I tend to flip between a few different site auditor tools, but SEMrush tends to be my go-to tool at the moment. Partly because of convenience. Since SEMrush has a suite of content, SEO and social media tools, It’s very easy to quickly run off a site audit while I’m using it for content audits, or topic research.

When completing a website audit I actually use a few different tools, but typically Ahrefs (although honorable mention to SEMRush because I’ve used them in the past as well!). For me, Ahrefs just makes sense and keeps things easy. I feel like their basic plan has a lot of functionality where you have to pay more with other tools. I use this tool primarily to identify issues with my website, and then I very often find myself in Google Search Console to dig deeper or fix the problem. I also use Google PageSpeed Insights frequently and continually try to improve my site speed, and I often check different sites to identify broken links (there are many free tools out there). While these tools are easy when you just want to focus on one area of a website audit, ahrefs is the go-to tool for me every few months when I want to do a deep dive. I also use the reports from ahrefs to communication with others in the company about improvements and struggles.

My vote is a classic: CrazyEgg. I use it anytime I make major design or content changes to a site, because you can’t beat seeing how people are scrolling through and interacting with your content. It’s an excellent way to see what people value and how you can better position that on a site to its easily accessible and to see what they’re passing over that can be reprioritized or improved. Let me know if there’s anything else you need!

I am in love in using SERanking for any of the Web Audits we want to do. It has one of the most advanced ways to generate also reports, which is part of why I prefer it. A web site audit when it comes to SEO it should take in consideration all the ranking reasons and not just some of them. A detail report that user afterward can use from their side, to get the results that will help them reach the highest potential for their web site. Do not care for the price when it comes on tools like this, as the result is what matters the most.

“If I had to use one tool to audit a website for SEO, Sitebulb is my hands-down winner. It has some super-deep technical audits built-in, and provides actionable tips on what to fix (and why). It’s damn impressive, actually.”

I’ve tested out many tools but I was looking for a combo of a great dashboard, detailed notes and actionable steps and for me, SEMRush was hands down the best tool for me. I leverage SEM Rush’s SEO Dashboard weekly to understand position tracking, brand monitoring as well as the detailed site audit. I’ve also launched a brand new speaker website (BrianFanzo.com) and SEM Rush worked great for Page SEO Checker as well as the backlink audit which is extremely important for me not only as a blogger but also a podcaster and professional speaker. Beyond those functions, I’ve also found value in the keyword analytics and the new SEO Writing assistant as I’m now way more confident as I edit my weekly blog posts and podcast show notes that not only am I writing for SEO but I’m also not hurting my other content or websites. As a data geek and hands-on founder of iSocialFanz.com I leverage SEMrush.com weekly and couldn’t be happier.

We like Spyfu and SEMRush..

Bruce Clay SEO Audits Tools I think this should answer about what I think of various audit tools.

Personally, the SEO tool I prefer to use for website audits is Ahrefs. It’s intuitive to use. It paints a clear picture of the primary factors that may be influencing a site’s organic presence. At a glance I can see the health of the domain, what a site’s link profile looks like, the keywords it’s ranking for, and how much exposure the site’s content is getting in SERPs.

I’ve used several tools over the years to run SEO audits. While no tool is perfect, lately I do find myself often using the SEO Audit tool provided by Ahrefs. Not only does it get the job done for most of the sites I work on, I’m already paying for Ahrefs so it makes one less tool I need to pay for ?

I personally like to use a tool called URL Profiler. It has a ton of various API connections (you just need access or a token) which can really open up the data you can pull. Since I work with a ton of clients across various verticals it allows me to a lot of my auditing in bulk. It is also great for larger projects like backlink auditing or competitive research. Overall I would recommend it for anyone doing a lot of auditing or detailed client reporting for hundreds or thousands of clients.

I would recommend UberSuggest by Neil Patel as it’s a very simple tool that gives you a quick overview of what’s working for you, especially when trying to improve traffic to your blog.

