Compare the Best Technical SEO Audit Tools
Our recommendation for the best technical SEO audit tool is Screaming Frog SEO Spider because it offers several technical audit-specific features to monitor the health of your SEO strategy accurately. Download the free version to get started.
Performing a technical SEO audit of your website involves making specific changes and optimizations to make your site easier for search engines to crawl, thereby improving search engine ranking. It’s an in-depth process where you focus on resolving technical issues (crawl errors, hosting, indexing), analyzing content (keyword research, content maps, metadata), and fixing links (backlink profile analysis, growth tactics, broken links).
Clearly, this is a huge deal.
The issue with conducting a technical SEO site audit manually is it’s highly time-consuming and tedious. Instead, you can use trusted technical SEO audit tools that simplify identifying and eliminating your most critical website problems to improve search rankings. This brings us to the next important question: which is the best technical SEO audit tool for your needs? Let’s find out.
The Top 6 Technical SEO Audit Tools
As someone who has conducted multiple technical audits, here are my top six SEO audit tools that are worth their weight in gold. Screaming Frog SEO Spider would be the most suitable option for most because of its excellent feature set and generous free plan. Download the free version today.
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider — Best for websites with under 500 URLs
- Semrush Site Audit — Best for large-scale enterprises
- Google Search Console — Best for in-depth index analysis
- Ahrefs Site Audit — Best for website content auditing
- Sitechecker — Best for entry-level business owners and in-house marketers
- Lumar — Best for customized reporting
Wondering what makes them better than the rest? Keep reading.
Match Your Scenario to the Right Technical SEO Audit Solution
Every website has unique requirements and problems. Here’s my structured guidance to help you pick the best technical SEO audit tool for your site.
- You want to achieve a higher position in the search engine
- You want to identify keywords you’re ranking for
- You want to get customized reports on your SEO strategy
You want to achieve a higher position in the search engine
Best option: Screaming Frog
With Screaming Frog, you can easily identify and remove factors negatively impacting your website’s ranking. It also has a generous free plan that lets you remove broken links, errors, and redirects, analyze metadata and page titles and generate XML sitemaps.
Another great choice: Semrush
If you have a larger website with more than 500 URLs, you’ll find Semrush more suited to your needs. With its powerful SEO audit tool, you can accurately assess technical site problems and improve your organic ranking.
If improving your website’s ranking applies to you, look for tools that:
- Provide real-time crawl log
- Assess both the desktop and mobile versions of your website
- Evaluate internal linking and URL structure
- Find broken links and server errors
You want to identify keywords you’re ranking for
Best choice: Google Search Console
Use Google Search Console’s content keyword tool to analyze keyword performance.
In addition to helping you identify web pages that are ranking in the search engine, it also provides deeper insight into how well each keyword is performing. Google Search Console is also handy for identifying your website positioning, the number of clicks in the SERP result, and the number of impressions you get.
Another great choice: Ahrefs
Ahrefs can help you identify keywords your website is already ranking for, thanks to its rank tracking tool. It allows you to monitor your rankings over time, as well as compare performance against your competitors.
If keyword ranking applies to you, look for tools that:
- Come with a keyword rank tracker
- Provide data related to SERP features, such as features snippets, image packs, and site links
- Allows you to visualize data using relevant filters and tags
- Perform competitor analysis
You want to get customized reports on your SEO strategy
Best choice: Lumar
Lumar’s customizable reporting lets you uncover valuable insights related to your website as well as your competitors’. Set filters and tags to only highlight information you deem necessary.
Offering 100+ reporting options and customizations, this tool makes it easier than ever to uncover insights that make a real difference in how you optimize and drive traffic from your website.
Another great choice: Sitechecker
You can also give Sitechecker a shot if you’re looking for custom checklists containing valuable data about your website.
What’s more, Sitechecker even analyzes your site search performance and updates your checklist based on the changes in your content, ranking, and backlinks.
If customized reporting applies to you, look for tools that:
- With an intuitive user interface
- Have advanced reporting capabilities
- Lets you automate reporting on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis
- Offers competitor analysis
Best Technical SEO Audit Company Reviews
Based on my extensive experience and feedback from other SEO experts, I present to you my top recommendations for the best technical SEO audit tools that simplify and streamline analyzing your website’s SEO performance.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider — Best for Websites With Under 500 URLs
Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider is an installable crawling tool you can use to crawl through your website to extract on-site data, audit SEO problems, and analyze results in real-time.
