17 Best SEO Audit Tools in 2024 (Top 3 Picks & WHY)

There are a lot of SEO audit tools on the market these days. So how do you know which one is best suited to your needs? In this article, we'll take a look at the best SEO audit tools and explain why they're worth considering.

On-page SEO versus off-page SEO

It's essential to understand the difference between on-page SEO and off-page SEO:

• On-page SEO refers to activities you can do within your website to improve its ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs). It includes improving content quality, optimizing titles and meta descriptions, and ensuring your site is properly indexed.

• Off-page SEO refers to activities outside your website that can affect your rankings. This includes building backlinks with optimized anchor texts and using social media to promote your content.

What are the Best SEO Audit Tools?

Let's review the best off-page and on-page SEO audit tools, starting with on-page search engine optimization.

On-page SEO tools:

1 – SurferSEO (Recommended SEO Audit Tool)

Best SEO Content Audit Tool

My Take

SurferSEO is the best SEO audit tool for content optimization. It provides actionable insights to help you improve your content quality and make it more SEO-friendly. I use it for all my articles, which helped me get my content to rank better in google.

Key Features

• Content Editor: This is the feature I use the most. The tool gives you a content score that shows how good your content is compared to your competition on Google. It tells you exactly which NLP keywords to use and how often, as well as the optimal number of words, headings, paragraphs, and images, depending on your selected competitors. You increase your chances of ranking by having keyword-rich and high-quality content.

• Audit: SurferSEO has a page audit feature that allows you to improve your existing website pages. It shows you where your content is missing out on optimization opportunities. It looks at backlinks, keyword density, word count, page structure, meta tags (title and meta descriptions), load time, and more. The site audit tool analyzes your competitors' content so you can see where you can improve. It's the second feature I use the most.

• Keyword Research: SurferSEO's keyword research tool helps you find topic clusters and uncover relevant high-traffic keywords to build topical authority. It shows you monthly search volume, keyword difficulty, and related terms.

• SERP Analyzer: Analyze the correlations between on-page optimizations and rankings in search results.

• Domain Planner: enter your domain name into the tool to find missed SEO opportunities. This feature helps you to identify and target high-value keywords that can drive more traffic to your site. Domain Planner streamlines the content optimization process by using your Google Search Console data. Audit your domain for pages that need content improvement. Find opportunities for featured snippets in a Google search. You can also check the content scores for multiple pages on your website.

• Grow Flow: it gives you tasks to accomplish every week, such as adding missing target keywords in your articles, inserting internal links, or creating new articles about specific topics.

Pricing

SurferSEO lets you track and optimize an unlimited number of low-traffic websites. However, it has restrictions on high-impression websites, depending on your plan.

• Free: 1 high-impression website and Grow Flow.
• Basic ($49/mo): 2 websites, Content Editor (10 articles/month), page Audit (20 pages/month), invite 1 team member. Plus, better guidelines with NLP support.
• Pro ($99/mo): 5 websites, Content Editor (30 articles/month), Audit (60 pages/month), invite 3 team members.
• Business ($199/mo): 10 websites, Content Editor (70 articles/month), Audit (140 pages/month), invite 10 team members, plus other advanced features.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• Efficiency: I could reach the first page of Google for many keywords using SurferSEO. I like the actionable advice, especially the NLP keywords, to include in the Content Editor.
• Ease of use: It's easy to use and understand, even if you're new to SEO.
• Integrations: WordPress plugin integration, Google Docs extension.
• Intuitive interface.

Cons

• It can be a bit pricey for beginners: the Basic plan lets you only optimize 10 new articles per month.
• Suggestions in Grow Flow are only sometimes relevant.

Verdict: Best SEO Audit Tool

SurferSEO is one of the best site SEO audit tools. It provides actionable insights so you can optimize your content quickly and effectively.

It's also easy to use, and you can track and optimize multiple websites simultaneously.

It's worth trying out this on-page optimization tool and seeing how it can help your SEO efforts.

Try SurferSEO

2 – ContentKing

Best SEO Tool for Real-Time Insights

This SEO audit tool helps you monitor your website's SEO performance in real time.

With their cloud-based platform, you'll always have access to your SEO data and reports. Therefore, you can quickly identify and fix any SEO issues that arise.