There is no better website auditor tool than your own brain, but I’m a fan of the free website auditor tools at https://varvy.com/. They are based on the Google Guidelines and will check your site for all of the recommendations from the guidelines. It will check:

• Googlebot access
• Mobile friendliness
• Page speed
• https
• Accessibility
• Robots.txt
• Image alt text
• Sitemaps
• Headers (like the often missed “If-Modified-Since HTTP header”)
• Valid HTML
• Number of links

You can click into each of these items for more information and optimization recommendations. It’s quick, free, and covers much of the basic technical SEO elements you should be concerned about. Combine this with a free content analysis from http://siteliner.com and you’ll have a good list of recommendations for areas to improve your SEO.

For something more advanced, I think the site-auditor from https://www.woorank.com/ is excellent, easy to understand, and covers everything. You’ll have to pay for it, but it’s reasonably priced.

I’d probably go with SEMRush. I have a unique point of view on the tools because my clients are agencies and each agency has a personal preference or hierarchy of what data to go off of for their client’s websites. This means I have to read and react to each client’s needs between Majestic.com, Ahrefs.com, Moz.com, SemRush.com, etc. I trend towards SEMRush because their interface is the easiest to navigate in my opinion. Even though I know how to use the other tools well, if I need to share screenshots or data from one of the services the SEMRush pages are “prettier” and more self-explanatory which helps me share information without needing to provide as much as context as, let’s say, a screenshot of what a website’s trust and citation flow is and means (from Majestic)

I have been using Screaming Frog for technical SEO audits for almost as long as I can remember doing them. I have used many others, including web-based crawlers like Botify and OnCrawl, as well as tools like Moz, SEMRush, and AHrefs, each of which has their own strengths and weaknesses. The only other tool I would recommend in tandem with Screaming Frog is URL Profiler, which pulls in some metrics that SF doesn’t, although recent SF updates have brought more metrics capabilities into the tool, which you can see in the API tab.

Site Audit by Ahrefs can crawl your entire website and give you a detailed report on a wide array of possible SEO issues and optimization opportunities, including issues with internal pages, performance and HTML tags. Ahrefs site audit includes a data explorer with important metrics for each URL.

I’ve spent most of my time playing with ScreamingFrog and Sitebulb so I don’t have experience with dozens of tools but ScreamingFrog is definitely my favourite, with Sitebulb being a close second.

SEMRush: I have been using this tool for the past few years and it’s been perfect for performing site audit for large and small websites. You can connect your Google Analytics account to find more refined data and start working on pages that matter the most to you or your client. I have set up the email report which keeps me updated in case of any issue is found.

Screaming Frog hands down is my favourite website auditing tool. The ability to add custom extractions is what’s sets it apart from most other tools in the market. They also keep improving the tool by adding more and more integrations with other SEO data points which makes it even more powerful.

For website auditing the best tool we use is SiteBulb, it provides a detailed analysis of the website with actionable fixes a webmaster can make. Finding things such as broken links, redirect issues, oversized images and much more.

For top-level web analysis I am also a big fan of Surfer SEO tool which has great features from an on-page point of view for websites for a quick SEO audit, picking up factors such as TTFB, Schema used, on-page targeting and much more.

Here are the tools that I often use when doing comprehensive website audits:

1. Ahrefs (Site Audit feature) – their crawl report is quite extensive, plus it presents a ton of metrics where you can derive meaningful insights into your recommendations (and I think is kind of underrated at the moment).

2. Google Analytics

3. Google Search Console

4. Google Chrome Lighthouse

One of my favorite tools for website’s SEO Audit is ContentKing, it covers all the basics of an SEO-audit but also goes deeper into content-specific issues, scoring the quality of each individual page and providing actionable steps to correct any issues and increase the score. One of the main advantages is the real-time monitoring, ContentKing not only reflects updates to your website in real-time but it also tracks changes and informs when anything changes, like a page title or your robots.txt file. It’s a great tool when working with a team where multiple people make changes to the website.

