10 free and paid SEO audit tools for maximizing results

10 free and paid SEO audit tools for maximizing results

Conducting an SEO audit is both beneficial and time-consuming.

It’s difficult to stay on top of things with continual algorithm modifications and updates to your website and content. Fortunately, there are several excellent SEO audit tools available that will do the majority of the heavy job for you.

In this piece, we’ll categorize audit tools into three categories:

1. Material auditing tools can assist you to determine how SEO-friendly your content is, whether you’ve satisfied search intent and whether users are converting.
2. Technical audit tools that assist you with robots.txt, sitemaps, canonicals, hreflang, on-page optimizations, and other technical concerns.
3. Backlink audit tools can assist you in understanding your backlink profile, determining which links are good and which are bad, and keeping track of your backlinks.

But, first and foremost, why bother with SEO audits in the first place?

Why Perform an SEO Audit?

An SEO audit can assist you in determining your current ranking position. The method will discover any key difficulties impeding your website’s organic functioning, as well as areas for improvement.

Audits can be performed when you begin working with a new customer, when you start a new job, or simply as part of your quarterly or annual SEO routine. With a thorough audit, you can begin to sketch out a robust SEO strategy armed with all of the knowledge you need to make sound decisions.

Without the use of SEO audit tools, it is easy to overlook potential for growth – as well as difficulties that are impeding progress.

Let’s take a look at the top SEO tools for doing an effective audit.

Content Auditing Software:

1) Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free tool that is simple to set up, use, and comprehend. It also has no negative impact on load speed or anything else. What is there not to like?

Google Analytics includes a plethora of options for learning how visitors interact with your website, where traffic is coming from, and much more. Here are a few examples of what you may learn about your content’s performance using this tool:

• Rates of conversion. With Google Analytics objectives set up, you can check if your site visitors are taking the intended action (e.g., making an inquiry, signing up for a trial, becoming an email subscriber).
• Rates of bounce. Are consumers finding what they’re looking for on your page? Or are they leaving soon to try another search result?
• Audience. Who visits your website? What are the most common geographies? Which device types are there? Google Analytics can assist you in determining whether or not you are reaching your target market.
• Returning guests. This tool can assist you in determining how many of your users are new versus returning. Are your visitors enjoying your content and returning for more?

Pricing: Google Analytics is a free tool for the vast majority of consumers. Analytics 360 is a commercial version of the program offered to enterprise users, with pricing available upon request.

2) Grammarly

Grammarly offers a substantial free plan that includes features such as tone recognition and conciseness in addition to the fundamentals (like grammar and spelling). It’s a simple approach to improving your writing.

Grammarly currently offers far more than only spelling and grammatical corrections, as the original software did, thanks to changes in the product roadmap in recent years. This tool can help you audit your work for readability, grammar, tone, spelling, plagiarism, and other factors.

Their user interface is really clean and simple to use, and they have a fantastic Chrome extension, so you can get writing recommendations wherever you are (Gmail inbox, social media, etc.).

Grammarly offers a generous free-forever plan. Upgrading to premium for one user costs $12 a month and includes additional features such as plagiarism detection, formality level comments, and more.

Technical Auditing Tools:

Moving away from content-based audits, here are several excellent tools for conducting technical SEO audits.

3) Ahrefs Site Audit

The Ahrefs Site Audit tool provides a thorough technical auditing solution, as well as competitor analysis, keyword research, backlink monitoring, and other capabilities. If you require an all-in-one platform, purchasing Ahrefs makes sense.

The Ahrefs Site Audit tool assists you in identifying technical issues that may be impeding your website’s SEO performance. Examples of problems include:

• 404 pages.
• Canonical tags that refer to a redirect
• Orphaned pages
• Links that lead to a broken page.
• There are no title or description tags.

Ahrefs performs an excellent job of assisting users in understanding which issues are the most critical and what they mean, as well as providing guidance on how to resolve them. For example, issues are classified as Errors, Warnings, or Notices to indicate their significance.

You may schedule frequent audits, and your Site Audit dashboard will show you how things are going. During weekly automated crawls, you’ll be able to observe the progress and trends in your overall health score if you’re striving to resolve concerns.

