counts, missing meta descriptions, and problems with your page load times.
How do you perform an SEO website audit? Depending on the SEO auditing tool, it’s as easy as entering your website’s domain name and pressing the audit button, then waiting a few minutes for the software to crawl your website. When it’s finished, you’ll find a list of results giving you new ways in which you can improve your SEO metrics.
These include but are not limited to:
- Content issues
- Meta tags & descriptions
- Broken internal links
- HTTPS issues
- JS & CSS errors
- Page redirects
- Page load speeds
- Crawl errors
- Overall website health score
- Backlinks
- Missing image alt tags
Giving your website an SEO audit every week or month is a great way to stay on top of the never-ending search engine optimization task, especially as Google algorithms and ranking factors associated with getting to the top of SERPs change frequently.
Here’s my pick of the best SEO audit tools
- Semrush – best overall SEO Audit software
- Ahrefs – best user-friendly SEO tool
- ScreamingFrog – best for in-depth site analysis
- Ubersuggest – best for SEO beginners
- Deepcrawl – best for technical SEO
- Moz Pro – best for customizability
#1 Semrush – best overall SEO audit software
The Semrush Site Audit tool comes as part of your Semrush account alongside link-building tools, keyword research tools, and competitor research tools.
Designed specifically to provide you with a comprehensive overview of the health of your website in terms of technical SEO and on-page SEO, it’ll check your website for over 130 different potential issues.
When it’s finished its crawl of your website, it breaks down any issues into Errors, Warnings, and Notices, letting you know which ones have the greatest effect on your rankings.
Your reports can be further broken down into crawlability, site performance, internal linking and HTTPS, and International SEO reports so you can focus your issues on certain areas of your website.
You’ll be able to track your progress with each new crawl you do, seeing how many issues you still have left to fix and if any new ones have reared their ugly heads.
With an easy-to-use dashboard, Semrush offers a comprehensive SEO tool with a technical auditing feature that can help your website no matter how big or small.
#2 Ahrefs – best user-friendly SEO audit tool
A Semrush competitor, Ahrefs, takes the guesswork out of SEO issues with their Site Audit tool that crawls and checks your website for over 100 technical SEO problems.
After a few minutes, you’ll have an overall SEO health score with a list of issues to fix, which you can filter based on Notices, Warnings, and Errors like Semrush offers.
You can either take a look at the issues in the overall list, where you’ll find a description of the problem and how to fix it—providing you with actionable insights.
You can also drill down into a specific type of issue and see all of that particular type of issue, which you can then provide a report to the right person within your company to fix.
Ahrefs comes into its own with its ability to let your filter on a variety of features, providing you with a granular analysis of how the pages of your site are performing, whether that’s through page-speed load times, links, and content quality.
Ahrefs SEO audit tool is just part of what you get when you sign up for an Ahrefs account, with their Keyword Explorer, Site Explorer, Rank Tracker, and Content Explorer all part of the package.
#3 ScreamingFrog – best for in-depth site analysis
Screaming Frog isn’t a cloud-based SEO tool like the others on this list. Instead, you’ll have to download the SEO Spider Tool to your computer to perform an audit of your site. It’s available to download on Mac, Linux and Windows machines.
This might be a downside for some. However, ScreamingFrog offers a comprehensive list of common SEO issues for your domain.
With Screaming Frog SEO Spider you can:
- Find broken internal and external links
- Analyze page titles, meta titles, meta descriptions
- Find page redirects
- Find duplicate content issues
- Important user performance data from Google Analytics, Search Console & PageSpeed Insights
- Validate structured data
- Generate XML Sitemaps
- Schedule your website audits
Unlike Ahrefs and Semrush, Screaming Frog isn’t the most user-friendly option and can take some time to learn how to use it. However, its wealth of data is valuable for many SEOs.
Plus, it’s a great free SEO audit tool that can crawl up to 500 URLs and help you extract the most out of your website on a budget.
#4 Ubersuggest – best for SEO beginners
One of the simplest SEO audit software, Ubersuggest, is easy to use and great for SEO beginners and smaller websites looking for some quick wins.
Much like the other search engine optimization audit tools on the list, the Ubersuggest audit comes as part of the overall SEO package you get, with a keyword tracker, keyword ideas, backlink, and competitor research tools.
When it comes to auditing your site, you can pick to audit a specific URL or your whole domain. A complete domain scan can take up to 10 minutes to crawl your website, and if you’re on the lowest-paid plan, it will only crawl up to the first 1000 pages it finds.
Any issues found come with descriptions of the problem and how to fix it. You can also drill down into all the issues of the same kind.
A simple tool that keeps getting better.
#5 Moz Pro – best for customizability
Moz Pro gives you the tools you need to perform a full audit of your website to fix the technical SEO issues that might be hindering your website’s performance in SERPs.
Using the Moz Pro Site Crawl feature, you’ll get a list of results showing you what impact they have on your site. The colorful charts give you an overview of what’s wrong and keep track of your progress as you fix any of the issues.
The Site Crawl is performed each week automatically, or you can perform a manual crawl yourself if needed. Remember that any crawls come as part of your crawl allowance, based on your plan.
With each crawl, you’ll be able to find new issues that weren’t part of the last crawl and find the issues by type to see precisely what needs to be done.
If you’re not the one that will fix the issues, Moz Pro makes it easy for you to export any issues to CSV. If you want a record of the overall health score of your site to show your managers or colleagues, you can also export that to PDF.
It’s a comprehensive tool that provides an in-depth analysis of your website’s health and is a good step up from what Ubersuggest offers but still lacks some of the usability features that Ahrefs and Semrush provide.
#6 Deepcrawl – best for technical SEO
Last on our list of the best SEO Audit tools, Deepcrawl provides technical SEO insights into your website’s overall technical health.
It’s a different type of tool that, unlike the others, continually tracks and measures your performance in search engines.
The technical analysis tool provides you with detailed insights into what you need to do to help your website perform better and gain rankings in search. It’ll track your page titles, metadata, image alt, check link data, and more.
All of this can help websites, no matter how big or small, find and fix critical errors that can negatively affect your sites with actionable descriptions of what to do.
You can expect to choose your plan based on the number of pages you expect to crawl each month when it comes to pricing.
Which is the best SEO website audit tool?
SEO audit tools come in all shapes and sizes. Each offers different features, but all try and achieve the same task, which is to provide you with ways to increase your site’s performance in search from a technical viewpoint.
If you’re looking for an all-around solution, it can be helpful to combine multiple website tools to fill the gaps that one of the others doesn’t manage to fill.
For bloggers, freelancers, or small businesses on a budget with a small number of website pages, the free SEO tool that ScreamingFrog offers is a great option. The only downside is you have to download it to your machine.
For those looking for an intuitive solution to your website problems, the more expensive Semrush is a great tool that gives you many ways to improve your site technically and with on-page SEO, content, and linking opportunities.
Whichever you choose, be sure to use the free trials to see if they are the best option for you. This will give you the information you need to make an informed purchasing decision.