Their algorithms quickly and accurately process tasks using many signals, so you can be confident that your SEO is on track.

And with content alerts, you'll always be the first to know if something breaks, so you can fix it before it impacts your results.

Key Features

• SEO Auditing
• SEO Monitoring
• SEO Alerting
• SEO Change Tracking
• Log File Analysis
• Insights and Reporting
• API and Integrations

Pricing

They don't show their pricing publicly, but if you create a free trial account, you'll see their plans:

• Basic ($39/month)
• Standard ($149/month)
• Pro ($279/month)

Small businesses and brands like Shopify, H&M, and Adidas use ContentKing.

Get started today and see the difference ContentKing can make for your SEO.

Try ContentKing

3 – Frase

Best SEO tool for writers

Frase is one of the best AI copywriting software. More than 30,000 SEO experts and content writers use Frase to create SEO-optimized content faster.

Its AI-powered editor can instantly identify the topics and keywords you should use in your articles.

Plus, it will suggest ideas for improving your content to ensure it's always up-to-date and optimized.

Key Features

• Content Brief: to quickly create brief tasks for your writers. Create SEO-optimized briefs in minutes by using the top Google search results. Frase saves you time by finding, studying, and putting the best web content in one place.

• Content Writing: AI-powered content editor featuring instant topic and keyword suggestions. With just a few clicks, you can write high-quality content that will help improve your SEO ranking. Get rid of writer's block, use automated outlines, and create blog articles or optimized product descriptions that help you sell more.

• Content Optimization: optimize existing content and ensure it meets SEO best practices. As with SurferSEO, the tool uses a score to show you how well your content ranks against your competitors.

• Content Analytics: The dashboard will help you find the best content opportunities. It uses your Google Search Console data to suggest what to work on next.

Pricing

All plans give you 20,000 AI characters per month. Use the Solo plan to begin, and then upgrade whenever you need to write more articles or if you have a team.

• Solo ($14.99/mo): 1 user, 4 articles/month.
• Basic ($44.99/mo): 1 user, 30 articles/month.
• Team ($114.99/mo): 3 users, unlimited articles.

Verdict

Frase is the perfect AI copywriting tool for content creators and SEO experts. It simplifies the writing process, helping you create effective content faster. And with its content optimization and analytics features, you'll always be one step ahead of your competitors.

Try Frase today and see how it can help you with your SEO.

Try Frase

4 – MarketMuse

SEO is vital for any website that wants to rank high in search engine results pages (SERPs), but it can be a complex and time-consuming process. This is where MarketMuse comes in.

MarketMuse is an AI-powered SEO tool that helps you to research, plan, and write SEO-optimized content.

With MarketMuse, you can get your content published faster, build customer journeys, and get discovered by the people who need you most.

Key Features

• AI SEO Writing: Automatically generate SEO-optimized content with the power of artificial intelligence.
• Content Research: Analyze your topics and identify content gaps to create content clusters and rank higher.
• Intelligence: Analyze the topical relevancy of your content, and evaluate the performance of your existing content.

Pricing

• Free: 1 user, 15 queries/month, 10 projects.
• Standard ($7200/yr): 1 user, 100 queries/month, unlimited projects.
• Premium ($12000/yr): unlimited everything and advanced features.

Verdict

MarketMuse is the premier SEO audit tool. It's a technical SEO audit tool that gives you an in-depth look at your website's SEO health. The tool can help you write more articles and help you reach the people who need your help.

Try out this tool today and see how it can help you to take your website to the next level.

Try MarketMuse

5 – Screaming Frog SEO Spider

This desktop application crawls your website and uncovers any website SEO issues that could hamper your search engine ranking.

Thousands of SEO professionals and agencies trust the website crawler for technical SEO site audits.

It works on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Screaming Frog can also help you find the important content on your website so you know where to focus your efforts.

Pricing

ScreamingFrog is available in 2 versions: Free and Paid ( $209/yr).

Try Screaming Frog

Off-page SEO audit tools:

6 – Semrush (Best Off-page SEO Audit Tool)

Do you want to dominate your competitors?

Semrush is the platform you need to crush the competition. It provides all the SEO data and tools you need for search engine optimization, content marketing, competitor research, PPC, and social media marketing.

Semrush is the most popular SEO audit tool, already used by 10M digital marketing professionals and 30% of Fortune 500 companies.