I personally recommend Ahrefs as one of the best SEO audit tool, they have everything an SEO expert need. Ahrefs can analyse backlinks, keyword explorer & find broken links. Ahrefs provides up-to-the-minute info on any SEO query. Today, Ahrefs is the only tool that digs into Javascript, while others crawl HTML pages and nothing else. I know many of my SEO friends they cannot live without Ahrefs as we use extensively to find backlink opportunities.

Ahrefs Site Explorer leads the game when it comes to backlink analysis and discovery of link opportunities like no other tool in the market can do. Its crawling power is 4.1+ million pages per minute. The backlink index is not the only big thing in Ahrefs. Its Keywords Explorer runs the largest database – 5.5 billion keywords for over 200 countries. SO you can see the power of this amazing tool which can do audit your website very thoroughly.

I use a combination of different SEO tools when doing an audit but one of my favorites right now is Ahrefs Site Audit tool. This tool is very similar to Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider tool but where it shines is how it presents the info and allows you to slice and dice data for better insights (even if you don’t have a lot of experience doing it).

It quickly allows you to run a website through and see any major problems because it categorizes issues by urgency. One of my favorite parts of it is the Data Explorer tool where you can create filters and choose from dozens of existing segments and filters to really dig into a problem quickly and easily. And it even allows you to create a to-do list from them for your team.

One downside is, the data isn’t always accurate so you always want to double-check it with another tool, which you want to do anyway. That being said, I don’t hear a lot about this tool but I think it has a ton of potential!

I recommend SEMRush as an exceptional website audit tool. Not only do they offer comprehensive website audit tools, but they also do double-duty as a research tool. The research includes identifying what the competition is doing in terms of their advertising strategies and spend as well as the backlinks and PPC keywords they use. Competitor data is nearly as important as your own company data so these features have helped us gain a significant competitive advantage with our website ranking and traffic.

Other features that make SEMRush an ideal website audit tool include identifying the best publishers and advertisers as well as optimum keywords for SEO and effective PPC campaigns. The website audit tool also provides comprehensive position tracking and analytical reports to further assess our website and ad campaign performance. Plus, it has a free version, which makes it a practical choice for any startup who wants to stretch their available funding while still getting the results necessary to grow its audience and revenue.

When I audit a website I’m usually looking at links so I use a combination of SEMRush, Majestic, and Ahrefs because they all have various types of reports that might make more sense for certain cases. I like to get as much data as possible and look at it in a few different ways. I also can’t live without Sitebulb, especially because it has such useful visualizations of data.

I use Screaming Frog’s paid version to perform all our SEO audits. It allows me to input the sitemap to crawl all pages plus is quick and easy. From there we manually check all the title, descriptions, and internal links through the data Screaming Frog has pulled. I do sometimes use SE Ranking’s website audit as it’s also quick and pulls all data in a nice format. This allows me to see items I may have missed on Screaming Frog.

Most website audit tools are saas tools but I still use a manual desktop application crawler called Xenu link sleuth.

It helps you find broken links and other useful information like loading times and crawl errors.

It hasn’t been updated in over 20 years but works perfectly.

http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

There are dozens of useful SEO diagnostic tools, but none can yet replace the human touch for strategic oversight of an SEO program, prioritization, and opportunity identification. Use any and all of the tools to spot micro issues, but work with an experienced human SEO to pull it all together and set a course for growth

At Bowler Hat (my agency) there is only really one tool that we use when it comes to auditing websites and that is the Screaming Frog SEO Spider. We also have our own audit process that looks at around 200 ranking factors but much of that analysis is done in Screaming Frog. There are a bunch of tools out there that will provide some form of SEO audit and then can be useful, especially if you are not an SEO expert. However, for audits to be truly effective they need to be approached from the objective and this needs a skilled SEO consultant to conduct the audit using a flexible audit tool like Screaming Frog

I recommend everyone get familiar with the free tools that Google provides first. This way you get the information straight from the horse’s mouth. Search Google to know what they rank, explore Search Console for potential issues, check your site speed with PageSpeed Insights and design with the Mobile-Friendly Test tool. All this gives you a nice and simple audit you can start with.

