The Ultimate Guide of Top 10 SEO Audit Tools

This guide is ultimate resource when you are looking for SEO audit tools. Each tool is designed to accomplish a specific SEO task – and they carry a range of price tags, from free to expensive.

For the purposes of this guide, we decided the best approach is to provide tools that can perform specific functions, even though some might overlap in breadth and scope.

We also divided the guide into sections that you can use to help complete our SEO Audit workbook.

Top 10 Technical SEO Audit Tools

1. Google Search Console

With Google Search Console, you can track statistics such as clicks, impressions, position, and click-through rates (CTRs). It’s also possible to check your stats in Google Discover and Google News.

Google Search Console also tracks featured snippets such as sitelinks, breadcrumbs, AMP, video snippets, and more.

Key Features: A critical tool for most SEO professionals, it lets you track stats and metrics through Google’s own data (not third-party data). In addition, it helps to provide insights on things like Google algorithm updates, site errors, and more.

Pricing: Free.

2. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the best tools that you can use for tracking your site’s overall performance data from a wide variety of channels (not just from Google organic channels).

Key Features: With its highly robust data-gathering mechanism and reports driven by insights, you can create a story that is easy for your clients to follow.

Google’s product pitch explains that you can “unlock customer-centric measurement,” which will help you determine how your customers interact across your sites and applications throughout the buyer journey.

Pricing: Free. At the time of this writing, it’s important to mention that Google Analytics 4 is being completely released in July 2023, so if you have your data stored in Universal Analytics, you need to make sure that you make the switch properly before then (do not rely on Google to do it for you).

3. Google Trends

Google Trends is a rare tool that provides a ton of data that can help you inform your SEO strategy. It shows you the interest in a search term over the span of months to years.

Key Features: This tool’s claim to fame allows you to search for keywords with data showing the peak popularity of these terms (not search volume).

Basically, when you search for a term on Google Trends, the interest over time graph shows the relative importance of a term and how highly important it is. The bigger the number, the more traffic it is getting at that given point in time.

But, as a data tool, Google Trends should only indicate what kind of searches you could expect from going after a specific keyword.

4. Google Rich Results Testing Tool

Google’s Rich Results Testing Tool allows you to test your structured data.

Key Features: When using code input or URL input, it’s possible to check and ensure that your structured data validates according to Google’s standards.

If you don’t, it’s possible that you could run into issues displaying your structured data.

Pricing: Free.

5. Google Mobile-Friendly Test

By checking your site with this tool, you can verify that your site is ready for the mobile-friendly world.

Key Features: Google recommends that this tool be used as part of a check-and-repair process for mobile usability issues.

It’s a mistake to think this tool will tell you your site is mobile-friendly within Google’s index.

Pricing: Free.

6. Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is the de facto standard for comprehensive technical SEO audits.

From allowing you to perform a basic crawl to more advanced features, such as helping you analyze JavaScript and deep canonical issues, you can create SEO audit deliverables just by using Screaming Frog itself.

Key Features: Aside from the basic to advanced crawls that you can perform, Screaming Frog can help you dive deep into broken links, redirects, and duplicate content.

It also allows you to use XPath to extract any custom data you might desire and generate your own XML Sitemaps automatically – including crawling JavaScript websites, integrations with Google Analytics, and Google Search Console for even more comprehensive data.

In addition, it also helps you visualize website architectures and audit scheduling as well.

Pricing: The full version of Screaming Frog is $259 per year. You can also switch between currencies based on your country or region.

7. Semrush

From tools that can assist with SEO audits, to link building and content marketing, Semrush has a comprehensive suite of SEO tools suite that can help you accomplish a ton while saving you a lot of time.

Key Features: When performing an SEO audit, Semrush runs through over 120 checks. It helps identify issues with things like page speed, crawlability, and backlinks, as well as security checks and on-page.

Pricing: Semrush has a variety of plans at your disposal.

Its cheapest plan runs at $119/month, the Pro plan.

Its Guru plan runs at $229.95/month and gives you a topic research tool, among other benefits – including greater numbers of keywords to track and more results per report.

The highest plan is the Business plan at $449.95/month, which is perfect for large agencies and enterprises.

8. Sitebulb

Sitebulb is a crawler and site audit tool in the same vein as Screaming Frog. It is comprehensive and can provide information and diagnose things like crawlability issues, on-page SEO, backlinks, and much more.

In addition, it includes another dimension of SEO issues using its own interpretation of SEO best practices. But because of this, it’s always the job of the SEO analyst to help identify these issues and prioritize them in a way that makes sense to the client.

Key Features: Sitebulb includes several key features, including in-depth reports for on-page SEO issues, links (internal and external), indexability, and duplicate content.

In addition, you can find functions for JavaScript crawling, its own prioritization hints, along with full PDF reporting and audit comparisons.

Pricing: Sitebulb is most likely one of the cheapest SEO pieces of software out there, but this does not make it any less valuable.

It has a free version, a lite version with around 10,000 URLs per audit at $13.50/month, and a Pro version with 500,000 URLs per audit at $35.00/month.

As with most other SEO audit software applications, the features and benefits increase as you increase your pricing tiers.

9. Seo Test Online

Seo test online is not just a website seo auditing tool, but it also provides other useful tools including Website Management Tools, Website Tracking Tools, YouTube Tools, Text Analysis Tools.

Key Features: Aside from its site auditor, this tool includes Google Data Studio integrations, comprehensive marketing reports you can white label with your agency, competitor research, keyword research, a backlink checker, and social media functions.

Pricing: Free

10. Ahrefs

Important note: Ahrefs currently uses a “credits” system in their pricing structure that may not be suitable for those who need to stretch their dollar. You could easily find yourself running up your limits every month if you do a lot of work.

Before moving forward, investigate and ensure that Ahrefs is the right solution for you. If you have to pinch pennies, Ahrefs may not be the tool for you.

Key Features: Ahrefs is best known as Semrush’s counterpart in the same space: a comprehensive suite of SEO tools designed to help you perform comprehensive technical SEO audits, backlink audits, content gap analyses, keyword gap analyses, and more.

Pricing: Ahrefs has the following pricing structure:

• The Lite plan starts at $99/month.
• The Standard plan starts at $199/month.
• The Advanced plan starts at $399/month.
• The Enterprise plan starts at $999/month.

All plans include site explorer, keywords explorer, site audit tool, rank tracker, and alerts. All of these go up in terms of how many rows can be run in your report, and you get additional tools if you go up in price.