Best SEO Audit Tools For Detecting Issues That Can Compromise Your Site’s Visibility

SEO audit tools

Should you wait for your car to crash on the highway when you know its brakes are showing signs of malfunction? Definitely not, right? But if you fail to carry out routine inspections, this is going to happen sooner or later. When it does, the loss and damage may be irreparable. In much the same way, it’s unwise to sit around and do nothing when you notice technical issues developing on your site. Take the help of SEO audit tools before these start to compromise your site’s visibility.

Why is it necessary to conduct SEO audits?

Search engine optimization is an ongoing process, you cannot look at it as a one-time investment. It’s important to find a reputed and experienced SEO agency that will audit the website for you by conducting routine inspections on your site. These audits are important to detect and correct problems before they get out of hand.

Continuous site maintenance is what an SEO audit is all about. It is imperative to do an audit from time to time to keep your site ranking high on SERPs. Even with a visually-appealing website, you cannot be sure it will engage visitors as expected. According to Ahrefs, almost 91% of content gets zero organic traffic! To solve this problem, you need to carry out a site audit on a regular basis, using top-of-the-line SEO audit tools.

Do you know that the average viewer won’t spend more than 54 seconds on your site? This is also when they make assumptions about it. So, you practically have less than a couple of seconds to impress your viewers. Making that first impression is crucial and for this, an SEO audit is crucial.

The purpose of an SEO audit is to perform a comprehensive evaluation of your website and its ranks on SERPs. This gives you an idea of the areas where improvements and reworking are needed. During an audit, the SEO company will assess your on-site SEO and point out areas that can be upgraded. For instance, an audit can identify places for improvement, like content gaps, page loading speed, technical problems slowing down the site, places where competitors outrank you, etc.

What will SEO audit tools help you understand?

An SEO audit tells you where SET strategies stand. This is important to improve your ranking on search engines. Audits are not easy to do; they require expertise, accessibility to state-of-the-art tools, and dedicated workers. An SEO audit will ensure that your site continues to stay “visible” to its target audience, even when search engine algorithms keep changing. The evaluation finds issues that need to be addressed, corrected, and updated. For example, an audit will expose errors in code, structure, and site content. It will help you stay ahead of your competitors by providing actionable insights. It can identify whether you are getting ranks for your keywords. An audit is needed for aligning the site content with the latest algorithms and making a decision on which parts of the content to improve. The audit tools help you evaluate the text length, quality of backlinks, and URL keyword opportunities, and check for mobile compatibility and loading times to upgrade user experience.

When is the right time to search for the best SEO audit tools?

Your customers should be able to find you online. That’s exactly why you need to make SEO audit a part of your SEO strategy. Now, the question is, how often should a site be audited?

Here is a list of things you should look out for to know that the time is right for an SEO audit:

• Low conversion rate and failure to get organic traffic
• High bounce rate
• Low keyword rankings
• Declining customer satisfaction
• New website creation or post-site migration

An SEO audit is not a one-off instance; it’s recommended that you do it once every quarter to stay on top of things. According to a survey, SEO experts agreed that SEO audits are the second most important strategy for improving site traffic.

An audit can take from a few hours to a few months; so, you need to start prepping for it beforehand. That will help you identify the issues faster and address them on time. It keeps the entire process organized and smooth sailing and lessens stress. Before you start an audit, here’s what you should do:

• Outline your goals to focus on problems that have been bothering you for some time. For example, if you have noticed your bounce rate increasing or your site not ranking well
enough for the chosen keywords, this needs to be tackled.

• Identify resources and stakeholders so that you know who will be in charge. This tells you what kind of resources are necessary and whether you will have access to tools, data, and manpower to do an audit.

• Your next task is to identify the metrics for assessment. For instance, will you be looking at your website’s performance over the last year or last quarter?

• Decide on the type of SEO audit tools for the job. Some may be multi-purpose tools like Screaming Frog. Copyscape handles problems of duplicate content while DeepCrawl looks into site crawling.

• Create a data plan to know how it will be analyzed after an audit. You need to create accounts and get permission to complete the reports fast while all the data continues to be fresh in your head.

Top SEO audit tools for your business:

SEMrush: It’s one of the most trusted and robust all-in-one SEM platforms that offers excellent SEO auditing features and functionalities. It provides a single-site auditing tool capable of diagnosing more than 130 on-page and technical SEO problems.

This comprehensive marketing suite includes 40 intel tools that specialize in competitor intelligence, keyword research, rank tracking, social media monitoring, and content optimization. As far as auditing goes, the Site Audit tool can crawl through web pages to identify red flags. These could be issues related to JavaScript, AMP implementation, CSS, HTTPS security protocols, SEO content, meta tags, page loading speed, etc.

Like SEOmator and tools on its list, this audit tool encompasses a host of SEO performance issues while performing an audit. SEMrush is distinct from the rest because of its dashboard and reporting functions.