Pricing: The base plan includes 10,000 monthly page crawl credits and 500 keywords for rank tracking. Higher tiers grant access to new services, increased limits, and longer data retention. A $7 7-day trial is available.

4) The Website Audit Tool in SEO PowerSuite

SEO PowerSuite is a collection of SEO tools, including technical audits. It is a downloadable desktop tool rather than a cloud-based service, which offers several potential benefits, including security. It also has a lower annual fee than most cloud-based solutions and is available in various languages other than English.

The WebSite Audit tool in SEO PowerSuite is a low-cost solution to gain a rapid assessment of the health of your technical SEO. The tool crawls your site and highlights technical and on-page issues that may be slowing it down. SEO PowerSuite, like Ahrefs, provides valuable advice on what each issue means and how to address it.

With automated scheduled reports, you can check your page speed, Core Web Vitals scores, internal linking, on-page improvements, and more. These can be done site-wide or page-by-page, and bulk changes for the pages you’re working on can be tracked.

This application can also build robots.txt and sitemap files if you don’t already have them.

Finally, whether you’re an SEO agency or freelancer, you can print white label PDF reports to simply share your audit.

Pricing: There is a restricted free version of SEO PowerSuite. You may acquire the commercial version of WebSite Auditor alone for $125 per year or the whole package (including other capabilities) for $299 per year, which enables stored projects and removes usage limits on tools like site auditing.

5) Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog has a fantastic free version that can handle up to 500 URLs. The premium version is likewise quite inexpensive. If you enjoy the notion of a desktop app but don’t require all of the other tools that SEO PowerSuite provides, Screaming Frog is a wonderful option.

Screaming Frog, like Ahrefs Site Audit and SEO PowerSuite’s WebSite Auditor, is used to check a website for technical SEO issues.

After crawling your site, you’ll see a number of tabs filled with information regarding the current state of your technical SEO. The first, and most likely the one in which you’ll spend the most time, is named Internal. Important information about each URL crawled may be found here, including the status code, headings/subheadings, title and description, and more.

One thing you’ll notice is that while Screaming Frog is less expensive, it’s significantly less useful than a tool like Ahrefs. Screaming Frog is best suited to SEOs with at least an intermediate degree of technical SEO competence because you don’t get the same helpful recommendations and guidance.

Screaming Frog offers a generous free version. Upgrading to the commercial version costs £149 per year (about $200 USD) and unlocks a slew of extra capabilities, including Javascript rendering, crawl comparisons, and AMP crawling. It also raises the crawling URL limit.

6) ContentKing

Not only is ContentKing an amazing technical auditing tool, but it is also the market leader in SEO monitoring tools, providing 24/7 monitoring and near-instant warnings when things change or break.

ContentKing, like the other technical auditing tools on our list, may help you keep track of (and repair) all of the usual SEO concerns.

The most major distinction is that ContentKing monitors your site 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and tells you when things change, or new problems occur.

For instance, if someone mistakenly violates your robots.txt or sitemap, you will be warned immediately. You may also track all SEO adjustments across the site to keep track of what’s going on. That means you’ll be able to easily undo any unpleasant modifications while also looking back at what may have had a favorable effect.

ContentKing features a robust set of connectors, including a reporting API, Data Studio integration, and connectivity to communications programs such as Slack and Microsoft Teams.

Pricing: ContentKing’s pricing is based on the number of pages you want to monitor, as well as tiered features. Prices begin at $49 for 1,000 monitored pages. Higher tiers grant access to new capabilities such Core Web Vitals monitoring, Google Data Studio integration, and reporting API access. There is a 14-day free trial available.

Backlink Audit Tools:

Next, we’ll look at backlink audit tools. These tools can assist you in understanding your current backlink profile, whether there are any potentially hazardous links, where fresh opportunities may lie, and much more.

7) Ahrefs Site Explorer

Ahrefs has one of the world’s largest backlink databases and the second-most active crawler (after Google). Backlink analysis alone is a compelling incentive to purchase it, but you also receive an all-in-one SEO solution built around it.