If you’re looking for an awesome website audit tool, look no further than SEMRUSH Site Audit. In just a few clicks the sophisticated site audit tool checks 130+ technical SEO errors such as website crawlability, content issues and metadata problems alongside documenting fixable SEO mistakes. It splits issues into 3 areas (errors, warnings & notices) to make sure the tasks list it creates is easy to manage Best of all, you can export tasks to 3rd party management tools such as Trello which makes working through the task list easy and stress-free when working with your team. After fixing each task, you can then run another crawl of your site to see if the issue has been fixed – using visual graphs that highlight errors reducing, you can then show clients the progress of their website.

The best tool for website auditing is really dependant on the type of audit we’re conducting for our clients. If it’s backlink related, we’ll use Majestic, Moz, or Ahrefs if it’s technical, we’ll use crawlers like Sitebulb and Screaming Frog – and often a combination of these. However, for this specific question I’m going to try and recommend an pretty unknown tool we’ve been using for a few months now that the others on this list won’t highlight – Big Metrics.

Big Metrics is a tool that takes advantage of Google Search Console’s API en-masse. It’s got some excellent features for identifying cannibalization, looking at what keywords have performed well vs those that are dropping, includes on-page keyword analysis and more. Is it the best website audit tool out there? Probably not. Will it help up your audit game? Absolutely.

You can use anything like Screaming Frog, SEMRush audit, Ahrefs Audit, Website Auditor, etc.

The best SEO audit tool doesn’t cost anything and is accessible to everyone. It’s the computer between your ears! Manual observation should be the first thing you do when conducting any SEO audit but is often overlooked in favour of tools and automation. Fire up a mobile phone, a tablet and your computer and simulate the same experience on every device. What happens if you leave a comment, what happens if you signup, what happens if you buy?

It’s likely you’ll find huge holes that tools can’t find. For example every tool told me my site was mobile-friendly including Google’s own tool – but I had heaps of complaints from people saying that mobile experience was terrible.

And they were right!

So if you are going to do an SEO audit, the first thing you should do is to use your own eyes before anything else. SEO’s often forget about the human factor which is why I created the common sense SEO audit process to help make SEO audits accessible to everyone.

I like using Pingdom for a speed check. You can never underestimate the power of a fast website!

For a great SEO Audit, as many others can testify, I use a combination of SEMRush, ScreamingFrog, Majestic, DeepCrawl, Ahrefs as well as Google Search Console. However, as an International SEO one of the most important tools in my arsenal is HREFLang Builder.

https://www.hreflangbuilder.com HREFLang builder helps accurately identify how HREFLANG is setup on a global website. I have often discovered plenty of issues causing sites to lose massive amounts of exposure due to incorrectly sending Google the wrong pages for the wrong countries and languages. It’s easy to mess it up and a huge win for global sites to have it run really well.

The top tools I use for website technical auditing are a combination of Screaming Frog and Deep Crawl. Both of these crawlers allow me to quickly identify (at scale) some of the larger technical issues a website is having. After getting a macro view of what technical issues exist, it allows me to do more of the manual analysis with a focus on the area’s the tool pointed out. If I’m doing a traffic drop analysis, I’m utilizing the sites analytics, GSC and more recently ContentKing to understand if/when changes have occurred on the site.

The top tools I use for website technical auditing are a combination of Screaming Frog and Deep Crawl. Both of these crawlers allow me to quickly identify (at scale) some of the larger technical issues a website is having. After getting a macro view of what technical issues exist, it allows me to do more of the manual analysis with a focus on the area’s the tool pointed out. If I’m doing a traffic drop analysis, I’m utilizing the sites analytics, GSC and more recently ContentKing to understand if/when changes have occurred on the site.

