It is very important to employ a good SEO Audit tool while searching for the drawbacks of your website while focusing on the rankings on search engines. Many small and big factors impact your website’s ranking in a significant manner and you should align all these elements in the best interest of your website’s placement on SERP. A good SEO audit tool will not only help you to identify the loopholes but also helps you to formulate the priorities to keep ranking in even tough competition.
Relying on a single tool to do a website audit is not a good idea as a single tool especially the free versions will not help you to identify all critical factors. Every tool has its limited utility so it is always wise to use a mix. You should use different SEO Audit tools to make sure that you are identifying all important factors such as website speed, broken links, backlinks, and competitor strategies parallel for the best results. Being a digital marketer you should use these tools in the best interest by knowing the technicalities and fixes which these tools suggest to you. Below is our curated list of best SEO audit tools in 2021:-
SEMrush – It is one of the most efficient SEO audit tools especially when you want a 360-degree analysis of your website. It not only helps you to find the right keywords for your business but also analyzes the competition so that you can get vital information like backlink audit reports, Ad copies of competitors, and estimated visitors on any website. It becomes very easy to find the issues like broken links, faulty title tags, and errors in redirection, and blocked URLs of your website to deploy a successful SEO strategy.
Ahrefs- It is considered to be one of the most effective SEO audit tools by thousands of digital marketers around the globe. It helps in a deep analysis of your website ranking factors by providing you reports for on-page as well as off-page audits. Its ability to do keyword research for your website is also one of the added advantages it offers. Some of the other features you can benefit from while doing SEO audits are ranking history, analyzing outbound links, keyword search distributions, and internal link audits.
We all often neglect other search engines while framing our SEO policies but we do get significant traffic from them also. Ahrefs offers you insights from about ten different search engines such as Baidu, Bing, Amazon, and more so that you can optimize your website for them also.
Google Search Console- You should trust Google’s tools while auditing your websites as most of your SEO efforts are directed for the rankings on Google itself. Google search console is a free tool that offers you the features of some of the most popular paid tools for SEO audits. It also helps in keeping the track of indexed pages on your website and trends for it so that you can identify the particular time window for significant shifts in your overall website indexing with Google. With the help of content, keyword reports present you can streamline your keywords for maintaining a favorable perception of Google toward your website.
Google Page Speed insight – It is yet one of the effective tools from Google that help you to get important insights about your page speed to maintain the requirements of Google. The page speed of your website has a significant impact on your rankings. Every SEO professional must agree that Google gives preferential treatment on search results to the pages which have good-looking speed. If you are struggling with high bounce rates and low CTR for your web pages then it’s time to analyze your pages using the Google Page speed insights. By using this tool you can make sure to overcome the pages that load very slow and thus contributing to the high bounce rate.
Screaming Frog- Screaming frog spider is one of the very popular SEO audit tools which is even used by some of the top brands we know. If you want to stay tuned to the technical defaults on your websites impacting your search rankings then this tool is a perfect weapon in your hands. Screaming frog helps you to analyze the broken links, metadata, and duplicate content so that you should not invite any unnecessary penalties from Google. Monitoring your redirects is also important from an SEO perspective along with the robots on your website. Screaming frog not only helps you to check broken redirects but also assists to monitor the robots so that none of your pages important from the user’s perspective should face crawling issues.
Factors which are important while performing Audit
Now after discussing the best tools for the SEO audit we should also know the key factors which you need to study to get the most beneficial results from the SEO audit. Though you may come across many points buy below are the five most critical aspects of any Audit meant for your website’s ranking:-
Competitor Analysis – It is one of the most vital parts of any successful SEO strategy. While performing the audit you should make sure to check the keywords for which your competitors and ranking and get the organic traffic. You can also analyze the backlinks of the top competitors to your website and make sure your efforts are also directed to get the backlinks of the same or even better quality.
Crawling and Indexing – If your website has pages that are not crawled or have some indexing issues then it can prove to be a great hurdle for your rankings. Always check for the robot.txt to ensure that only those pages are blocked by you which do not have relevance for users. Crawling and indexing are among prime factors for better rankings and you can take the help of tools such as Google Search Console to rectify these errors.
Accessibility of website – Google gives significant weight to the accessibility of your website while deciding its place on the search rankings. Never let errors like 404, broken links, slow loading speed, and long response from the server affect your rankings. Identify all such issues by doing a technical audit for your website and rectify them well before Google crawls your website.
Keyword Analysis – Analyzing your keywords on a regular interval is one of the very good strategies for any SEO Audit. By keeping the track of the keyword performance you can make out the best performing keywords and can also cut down your efforts on the keywords where the stats are not as per desire. It also helps us to recognize new keywords that can bring organic traffic to our websites. Some of the SEO audit tools also help you to identify the long-tail keywords which is another trick to gain more traffic on your website.
Evaluation of the Website Content – Though we are discussing it last that does not mean that it has low relevancy. Every SEO enthusiast knows that Content is the King for SEO and without content that qualifies the terms and requirements for the latest Google updates and policies it will be hard for you to rank well. Always check for the mistakes such as grammar, intent, and formatting of your content so that it can get the best preferences from search engines while deciding the relevancy to the keywords.
SEO Audits become very crucial for the situation when your efforts are not driving equivalent traffic on your website. By identifying and rectifying factors which we discussed above you can surely achieve great results with your rankings. Always keep in mind the area that you are targeting while doing the audit and use the most relevant SEO audit tool for getting the best insights.