A routine technical SEO website audit is a must to ensure your website is working as it should. To do this properly, you need the right technical SEO tools.
Technical SEO audit tools are like the wrenches and hammers the mechanic keeps in a toolbox. They help you identify any potential errors or issues on your website so that you can fix them before they cause long-term damage. Website audits can also help improve SEO rankings and visibility. Generally, websites that load quickly and are well-optimized tend to get higher rankings and more organic traffic.
After comparing and reviewing several tools (their features, pros and cons, as well as pricing), we came up with 10 best technical SEO tools for auditing listed below. Use them to get the most out of your next website analysis!
What Are Technical SEO (Audit) Tools?
Before we go straight to some of the best technical SEO tool list for auditing and its comparison, let’s understand what these tools can do, especially when compared to other SEO tools.
Technical SEO tools for auditing are specifically designed to help you analyze your website for technical errors and issues. They can help you identify problems such as:
- Broken links
- Website architecture
- Crawling and indexing problems
- PageSpeed and mobile-friendliness
- Incorrect or missing titles and metadata
This means technical SEO tools are used to improve the website’s functionality (as a whole), such as the crawl and indexing efficiency. Oppositely, on-page SEO tools concentrate on improving content relevancy by analyzing individual web pages.
What Are the Benefits of Doing a Technical SEO Audit?
Doing a routine audit on technical SEO performance will help you understand your website health. You can see which parts are already working and which need improvement. Put this in your SEO calendar every six months or a year, and don’t forget to compare it with the previous auditing results.
Here are some benefits of doing a regular technical SEO audit:
Optimized SEO Strategy
Auditing your website offer many benefits, including gaining insights into your website’s inner workings. Also, they help identify how your competitors optimize their websites so you can reverse-engineer their strategies.
You can also leverage some technical SEO software for keyword and backlink research. You can then use the results for keyword optimization and backlink profiling, making your on-page SEO and link-building efforts more effective.
Save Time and Costs on Manual SEO Audits
Using tools to conduct technical SEO audits saves more time and costs than doing it manually or hiring professionals. Getting an SEO specialist to audit and developers to implement those recommendations on your websites can be costly.
However, when you use technical SEO tools to audit, you can automate the process. Many of these SEO tools are free or offer a free trial, so you can test them before buying.
Find High-Converting Keywords
With every SEO expert clamoring to rank for high-converting keywords, technical SEO tools can help you rank for them before they can. Technical SEO audit tools give you useful information like your competitor’s website performance, backlink profile, and keyword rankings. Ranking for these competitive keywords can get your content to generate more traffic.
Gauge SEO Progress and Track KPIs
Most SEO auditing tools generate automated reports that track your SEO progress over time based on the chosen key performance indicators (KPIs). This data can help you determine whether your website is running as intended and which parts need improvement. It can also help you compare your website to your competitors and make strategic adjustments to stay ahead of them.
Visualize and Conceptualize Data for Analysis
Converting raw data into visual elements like charts and infographics can help you understand the data more easily and identify opportunities for improvement.
10 Best Technical SEO Tools For Auditing
To help you get started, here are 10 of the best technical SEO auditing tools that we recommend having. Some of them are paid, while some are free. These tools will help you identify opportunities, develop a more effective SEO strategy, and optimize your website for better performance.
Note: When building this best list of technical SEO audit tools, we focus on those that offer free services. When no free tools are available for a particular technical SEO auditing function, we suggest the most budget-friendly tools available without sacrificing the results.
1. Prerender
Feature Overview
Prerender accelerates the indexing process of your JavaScript pages. This way, not only does it optimize your crawl budget spending, but also helps your website amplify its PageSpeed scores. This will boost your SEO health and ranking while still offering the best user experience for human users.
In terms of auditing features, Prerender helps you detect pages that aren’t crawled or indexed. It gives you a detailed analysis of pages that have been successfully indexed, the success rate, the time it takes to complete the indexing process, and more.
Additionally, Prerender also has a built-in 404 domain checker and technical SEO scoring feature. This lets you discover pages with specific technical SEO issues, such as broken pages and missing meta descriptions.
And don’t worry about compatibility issues. As a plug-and-play technical SEO tool, Prerender suits many programming languages, including Angular, React, and Vue.JS.
Pricing
Free plan, $90/month for the Start Up plan, $290 for the Scale Up plan, and tailored pricing for the Enterprise plan.
2. Screaming Frog
Feature Overview
Screaming Frog is a heavy-duty yet flexible website crawler that helps you audit your website for technical errors and issues.
Whether you have a large or small website, Screaming Frog can efficiently crawl and analyze your website in real time. It’s an equally suitable SEO tool for beginner and experienced SEO professionals.
Screaming Frog helps extract and analyze data for common SEO issues, which can help you find ways to tweak your on-page SEO tactics.
Pricing
Screaming Frog lets you crawl up to 500 URLs for free. Buying a license removes this limit and gives you access to more advanced features. If you have a new website, you can take advantage of its free version first, then invest in the paid license as your website grows. However, if this doesn’t suit your budget, there are many Screaming Frog alternatives to help you audit your website’s technical SEO elements.
3. Google Search Console
Feature Overview
Google Search Console is a technical SEO audit tool offered by Google that monitors your website’s performance in the SERPs. It also allows you to submit and track your website’s XML sitemaps.
This tool is a must-have for business owners who want to ensure their website is receiving maximum visibility. With Google Search Console, you can identify any errors or issues that may be preventing your website from ranking higher than it could.
You can also use it to analyze and benchmark your site’s performance and compare it to your competitors.
