When you manage a website of any kind, optimizing your site for search engines can be highly effective at bringing traffic to your website. If you can position your website and its pages towards the top of relevant search results, your website and brand will have more visibility, which should help you meet your business goals and objectives.
Keep in mind that it’s usually not enough to perform search engine optimization. There’s always a chance that the optimization you’ve done isn’t producing the intended results, which only serves to waste time and money. If you want to be certain that your SEO efforts are helping your website and brand grow, consider performing SEO audits on a regular basis.
These audits will allow you to identify how your website is performing on search engines like Google and if your SEO efforts are implemented properly. This article offers a comprehensive look at seven of the best SEO audit tools that you can use in 2022.
- 7. Google Search Console – 4.8 rating on GetApp.com
- 6. Ubersuggest – 4.5 rating on GetApp.com
- 5. Google Page Speed Insights – More than 30,000 active installations
- 4. Google Lighthouse – More than 11,000 active installations for browser add-on
- 3. Ahrefs – Over 10,000 new accounts in the last seven days
- 2. Google Analytics – More than 70 million websites use Google Analytics
- 1. SEMRush – Over 10 million users
What are SEO Tools and What Do They Measure?
When you’re searching for the right SEO tools to use with your website, the tools you select should provide you with built-in optimization insights that allow you to determine how effective your optimization has been. A good SEO audit tool will assess your site’s performance and any SEO elements that exist in the site pages.
If you choose a top SEO tool, you’ll benefit from gaining a better understanding of your website. When you implement SEO correctly, your website should start to improve in rankings once Google and Bing SEO crawlers index your site. Using SEO tools will help you identify weak spots that need improvement. The main site components that are measured and assessed with an SEO audit tool include:
- Backlinks
- On-page SEO
- Keywords rankings
- Traffic
- Mobile-friendliness
- Technical SEO, which extends to indexability, crawlability, and any code issues
- Load speeds for site pages
7. Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a completely free tool available to web developers and marketers who want to monitor their search rankings with Google. This tool offers reports and features that assist users in performing an SEO audit and identifying the most notable technical SEO problems. It’s possible to use the Google Search Console to determine if Google web crawlers can access every page. You’ll be alerted if your website has spam or indexing issues.
6. Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is a powerful SEO tool that provides users with a comprehensive keyword database, competitor research functionality, and SEO audit features. With the “On-Site Audit” feature, you can obtain insights about any SEO errors that need to be corrected, where you obtain backlinks from, and the various keywords that your website ranks for.
With this information, you should be able to improve any weaknesses in your site’s SEO efforts, after which an additional analysis can be performed. If you want to gain access to the Ubersuggest SEO tool, you must pay anywhere from $29-$99 per month depending on the subscription you select. You can also pay a one-time premium of $299-499 for a lifetime plan that gives you access to all features permanently.
5. Google PageSpeed Insights
Google PageSpeed Insights is a popular SEO audit tool with a focus on technical SEO. The purpose of this tool is to help website owners optimize page speeds on their websites. All you need to do when using this tool is enter your website URL, after which the Google PageSpeed Insights tool will analyze the content and provide you with suggestions on how to improve load times.
Keep in mind that loading speeds are among the most important aspects of technical SEO in regards to search rankings. If a site page takes a lengthy amount of time to load, many site users will leave and visit another website that doesn’t have these issues. Google PageSpeed Insights uses field data from visits to your website to measure page speed. This data is primarily gathered from Google Chrome and will provide you with a more accurate look into how the optimizations you’ve implemented are impacting performance. This tool is completely free to use.
4. Google Lighthouse
Google Lighthouse is a suite of tools that are designed to provide web developers and site owners with search engine optimization tools, accessibility audits, and SEO audits. The SEO audit feature allows you to measure how your website is currently performing in search engines like Google. This tool uses Google’s primary ranking factors to identify what types of optimization you’ve implemented.
Once the analysis is completed, you’ll receive data about your website that can help you further improve your SEO. Some factors that are measured include content quality, mobile friendliness, crawling, and indexing. You can use this tool for free. Keep in mind that most users consider Google Lighthouse to have an intuitive and easy-to-understand interface.
3. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is considered to be an all-in-one SEO tool that offers comprehensive SEO audit functionality. This specific tool is operated completely on the cloud, which means that your subscription will give you access to the computing resources that are needed to perform audits and take advantage of the other services available through Ahrefs.
The SEO audit tool available with Ahrefs looks for 100 different on-page and technical SEO problems that may be creating issues with your current SERP rankings. Once the analysis has been performed, every issue that’s detected will be separated into an issue type before you’re given a lengthy report that details how your site is performing. The types of issues that can be detected by Ahrefs include:
- Performance problems
- Content quality issues
- Social tag issues
- HTML tag problems
- Broken images
- Outgoing and incoming links
Obtaining a subscription to Ahrefs costs at least $99. However, you can select a seven-day trial for just $7, which gives you a good opportunity to gain a better understanding of how beneficial this tool is for your website.
2. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a tool made available by Google to analyze your SEO performance as well as every facet of the traffic that reaches your website. While Google Analytics is available for free, you can also obtain a paid version that offers additional functionality.
When using the free version of Google Analytics, you can:
- Filter your referral traffic – With this feature, you can get rid of any traffic that could create issues in your SEO reports. For instance, all fake traffic should be filtered out.
- Obtaining engagement metrics – Site Content Reports can be used to identify how users are engaging with the pages on your site and any directions. It will measure user behavior, acquisition, and conversion when it comes to landing pages.
- Comparison non-organic traffic to organic traffic – This feature gives you the opportunity to identify how visitors reach your website while also providing you with insights on how to improve and optimize performance.
- Review the Assisted Conversions feature – This feature allows you to identify the channels that have resulted in the highest amount of conversions.
1. SEMrush
SEMrush is the top tool in this list because of its ability to act as an all-in-one tool for search engine marketing and SEO auditing. The SEO auditing functionality centers around technical SEO and is able to diagnose more than 130 different on-page and technical SEO problems.
The main difference between SEMrush and other tools is that SEMrush offers custom reports and thematic reports that allows users to obtain more specific insights into a single aspect of on-page or technical SEO. You can use custom reports for site performance, international SEO, crawlability, and many additional metrics. The tool will also provide you with analysis on which issues are most affecting your website’s performance.
If you want to try this tool for free, SEMrush provides site owners with the ability to audit 100 pages of their websites for free. In the event that you enjoy using SEMrush and would like to extend functionality, you can obtain the basic subscription for $99.95 per month. The many features available with SEMrush include:
- Searches for 130 separate errors
- Performs thematic reports
- SEO problems are separated by severity and include “Notices”, “Warnings”, and “Errors” categories
- Can be integrated with Google Analytics
- Include intuitive and colorful graphs with SEO audit results
- Offers actionable insights on how to improve SEO performance
If you want your website to grow and bring in new customers, it needs to be visible to these users. An effective method for improving site visibility on search engines is to perform search engine optimization, which should allow you to start increasing your rankings and get to the top of relevant search results. In the meantime, consider using one or more of the SEO audit tools mentioned above to assess and improve your SEO.