It can offer customized reports and thematic reports for users that are related to specific aspects of technical SEO. You can get custom reports for site performance and site-crawlability. It will identify the key technical problems affecting a site’s performance. So, as a digital marketer, you can prioritize the optimization workflow. The best part about this tool is that you can audit as many as 100 web pages free of cost! This covers all features and main reports. Thereafter, the basic plan starts at around $99.95 a month.

Ahrefs: This is one of the top-rated and reliable tools for SEO auditing. It’s comprehensive, cost-friendly, and easy to use. That’s because it is in the cloud and will offer all necessary computing resources for auditing within the plan you have opted for.

It is capable of detecting more than 100 on-page SEO and technical issues which are likely to harm your rankings. What works in favor of this tool is its power to sort the issues into groups and aggregate reports with colored charts. You can print and review these for your in-house teams or display them to clients. Categories include HTML tags, performance, incoming links, outgoing links, scripts, broken images, and social tags. You can subscribe to its plans starting at $99 right away or opt for a week-long trial plan for only $7 to get a taste of its features.

Screaming Frog: This SEO auditing tool is one of the top tools in the industry catering to clients like Google, Amazon, Disney, and Apple. The Spider Tool in it is a site crawler capable of quickly analyzing sites and delivering technical SEO inputs and recommendations to users.

The tool is feature-rich and can identify broken links, pages having missing metadata, poorly-optimized web pages, etc. It can detect and repair broken redirect chains, identify duplicate pages, and generate XML sitemaps to ensure that your web pages get indexed faster.

When you choose to use the free version, it will crawl a maximum of 500 URLs free of cost and expose the most common SEO issues. To subscribe to it, you can opt for the plan at 149 pounds a year. This offers unlimited crawling and additional features such as scheduled crawls, and integrations with Search Console and Google Analytics. Unlike others, Screaming Frog doesn’t run in the cloud; rather, it can be installed. It will crawl through your site and extract on-site data, audit SEO issues, and evaluate results in real time.

Moz Pro: This SEO audit tool is somewhat of a pioneer in the field of SEO and you can subscribe to the Standard Plan for $79 a month. This plan is very basic, offering only 2 users, 5 campaigns, crawling for 250,000 web pages, and about 300 keyword rankings a month.

The Moz Pro Site Crawler crawls every page automatically every week, sending out site monitoring alerts for new issues that it detects. These alerts are then prioritized depending on how impactful they are, using metrics like crawl depth and page authority.

The crawler tool categorizes problems into descriptive types, aligning with the workflow so as to resolve them across 5 categories. These categories are redirect issues, critical crawler issues, metadata issues, crawler warnings, and content issues.

This company has been around in the SEO space for a very longtime, possibly longer than any other provider besides Google. Its biggest selling points are its reporting and metrics. The best part about using this SEO audit tool is that it shows you how to fix issues. So, Crawl will identify issues like broken links, duplicate titles or content, crawl errors, or missing page elements. Every such error has “Moz Recommends Fixing” attached to it; this describes why this issue is a high priority or low priority issues and you get instructions for editing metadata, adding tags, or any other action that can correct the problem.

SpyFu: This is another high-rated SEO audit tool that packs in a whole suite of digital marketing tools. These can take care of tasks like backlink tracking, keyword research, PPC research, competitor research, etc. SpyFu combines many tools to offer you insights into the SEO campaign. For example, the SEO Keyword Research tool highlights “bad” keywords which should be eliminated. Competitor Research tool points out the possible flaws in similar websites.

SpyFu is used for detecting mistakes exposed by Google and vets backlinks, which, in turn, helps to do away with junk links and duplicates. The tool compares your site content with that of your competitors and shows you the keywords that your competitors are ranking for, but you aren’t. It points out keywords which are unnecessary and helps to track SEO performance over 15 years. You can choose from any of its 3 pricing plans, ranging from $33 to $299 per month.

Things that an SEO audit will address:

• Whether it’s Google, Bing, or Yahoo, search engines keep changing and updating their algorithms. The idea is to offer users better search results. You must know these changes to tweak your site content accordingly, and an SEO audit will help you do that.

• An audit will ensure a website doesn’t have errors and broken links that can affect its visibility. The evaluation exposes errors and helps you to correct these to retrieve the lost traffic.

• Even high-end webmaster tools are always changing and the SEO agency carrying out an audit will ensure your site is compliant with these.

• Metadata and titles are what your viewers see first, when your site URL shows in the SERPs. These must be relevant to the site content, and an audit helps to check for relevance.

• If your site has content that is redundant, you lose visitors. Search engines need to see fresh and relevant content without which they won’t drive traffic to your site.
SEO auditing is imperative to stay ahead of your competitors and you need to hire experienced and qualified professionals to do this for you. A leading SEO agency will know which audit tool to use to give you the best results.

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