I have to be honest from the outset, I don’t rely on one single tool to conduct a website audit. However, if I was forced to do an audit with just the one tool then I would ask for ScreamingFrog. It’s going to take a little more work and technical understanding than other audit tools but, it gives greater coverage of the technical elements that I want to be able to uncover for a client.

If I had to choose only one tool for auditing a website that’s not provided by Google, I’d take Screaming Frog. It’s a workhorse that allows me to dive deep into the technical aspects of the website. It gives me the flexibility to ask many questions and solve a lot of challenges:

The standard reports don’t include things I’m interested in? I use Custom Extraction to collect all the information I need.

Working on a large enterprise website and my laptop runs out of memory? I can launch the tool in Google Cloud and forget the memory issues.

Needing to crawl the site repeatedly? Version 10.0 or higher allows me to schedule reoccurring crawls.

The tool doesn’t have the most visually appealing interface, but if you need to run complex analyses and merge the data with other data sources, you can always export the data and analyze them in Power BI or any other BI tool.

It really depends on what you’re looking for & trying to analyze. If I’m looking for duplicate content, I’m going to use Copyscape & Siteliner. If I’m doing backlink analysis or determining what pages are performing & showing up for organic searches which I may not be tracking elsewhere, I’m going to use Ahref’s site explorer.

However, for a basic, quick scan, one of my favorites is still Screaming Frog. Even the free version will allow you to do some quick analysis & see if things like title tags, meta descriptions & headings have been optimized & exist, if there are obvious indexability issues, what pages have been 301ed vs those which are live, word count on pages, etc, etc. You are limited with the free version though as to how many pages per site you can scan but it runs pretty quickly & gives a good snapshot into potential issues which you can then dive further into & utilize more specialized tools if needed.

DeepCrawl is fast, powerful and uses data visualizations incredibly well to help visualize boring SEO data. We use it both for technical SEO audits as well as a part of our sales process. It makes it easy to identify areas of improvement on a prospect’s site.

There are a lot of website audit tools out in the market, but we’ve consistently used a single website auditing (crawling) tool for a few years now. ScreamingFrog is mainly a crawling tool, but with its capability to display all the missing facets of my site’s pages, it’s at the top of my list of best website auditing tools.

ScreamingFrog’s feature of displaying what all SEOs need to see with regards to their site’s technical and onsite (sometimes off-site). Server status, Missing meta tags, duplicate meta tags, missing alt text, and every little detail that we need to see is inside ScreamingFrog. I strongly recommend that SEOs or any webmasters that want to see a more holistic and technical view of their website and its specific points of improvement try out ScreamingFrog since it’s THAT useful of a tool.

I’ve found Ahrefs to be a very helpful tool for evaluating the weak spots of my website. It has also been very useful for finding opportunities to deliver content to my audience that we haven’t covered yet. For all the information it can provide, I think it’s very much worth the price if you know how to use it and put it to work.

“An effective website audit should focus on at least 5 key areas:

(1) Crawlability

Are search engines able to crawl your site? To help answer this fundamentally important question, you can use crawling tools such as Screaming Frog, DeepCrawl, and Sitebulb.

Once you’ve verified that your site’s content is crawlable, you want to make sure you’re optimizing your crawl budget. Specifically, you can use Lighthouse and a variety of other tools (e.g., WebPageTest, GTmetrix, PageSpeed Insights, etc.) to measure the load times (and performance-related best practices) for your site’s content.

You can also use your site’s server logs (and the aforementioned crawling tools) to identify various issues with your hosting infrastructure (e.g., errors, redirects, crawler traps, etc.).

(2) Indexability

Are search engines actually indexing your site’s pages? You can gain important index-related insights with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools (in addition to performing various index-related queries using the actual search engines).

These tools can help you identify sections of your site that aren’t being indexed, and you can use them to diagnose potential problem areas (e.g., content that isn’t mobile-friendly, incorrect markup, etc.).

