Best SEO Audit Software for Your Website (3 Advanced Tools)

By Ben Rea | February 19, 2020

It’s in the rulebook; every digital marketer has to know how to optimize their website so that they can get higher rankings, and in turn, higher visibility on search engines.

However, doing so requires you to conduct an SEO audit, which can be tedious and time-consuming when done manually. This is where the best SEO audit software comes in.

On average, Google releases around 9 algorithm updates on a daily basis.

There is no way to keep up with the random updates that, even though they are for your own good, can deem your current SEO strategy obsolete.

Advanced SEO audit tools help you understand whether your site is optimized according to Google’s criteria. Simply put, they help you view your website the way Google does.

What is an SEO Audit?

SEO audits are vital when it comes to increasing website traffic, improving your organic rankings to outperform your competitors and to identify backend issues that could be affecting the performance of your site.

It is the best way to find out whether your digital marketing strategy is working, whether you are ranking for the right keywords, the strength of your backlinks; basically whether your website is compliant with standard SEO practices.

The Digital Marketing Institute highlights that the insights gained from an SEO audit can be beneficial in enhancing every aspect of your marketing strategy.

“An SEO audit checks the health of your website…and makes suggestions on how to optimize. SEO audits are important for a number of reasons, not the least of which because Google changes their algorithm frequently in accordance with new technology and new search patterns. Conducting a thorough SEO audit is an essential starting point for any digital marketer, whether you do so in-house or outsource the task. This is because it allows you to analyze your current SEO efforts…and take immediate action off the back of those insights.”

What Aspects Does an SEO Audit Focus On?

An SEO audit should be a core component of your digital marketing strategy.

Here are the 10 key areas it covers:

Search intent — your landing pages should contain keywords and content that captures the intent of web users.
Navigation — Web users should be able to find the information they need with ease.
Content — all content should be authoritative, comprehensive, and well-formatted. Do you have duplicate content?
URL — all links should be working, and the broken ones removed.
Keywords — an analysis of the keywords should reveal whether they are bringing the right audience on your site.
Site speed — has your website been optimized for speed, or are there bugs slowing it down?
Competitor Rankings — this checks your website performance against your competitors.
Meta descriptions — they should contain the focus keywords and should be of the right length.
Rankings on search engines — based on your target keywords, is your site ranking as high as it should be?
Links — does your website have the right internal and outbound links?

All these key areas work together to make sure that your website has been fully optimized for search engines.

These items can also be group together into larger buckets which make up larger branches of SEO including on-page SEO, off-page SEO, technical SEO, and competitor auditing.

What is an SEO Audit Tool?

An SEO audit tool is a piece of software or a web application that allows users to analyze one or multiple aspects of their search engine optimization effectiveness.

Some tools simply audit elements like site speed, where others are much more all-encompassing and provide a full suite of tools to accomplish various tasks.

Some SEO Audit tools include:

All-In-One SEO Platforms

Site Speed & Usability Auditing

Content Auditing

Google Search Console

Off-Page SEO Auditing

SEO Crawlers

What is the Best SEO Audit Software?

A correctly done SEO audit can be a game-changer for your business. It highlights the areas you’re your excelling in, those that could use some improvements, and those that you are failing in. As a marketer, there are areas that you consider vital to your marketing success, but are they in tandem with Google’s algorithms?

The insights gained from an audit allows you to focus on the areas that are really critical to your organic search strategy.

There are some all-in-one SEO Audit Tools but to fully cover every aspect of SEO we find that you’ll likely need to use multiple tools to get the job done.

Some tools are better than others and some are made for specific tasks.

Here are the top 3 SEO audit software that we use in combination to complete most tasks:

1. SEMRush

As far as advanced SEO audit software goes, SEMRush is one of the most trusted platforms worldwide. This audit tool has incredible technical SEO audit capabilities and can identify more than 100 on-page SEO issues that are technical in nature.

Here at Nomadic we rely heavily on SEMRush for almost all of our clients. It’s a large part of our initial process of analyzing client sites.

The platform is also clean and easy to understand so presenting screenshots directly from it to the client makes it streamlined for presenting information.

We’ve been extremely happy with this service, its depth, and ease of use and can’t recommend it enough.

Benefits of SEMRush

In addition to providing you with a comprehensive audit report, SEMRush has a very elaborate dashboard that segments the information in a more understandable format. You are able to see the overall performance of your domain or how specific pages are performing.

The SEO tool kit of SEMRush allows you to view the keywords that your website ranks for, the monthly search volume of the said keywords, and how your site is ranking for them. It also allows you to conduct competitor research and analyze your outbound links.

This toolkit is free with more advanced capabilities available with their paid tiers.

2. Screaming Frog

One of the things that make Screaming Frog impressive is that their SEO spider tool crawls all types of websites and rapidly analyses all the technical aspects of the site’s SEO before delivering a comprehensive report.

It simplifies audits that would otherwise take days to complete and delivers a report within a short time.

We use this tool to quickly identify site issues and export them in bulk to Google Sheets for either analysis or to convey information to clients.

One interesting and particularly useful aspect of the tool is the visualization of site architecture via “Visualization” tab. This can really help give an understand of how information is structured site-wide.

Benefits of Screaming Frog

This SEO audit software has been specifically designed to check websites for common SEO issues and organize the data into a spreadsheet-like format for analysis.

It checks for broken links, identifies pages with poor meta descriptions or content, and highlight duplicate pages or those with broken redirect chains.

This tool also generates XML sitemaps that ensure your site is quickly indexed by search engines and allows you to export data on excel sheets for further analysis.

3. Google Lighthouse

It only fits that Google’s own chrome-based audit software gets the first mention. Lighthouse is a great tool for checking how well your site would be ranked by Google crawler bots. It has a basic audit feature that focuses on user experience, descriptions, HTTP status code, titles, and anchor text.

According to Search Engine Land, however, lighthouse shouldn’t be used in place of a comprehensive SEO audit but is a great place to start as it gives recommendations based on the audit report.

We use Lighthouse at Nomadic to get in-depth technical insights on website performance as it relates to user behavior. We have found the actual “SEO” portion of this tool to be incredibly helpful or thorough.

The “Performance” section is the one you’ll want to pay attention to. The readings are very accurate and detailed so you’ll be able to pin-point exactly what assets and portions of your website need to be optimized.

Benefits of Lighthouse

Some of the other valuable insights you will get from this SEO audit Software include the accessibility of your website. This is how easy searchers find it to navigate your site based on factors such as tags, contrasting colors, etc.

Lighthouse is integrated into Google’s Developer Tools, so you don’t need to have anything other than Chrome. It’s 100% free of course and easy to run the audit.

Audit Your Website and Solve SEO Issues

Conducting and analyzing a technical audit of your website can be challenging and you’ll likely need multiple tools to get it done.

There are so many aspects to focus on that it can be extremely difficult to identify the critical issues in a timely manner. The good news is that the above SEO audit tools make it easier, and you could always engage the services of professional digital marketing experts to guide you.

Contact us today to learn more about how our digital marketing services, custom software, and web design experts can help you achieve marketing success and scale your business.

Posted in Digital Marketing, Web Design