Top 16 SEO audit tools to improve your natural search engine optimization
Using the best SEO (Search Engine Optimization) auditing tools enables you to carry out a precise analysis of all websites: your own, as well as those of your competitors. Indispensable for SEOs and marketing managers, these SEO tools enable you to carry out a technical SEO audit, obtain a site's performance, identify its strong and weak points, see which keywords the site is positioned on, and whether it is an authority in its field by observing incoming links.
Let's compare specialized software for optimizing your website's ranking in search engine results:
Tools for conducting a technical audit of your website
The technical SEO audit consists in observing the website's technical criteria. A well-designed site responds to a number of technical factors. It's necessary to use a number of SEO tools to check each point and identify areas for improvement.
Screaming Frog to explore pages like Google
Exploring pages like Google's robots means crawling your website. With its SEO Spider tool, Screaming Frog is a crawler that gives you essential information on the path taken by a robot.
For each page, you can detect the following technical errors in particular:
- Title tags not filled in,
- 404 errors,
- elements that prevent pages from being indexed,
- blocking URL parameters,
- broken links,
- non-compliance with the canonical URL principle,
- etc.
Here's an image preview of Sreaming Frog SEO Spider:
Screaming Frog is a free SEO auditing tool for up to 500 URLS, but with limited functionality.
Screaming Frog's price: currently £149 per year for a license usable on one computer, i.e. around €170 to benefit from unlimited functionality and check that all your pages are indexable.
Oncrawl for observing robot behavior
When do Google's robots visit my site? How long do they spend on my pages? How many pages have they seen? How did they behave on my site? Google's crawls are so numerous and varied (desktop bot, mobile bot) that it would take too much time to search for all this information by hand.
Oncrawl provides all the answers: by launching a log analysis, you can observe and analyze the behavior of a Googlebot. If the robots manage to visit every page on your site, and stay for a long time, that's a good sign.
If not, the aim is to find the obstacles in the robots' path and remove them. Oncrawl prices range from €39 per month to €1,900 per month, with a 14-day free trial.
Here's an image of Oncrawl's interface:
PageSpeed Insights to test site performance
In many sectors, website traffic is generated via cell phones. If the user arrives on your site and has to wait 30 seconds before seeing the page content, he'll be long gone... and so will your conversion rate!
That's why it's crucial to check page load times and all the other elements that make up a site's performance: cache, elements, speed, and so on.
Google's PageSpeed Insights tool lets you test the performance of your web pages to identify areas for improvement, including for mobile display.
PageSpeed Insights price: website performance analysis is free of charge.
Google's structured data test tool
Google's structured data tag test toollets you test the display of microdata or "rich snippets / rich results" in Google search engine results.
By previewing the search result in Google (the SERP), you can check that the data is correctly integrated into the tags. If the display isn't correct, or the structured data doesn't appear, there's a technical error.
Price: free of charge.
SEO tools for page ranking analysis
Website performance analysis must also take into account the referencing of your site's web pages. If you're naturally thinking of the famous keywords and positioning tracking, you also need to check the relevance of the semantics used, the internal links, as well as any duplication of content potentially penalizing natural referencing.
Cocon.se for internal site meshing
Cocon.se is an SEO auditing tool that focuses on your site's structure: it's very useful and practical for visualizing your site's internal mesh, i.e. the way in which links are made between pages.
If you're applying the semantic cocoon technique to improve your site's SEO, this software is recommended: you'll identify links that shouldn't exist, isolated pages, pages that shouldn't be linked together, etc.
Cocon.se price: in the form of credits.
An example of how to visualize the structure of a well-organized site in the form of a circular map:
Ranxplorer for identifying positioned keywords
Ranxplorer is a powerful SEO tool for tracking positions on every important keyword, as well as for keyword research.
Ranxplorer software lets you :
- see all the keywords on which your site is positioned,
- see which keywords a particular page is positioned on,
- view the traffic generated by a keyword,
- get keyword ideas to target the most relevant ones.
You'll not only get the keywords that are positioned, but also the pages positioned on several keywords, such as long-tail keywords, based on the largest database of results available in France (3 billion).
Here's a video on how one SEO uses Ranxplorer:
Ranxplorer price: from €19.90 per month per user.
Visiblis for checking the semantic affinity of pages
Visiblis is one of the most powerful tools on the market for analyzing the semantic relevance of a web page in relation to the keyword on which it is supposed to rank in the SERPs.
Also widely used by web copywriters, Visiblis can :
- identify keyword-related vocabulary,
- see which words are more important than others,
- optimize text for natural referencing,
- optimize title and meta description.
Discover Visiblis in the following video:
Visiblis prices: from €10 per month per user.
Kill Duplicate to find duplicate content, everywhere!
When we say everywhere, we mean absolutely everywhere on the web.
With Kill Duplicate, you can identify :
- your own duplicate content on another page of your site (internal content),
- your duplicate content on a third-party site (external content),
- content from another site duplicated on your site.
Copying and pasting the same content on several pages of your site, or having your content stolen, is an absolute evil for your SEO! Google penalizes sites that do this, and demands unique, original content that responds to the user's search intent on every page - that's the rule.
So you need to make sure that every text and every page title is unique, and watch out for duplication by a malicious third-party site. Kill Duplicate is the ideal tool for detecting duplicate content, saving you precious time.
Discover Kill Duplicate in the following video:
Kill Duplicate prices: from €19 per month for 100 URLS and 400 monthly scans.
Tools to check authority links pointing to your domain
Some third-party sites link to your site's web pages. These inbound links can help or hinder your site's SEO, notoriety and authority.