(3) On-page Ranking Factors

The previously mentioned crawling tools can help you assess the overall strength of your site’s on-page ranking factors (e.g., URLs, markup, content, etc.).

However, you will need to manually investigate a subset of your site’s pages to truly evaluate these ranking factors. There are various tools that will help with this investigation (e.g., WooRank, DYNO Mapper, etc.), but there’s really no substitute for using your favorite browser to audit these ranking factors on your own.

(4) Off-page Ranking Factors

Your site’s search engine rankings are still largely based on your site’s off-page ranking factors (e.g., backlinks, citations, mentions, etc.).

You can investigate a subset of your site’s backlinks using tools such as Ahrefs and Majestic. You can also measure your site’s external influence with a tool like BuzzSumo.

(5) Competitive Analysis

After you’ve audited your own website, you should perform a similar analysis on your biggest competitors. All of the previously mentioned tools can help with this competitive analysis.

Additionally, you can use tools such as SEMrush and SpyFu to help speed up the process.”

I could say one tool offers all the audits a search engine marketing practitioner needs to create an action plan for technical SEO. If I could only choose one tool, at the moment it would be Ryte (formerly OnPage.org), do to the depth of JavaScript-friendly crawl data it offers. Ryte allows us to see critical errors, trend improvements over time, and work one page at time through overall site improvements.

Other tools we use very often in our audits include eRanker, SEMrush, and of course Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. One-off tools include GTMetrix, Pingdom, Lighthouse, Google’s Structured Data Testing, Mobile-Friendliness Test and Test Your Site tools.

Nothing beats a manual review of a single landing page to look for obvious mobile usability issues, crawl-blockers, and content editing focal points such as storytelling and sales principles.

So, here’s my favorite tool for website audits:

My favorite tool for conducting a website audit is Screaming Frog SEO Spider. Within seconds, I can identify crawl issues (400/ 500 errors), on-page SEO issues (duplicate metadata), page structure issues (h1, h2, etc) and indexing issues (canonicals). It’s the first tool I go to and I have used it for every website audit I’ve ever done.

We have tested a large number of SEO Audit tools, and our favorite for the past several years is Raven Tools hands down. Raven covers all of the important crawling/indexing areas, performance/load times, as well as the on-page items of the highest importance.

If you want a more in-depth technical audit, it’s worth also considering the tools SEMrush has built over the past several years. They cover some aspects of SEO that Raven omits such as HTTPS issues and other security areas.

Raven has better reporting output capabilities, but either can work depending on what you are trying to investigate. Given the stellar reporting capabilities and white labeling as well, we opt for Raven for 80-90% of the audits we complete. Even if we have to fill in the blanks on some technical items manually or via a quick visit to SEMrush.

Hope that works – I know I shared two tools, but we actually do use a mix of both depending on the size and scope of the audit.

SemRush allows us to use the historical data in our sales pitches. This really gives our sales teams an advantage. But overall life without screaming frog would have reduced visibility!

The most underrated tool is… empathy.

Using your analytics tool of choice, looking at top conversion paths and actions, turning on Chrome dev tools and then manually going through the motions like an actual customer, recording page loads as you move from page to page and then breaking down that experience.

Is it slow? How does everything feel in a mobile device emulator? Does that experience match up to desktop?

Does the content on the page map up to a spectrum of consumer intent? (check the SERP on the topic the page ranks for)

Do the links work/point to an intent closer to transaction/conversion?

Are there more parts of the website/architecture that should link towards this conversion path?

The data from your tools are symptomatic. Getting an arbitrary 3rd party “red/low” score doesn’t mean anything if it doesn’t tie back to business reality. Empathy is a skill and tool that unlocks the true story behind the data. Like most tools, it’s something you can master over time. Being intentional about empathizing with the searcher makes you a much better SEO.

Sitebulb is the best. All the rest are just trying to live up to them. Sitebulb forever!