Some of the Google Search Console’s best features are:
- Submit your sitemaps to be crawled and indexed
- Monitor your website’s overall performance and search traffic
- Identify any indexing or crawling errors and issues with your website, such as soft 404 errors
- Identify keywords and search queries that are bringing traffic to your site
- View the landing pages with the most traffic
- Check hreflang implementation on a site
Pricing
Free
4. Google Mobile-Friendly Test
Feature Overview
Another practical SEO tool offered by Google is the Google Mobile-Friendly Test. With this free tool, you can check whether your website is mobile-friendly.
Google led the movement towards mobile responsiveness in web development. That’s why they made the Google Mobile-Friendly Test to guide webmasters and technical SEO experts in giving their users a better experience on mobile devices. The tool also lets you identify any critical alerts or load time issues, and it helps you make sure your site loads and displays correctly on smartphones and tablets.
Some of the Google Mobile-Friendly Test’s best features are:
- Check how visitors interact with the mobile version of your pages
- See how well your pages display on different types of mobile devices
- Test individual web pages or entire websites
- Get feedback on what you can do to make your website more mobile-friendly
- Send alerts if critical errors are found on your website
- Identify issues that might cause a decrease in load times
A valuable feature of the Google Mobile-Friendly Test is that it gives you a score and breakdown of how mobile-friendly a page is. This information can help you determine where you need to make changes to improve your site’s mobile friendliness.
Pricing
Free
5. Google’s Schema.org Structured Data Testing Tool
Feature Overview
Structured data is information stored in a specific format, allowing search engines to better understand what the page is about. With Google’s Schema.org Structured Data Testing Tool, you can identify errors in your site’s structured data markup.
Additionally, it helps you ensure that your website’s structured data markup is accurate and error-free, which, in turn, can improve your website’s search rankings. It allows you to select the appropriate tool, the rich results test, or the schema markup validator.
The rich results test identifies and previews the correct search engine-rich results. The schema markup validator approves all structured data embedded in your web pages to make sure it’s formatted correctly.
Pricing
Free
6. W3C Validator
Feature Overview
The W3C Validator is an open-source tool that checks the markup validity of your Web documents in HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML, and other markup languages.
By using the W3C Validator, you can ensure that your web pages are debugged and error-free. This can help you avoid penalties associated with incorrect or poorly written markup and boost your overall search rankings.
Overall, website maintenance will be more efficient as you can solve any website code error that arises.
Pricing
Free
7. Majestic
Feature Overview
Majestic is a paid tool that helps you track and analyze your website’s backlinks. It offers the largest crawler system and extensive backlink data repository for comprehensive analysis.
When you use Majestic, you can get a detailed SEO report of all of your website’s backlinks, including:
- Number of backlinks
- The referring domains of these links
- Anchor text associated with them
Pricing
$49.99/month for the Lite plan, $99.99/month for the Pro plan, and $399.99/month for the API plan.
8. Barracuda Panguin Tool
Feature Overview
The Barracuda Panguin Tool helps you identify whether a website has been penalized by Google. The result will tell you the cause of your website’s poor rankings and how to fix them. Moreover, it aids in tracking website traffic during Google updates, helping identify penalizing changes and plan effective strategies.
Barracuda offers a wide range of features to help you make the best results-driven choices to optimize your site, including:
- Mobile searches
- On-site link optimization
- Local and regional SEO insights
- Data encryptions
- Paid and organic visibility
Pricing
Free
9. Google Search Console XML Sitemap
Feature Overview
The Google Search Console XML Sitemap is a free tool that helps you diagnose any problems with your sitemap. If an issue has been identified, you can then troubleshoot and monitor it quickly and easily without having to dig through your website’s code.
Note: An XML sitemap is a file that contains information about the pages on your website.
With Google Search Console XML Sitemap, you can ensure that your website’s pages are being crawled and indexed by Google, which is step 1 in improving your website’s search engine rankings. You can also receive alerts for any critical errors with your site, including indexing errors and spam. If you’re using Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), this technical SEO tool helps you to troubleshoot and resolve any issues that happen with them.
Pricing
Free
10. Seobility
Feature Overview
Seobility is an all-in-one SEO software for freelancers, agencies, and enterprises. While it’s built for SEO beginners and professionals, it extends itself as a tool for content marketers. Its unique features, particularly the TF*IDF, give you valuable insights into the text optimization of good-ranked websites.
Then, on the technical side, it has everything you need to optimize. From crawling your website to flagging technical errors, on-page issues, and more, you can find all this in an easy-to-digest report.
The most-used features of Seobility include:
- Site Audit
- Website Rankings
- Backlink Analysis
- TF*IDF Tool
- Keyword Research Tool
Each feature drills down and offers additional SEO tools as follows:
- SEO Checker
- Keyword Checker
- Ranking Checker
- SEO Compare
- Backlink Checker
- Redirect Checker
- SERP Snippet Generator
Out of all features, Seobility truly shines in the website auditing space. Without the chaos and at half the price of big-brand tools, it’s proven to be a sustainable solution used by 333,333 users around the world. Now, everyone has the chance to understand and successfully apply SEO to achieve their online goals.
Pricing
Free plan, €49.90/month for the Premium plan, and €179.90/month for the Agency plan
Use Technical SEO Tools for A Thorough SEO Audit
Technical SEO is a complex domain that requires careful auditing. Using some of the technical SEO tools listed in this article can help you measure, analyze, and optimize your website for better search engine ranking and results.
If you find your website has poor crawling and indexing performance, try out Prerender. We accelerate the indexing process by rendering your JavaScript content in advance. So, when search engine bots request the page, Prerender feeds them with its 100% rendered version—cutting the indexing time while ensuring no content is left uncrawled.
Sign up to Prerender today and get started with 1,000 FREE renders per month!