Understanding the importance of backlinks to SEO
These external links - known as backlinks - are of quality when the sites are related to your site's theme: this is known as Trust Flow. Another factor in popularity is the volume of links pointing to your site, known as Citation Flow: the more quality links your site receives, the higher its Trust Flow and Citation Flow.
Since evil is everywhere, you need to monitor the links pointing to your site to guard against negative SEO, disavow poor-quality links, and vary the anchors on which links are made, or risk being penalized by Google for overoptimization and seeing your page's SEO drop considerably.
Majestic SEO for analyzing inbound link quality
Majestic SEO lets you sift through all inbound links, and see which pages on your site these backlinks point to.
Majestic SEO is renowned for its reliability and the quality of the information it provides, such as :
- URLs of pages linking to your site,
- referring domains,
- link anchors,
- Trust Flow for your domain, indicating the total quality of backlinks obtained,
- Citation Flow with link volume,
- etc.
Here's an example of a Majestic website audit:
Majestic price: from €46.99 per month per user.
Alternative to Majestic: Ahref
Google Search Console for disavowing toxic links
Have you identified the external links that are damaging your SEO? Now you need to disavow these links: the process consists in telling Google that you are denouncing these links. To disavow these links, you need to use Google Search Console: list the URLs to be disavowed in a .txt file and download it online from the dedicated page.
You may also find the following tutorial useful for disavowing links:
Price: free.
The best SEO software for analyzing competitor sites
A website audit wouldn't be complete without analyzing competing sites to discover their keyword strategy and identify the competitive context on each of them. Here are 2 SEO audit tools to spy on the competition!
SEObserver to see the competition on a keyword
Here's an example of an SEO audit carried out with SEObserver to obtain the level of competition on the query "tarte au chocolat" searched for over 14,000 times a month:
A number of relevant indicators are provided by the SEObserver tool to assess the competitive context existing on the query:
- the first 10 pages positioned on this keyword,
- Trust Flow (TF) for each page positioned and its associated domain,
- the number of referring domains (Citation Flow ) for each positioned page and its associated domain (RD),
- the number of organic keywords and the organic traffic generated by each page, both taken from SEMrush statistics.
We put ourselves in the shoes of the "lapopottedemanue.com" site to see if it's powerful enough to rank for the query "chocolate pie", by entering the URL to compare the site's power with that of competing sites.
Result: the context is far too competitive. The positioned domains have obtained many backlinks and benefit from a much higher Trust Flow.
SEObserver prices: from €99 per month for one user.
Ranxplorer for keyword ideas from competitors
As we saw above, Ranxplorer helps you identify which keywords your site is positioned for. But Ranxplorer doesn't stop there... The great strength of the tool lies in its ability to spy on competitor sites, identifying those that attract more traffic.
Example of website analysis
Let's take the example of "lapopottedemanue.com" and see how we can find keywords on competing sites!
In the image below, we've entered the URL of the site lapopottedemanue.com. The Ranxplorer tool identifies competing sites:
We go to the "missed keywords" tab, select marmiton.org as competitor 1 and compare.
In the image below, we see all the keywords for which marmiton.org is ranked, but for which lapopottedemanue.com is not:
We can export the keyword list and draw on keyword ideas consistent with the site's theme to attract more traffic.
Bonus: read our tutorial on how to spy on your competitors' sites and exploit the full potential of Ranxplorer.
Other free SEO audit tools
Free SEO is not 100% possible. You can, however, use a free SEO tool to cross-reference the data provided by Google's free tools.
Google Analytics to measure conversions and more
You need a website analysis grid with relevant metrics and indicators to evaluate the performance of your on- and off-site actions.
Google Analytics provides an impressive array of data, including :
- traffic acquisition sources,
- visitor behavior,
- conversions for each page,
- number of views for each page,
- useful information about your site's audience (interests, technologies, etc.),
- etc.
In this way, you can identify pages that are not generating traffic, and therefore logically few or no conversions. While analyzing a website's performance is free of charge, the time you spend on it must be regular and accounted for in your day/man budget.
Here's a video tutorial on how to get to grips with Google Analytics:
Lighthouse for analyzing page performance
Google Lighthouse for chrome is, as its name suggests, an extension for the Chrome browser. Lighthouse is an open source tool designed to improve web page quality.
Designed for developers, it enables technical performance audits to optimize website accessibility and compatibility with progressive web apps.
The tool provides a status report on the web page, specifying any shortcomings and indicators for optimizing the page.
Watch a test SEO audit with Lighthouse in the video below:
Alyze: free SEO web page analysis tool
Most SEO beginners start by using Alyze.
Advantage: SEO analysis is free and you benefit from indicators to identify a page's strong or weak points, such as :
- keywords used
- in which tags important words are found,
- warnings if your title or meta description are invalid,
- warnings if the page structure is technically non-compliant,
- information on links contained in the page, etc.
In the image below, for example, the Alyze tool provides information on optimizing the home page of the "lapopottedemanue.com" website:
Seasoned professionals switch to more powerful, reliable and accurate paid tools.
Web Developer Toolbar to view certain information on a page
The Web Developer Toolbar plugin is a free SEO tool: it's an extension you can install on your Chrome or Firefox browser to observe the technical criteria of a web page.
This plugin is handy when you want to focus on a particular element of the page.
For example, you can choose to :
- disable image display,
- disable CSS,
- observe meta tags,
- look at the structure of titles on a page,
- test a very large amount of data,
- etc.
Here's an image of the Web Developer Toolbar plugin integrated into the Chrome browser:
Article translated from French