Although not an audit tool in the traditional sense, it can accurately report on various parameters to conduct a complete site audit, including response time, meta descriptions, anchor text, outlinks, and security.
Screaming Frog makes an excellent choice for smaller websites. It has a generous free version with a crawl limit of 500 URLs that has all the necessary features to perform a thorough website audit.
What Makes Screaming Frog Great
Regardless of whether you choose the free or paid version, Screaming Frog offers tons of excellent features to effectively monitor the health of your SEO strategy.
Use it to find errors, broken links, and redirects on your website to eliminate any negative impact on search rankings. Screaming Frog also analyzes title tags and metadata too, which is useful for improving click-through rates and boosting organic traffic.
You can also remove any duplicate content on your website to help Google easily determine which web page to rank for the target keyword. Performing quick spelling and grammar checks, Google Analytics and Search Console integrations, and free technical support are other significant advantages.
Alongside the free version, you can also consider the paid version, which costs $209 per year.
Semrush Site Audit — Best for Large-Scale Enterprises
Semrush is a popular name in the SEO space for a good reason.
It’s a full-fledged and comprehensive digital marketing suite offering over 40 intel tools. It provides several tools to enhance your SEO, PPC, and content marketing efforts—all available with the very best enterprise-level features. From running thematic reports to analyzing specific website areas, Semrush’s Site Audit tool does it all to provide deep, focused insights related to site performance, crawlability, linking structure, and more.
As one would expect, these highly advanced features make the tool slightly more expensive than its competitors, making Semrush Site Audit a better fit for enterprises with larger SEO budgets.
What Makes Semrush Site Audit Great
For each audit, you’re assigned an overall health score as well as individual scores for site performance, HTTPS, crawlability, markup, and internal linking. It also provides a list of critical issues (think: AMP implementation, HTTPS security protocols, page loading) that are arranged in order of importance and advanced filters.
While Semrush Site Audit provides short notes on fixing these issues, the instructions aren‘t detailed. You need to do your own research to fix the problem effectively.
A progress tracker makes it easier to determine the effectiveness of your efforts, as well as compare recent crawls with previous crawls to ensure your site is improving SEO-wise.
Semrush Site Audit offers free SEO audits for up to 100 web pages, but beyond that, you’ll have to get a paid plan starting from $119.95 per month. All plans come with a seven-day money-back guarantee.
Google Search Console — Best for In-Depth Index Analysis
Google Search Console (previously known as Google Webmaster Tools) provides an in-depth big-picture overview of your website pages, which includes indexing issues, organic performance metrics, and sitemap issues. Expect a detailed breakdown into overall patterns and opportunities that you can trust, considering all the data comes straight from Google.
Search performance tracking lets you see what queries drive users to visit your website and gauge your overall position in the search results. Website error tracking is handy for identifying issues with the URLs and making quick repairs to improve your SEO.
While both are useful features, Google Search Console‘s index analysis takes it a cut above the rest. The tool analyzes your URLs, giving you detailed information about Google’s ability to crawl and index your pages. This will help you better understand whether your pages are being crawled or indexed correctly.
What Makes Google Search Console Great
With Google Search Console, you can monitor your site performance in the Google search engine. From knowing your current keyword rankings to diagnosing technical SEO problems, you can make the necessary optimizations to improve your web page rankings.
This technical SEO audit tool also offers reporting that provides you with detailed insights into important search factors and metrics. For instance, the Core Web Vitals report lets you see how your web pages are performing in real-time, as well as which ones are loading quickly and which ones need fixing.
Google Search Console doesn’t give you a complete picture of your website, which is a drawback. But you get a summary of all the critical things to note, such as indexed web pages, broken links, and HTML markups, among others, making it a great tool for conducting an initial technical SEO audit of your website.
What’s more, Google Search Console is a completely free service. Simply verify the ownership of your site, and you can access Google search data.