Ahrefs Site Explorer has a wide range of applications, but backlink analysis is one of its strongest. It may be used to audit your own backlink profile as well as rival backlinks.

When you enter a URL into Site Explorer, you’ll uncover a wealth of information about the website’s backlinks.

There are numerous useful filters available to assist you in analyzing the data. You may segregate links by dofollow versus nofollow, language, minimum or maximum Domain Rating or traffic, and more with only one or two clicks.

You may also see a timeline of trends to see how many links are built and lost each month and how that trend is changing.

Pricing: The basic subscription includes 175 domains every week and up to 100,000 export rows per report for backlink analysis. Higher tiers grant access to new features, increased usage limitations, and longer data retention. A $7 7-day trial is available.

8) Nightwatch

Nightwatch provides a backlink tracking and analysis tool for a significantly lesser cost than Ahrefs, but with fewer capabilities overall. This tool also features a fantastic rank tracker. Nightwatch is a good option if you need backlink audits and rank tracking at a cheaper cost than Ahrefs.

Nightwatch’s main advantage is rank tracking, but it also features a useful backlink auditing tool. You can monitor and analyze the backlink profile of any site that you’ve added and enabled this capability for. You can see how many referring domains you have at a glance, and you can filter by pages and tags if you like.

Their summary dashboard also shows you how many High, Medium, and Low quality links you have based on their URL ranking criteria. It also alerts you to any ‘Suspicious’ links, which have a URL rating of 2.

Aside from that, you can monitor for lost links and export your link profile to use in spreadsheets and other programs.

Pricing for Nightwatch is based on usage. Plans start at $39 per month and include tracking of 5,000 backlinks, 500 keywords, and 5,000 site audit pages. A 14-day free trial is offered.

9) Mangools LinkMiner

Mangools, like Nightwatch, provides a less expensive backlink auditing tool with less capabilities overall. KWFinder, a keyword research tool, is one of Mangools’ greatest features. Mangools is a good option if you need backlink auditing paired with keyword research at a lower cost than Ahrefs.

LinkMiner draws high-quality backlink data from Majestic’s API. You may get a high-level summary of any page’s or domain’s links and referring domains. Extra metrics for each connection include Majestic Citation Flow and Trust Flow, as well as Alexa rank.

In addition, LinkMiner presents an LS (Link Strength) score, which provides a quick and easy way to determine how powerful that page’s backlink profile is based on all of the other indicators combined.

When evaluating a website or domain, you may easily distinguish between dofollow and nofollow links and use various filters to get what you’re searching for.

Pricing: Mangools’ pricing is dependent on many forms of usage, such as backlink rows, SERPs lookups, keyword lookups, and so on. You can receive 100,000 backlink rows for $49 per month. A 10-day free trial is offered.

10) Linkody

Linkody is the only tool on this list that focuses solely on backlinks (auditing, monitoring, and building links). That is, if all you need is backlink tracking, their standalone product is less expensive than others. It also provides good monitoring options for when links are nofollowed or lost.

The Linkody dashboard provides an overview of your website’s backlinks, which may be filtered by landing pages, anchor texts, and other metrics. Moz Domain Authority, Majestic’s Trust Flow & Citation Flow, spam score, Alexa rank, and other metrics were employed.

Linkody can audit competitor backlinks in addition to checking your own. This allows you to examine how you compare to other sites in your niche and leads to the discovery of fresh backlink prospects.

Linkody also has a disavow file generator and white label reporting capabilities for agencies and freelancers reporting to customers.

It’s worth noting that while Linkody has a useful UI and is less expensive, it doesn’t crawl as swiftly as larger programs like Ahrefs and Semrush. This means that discovering new links may take longer.

Cost: Linkody’s pricing is depending on the number of websites and backlinks you want to monitor. Plans begin at around $15 per month, and a 30-day free trial is offered.

Conclusion

Now that you understand the significance of running SEO audits on your website in order to gain a better understanding of how it is performing, hopefully, our list of the top SEO audit tools can help you get started on improving your current ranking position.

Don’t pass up possibilities for improvement, and don’t ignore challenges that are impeding your progress.