Ahrefs Site Audit — Best for Website Content Auditing
Ahrefs Site Audit is a cloud-based tool that comes with all the necessary computing resources to execute audits, among other services.
It can detect over 100 technical and on-page SEO issues that are negatively impacting your rankings in search engines. Ahrefs Site Audit goes as far as grouping them by categories (for example, HTML tags, content quality, outgoing links, broken images) and providing aggregated reports, complete with easy-to-understand charts, to enhance your SEO strategy.
It’s particularly handy to analyze the quality of content on your website. Use it to find and remove duplicates as well as optimize pages with low word counts. You can also use Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer to identify the keywords you rank for (or don’t) and reoptimize your content for relevant terms.
What Makes Ahrefs Site Audit Great
Ahrefs’ Site Audit tool can easily discover and optimize problems related to your website. This includes JavaScript and CSS resources, no-follow links, external pages, orphan pages, duplicate pages, poorly optimized HTML tags, and several other factors hindering your organic growth.
It also has a lightning-fast online crawler (second only to Google) that shows each of your crawl results in the form of charts and graphs that can be stored and referenced again in the future. The fact you can schedule crawls to run daily, weekly, and monthly is another time-saving benefit.
Ahrefs Site Audit offers several premium plans, starting at $99 per month. But you can sign up for Ahrefs Webmaster Tools to get free limited access to the audit tool.
Sitechecker — Best for Entry-Level Business Owners and In-House Marketers
Sitechecker is most suitable for those who have little to no knowledge about complex SEO software and want to get to the top of Google without becoming an SEO expert. It has a user-friendly interface, where all the information is presented conveniently for 24/7 monitoring. The tool also has extensive how-to guides and generates custom SEO reports, simplifying the website audit process further.
You can use Sitechecker for both one-time tracks (SEO audits, on-page SEO checking) and regular monitoring (tracking backlinks, website changes monitoring).
What Makes Sitechecker Great
Sitechecker gives you a great level of control when conducting your technical SEO audit. You can use filters to exclude categories and pages from the audit, as well as schedule calls in advance to save time.
Moreover, each audit gives you an overall size score and a personalized checklist of both site-level and page-level problems to improve your website in terms of rankings. In case your site has critical issues that need immediate attention, Sitechecker will notify you via email so that you can make the necessary changes quickly.
Sitechecker‘s pricing starts at $23 per month (billed annually). You can start a 7-day free trial to test-drive its features.
Lumar — Best for Customized Reporting
My final pick for the best technical SEO audit tool is Lumar.
Formerly known as DeepCrawl, Lumar gives you all the normal functionalities you would need to conduct a thorough technical audit. It can accurately locate broken links, monitor page speed, and performance, and test your XML sitemaps. The tool is also handy for verifying the content quality and ensuring your website is optimally structured for search engines to improve ranking.
However, it’s Lumar‘s customized reporting feature that stands out for me.
Expect custom reports that go in-depth about your website and your competitors in terms of site structure, content, and social marketing strategies. Getting deeper insights into your competitor’s SEO strategy will help you enhance your own website’s user experience and get more organic traffic.
What Makes Lumar Great
Lumar reviews several technical aspects of the website, including on-page elements and indexability, to help you enhance your website architecture and redeem yourself from Google’s penalties.
You can also auto-schedule crawling tasks as well as customize your crawls. For example, the tool lets you set metrics for content, URL lengths, web page loading time, and titles, among others. It can handle millions of URLs at a go, which makes it suitable for large websites.
Lumar hasn’t published pricing information on its website. You’ll have to request a custom quote based on your requirements.
Quick Sprout Technical SEO Audit Related Content
Want to improve your SEO game, technical and non-technical? Here’s a complete breakdown of all the topics we’ve covered.
Technical SEO Audit Guides and How-Tos
Technical SEO Audit Related Top Lists
The Top Technical SEO Audit in Summary
Conducting a technical SEO audit requires in-depth knowledge. But getting the right tools can significantly simplify and streamline the process.
Balancing functionality and simplicity, Screaming Frog is my top choice for the best technical SEO audit tools. Its SEO Spider tool lets you dive deeper into your website’s technical aspects by evaluating internal linking and URL structure, identifying and fixing broken links, setting up XML sitemaps, and removing duplicate content and elements.
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