Brands like Tesla, Amazon, Samsung, IBM, Walmart, Wix, P&G, and Forbes use Semrush.

The SEO audit software helps you track your website's ranking in search engines and spy on your competitors' strategies.

Not only can you do everything with Semrush, but it's also straightforward. The user interface is simple and intuitive so you can get started immediately–without any required training.

With SEO analytics, create content that ranks higher than your competitors. You'll also have access to their marketing strategy and tactics so that you can stay ahead of the curve.

Plus, there are tons of video tutorials and webinars if you ever need more help.

Key Features

Semrush has over 55 tools and reports, so I can't list them all, but some of the key features include the following:

• Backlink Audit Tool: Analyze and audit your website's backlinks and keep track of new links.
• Site Audit Tool: Analyze and optimize your website for SEO, find broken links, fix technical issues, and improve your site health score.
• Content Audit Tool: Get a personalized audit of your website's subfolders based on real-time metrics from Semrush, Google Search Console, and Google Analytics.
• Keyword Research
• On-page SEO
• Competitor Analysis
• Content Marketing
• Rank Tracking
• Link Building
• Social Media Management
• Competitor SEO Analysis

Pricing

• Pro ($119.95/month): 5 projects, track 500 keywords, 10,000 results per report.
• Guru (229.95/month): 15 projects, track 1500 keywords, 30,000 results per report.
• Business ($449.95/month): 40 projects, track 5000 keywords, 50,000 results per report.

Find more details on Semrush pricing here.

Verdict

Semrush is one of the leading SEO audit tools on the market. It's incredibly versatile and gives you everything you need to outrank your competitors and increase your SEO ranking.

Plus, it's user-friendly and intuitive, meaning you don't need any technical knowledge to get started.

So if you want a comprehensive online SEO audit tool to help you reach the top of search engine rankings, Semrush is definitely worth checking out.

Sign up for a 14-day free trial today:

Try Semrush

7 – SE Ranking

All-in-one SEO Software 

Are you looking for the best SEO audit tool on the market? SE Ranking offers an all-in-one platform packed with features to help you improve your SEO.

This software has everything: technical SEO audit, website audit, keyword tools, and more.

Key Features

• Website Audit
• Keyword Rank Tracker: track the real-time ranking position of your website's keywords on various search engines.
• On-Page SEO Checker
• SERP Checker
• Backlink Checker
• Backlink Tracking Tool

Pricing

SE Ranking has 3 pricing plans with higher limits in the more advanced plans.

• Essential ($39.20/month): 10 projects. Perfect for small businesses.
• Pro ($87.20/month): Unlimited projects, best for scaling businesses and agencies.
• Business ($191.20/month): Higher limits, best for large companies.

Try SE Ranking

8 – Ahrefs

Best Keyword Research & Site Audit Tool

My Take

Ahrefs is the best technical SEO audit tool on the market. It helps you identify and fix any website errors impacting your SEO and provides a wealth of other tools to help improve your site's overall SEO. I use it regularly to help me rank better on Google.

Key Features

• Site Audit: get your site health score, find broken links, and optimize your site architecture. Identify key areas that need improvement with this site audit tool.
• Site Explorer: to uncover organic search opportunities, check backlink profiles with incoming and outgoing links, and track the most popular pages on any domain.
• Keywords Explorer: find new keywords and get related keyword suggestions.
• Rank Tracker: monitor your keyword rankings easily.
• Content Explorer

Pricing

• Lite ($99/month): best for beginner website owners. Minimal features.
• Standard ($199/month): best for small businesses and SEO professionals.
• Advanced ($399/month): best for scaling businesses.
• Enterprise ($999/month): best for corporate and big agencies.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• Accuracy: Gives great insights into keyword research and competitor analysis.
• Comprehensive features: Provides detailed reports on search engine performance.

Cons 

• Price: Very expensive for beginners or small businesses.
• Pay-per-click usage limit: you get a limited number of monthly credits (500 in the Standard plan). Each time your search for something or reload the page, it consumes 1 additional credit. So you use your credits very quickly, which is a very unpleasant customer experience, especially for an auditing tool that costs so much.
• No free trial
• Complexity: It can be overwhelming to learn if you are a beginner with SEO tools.

Verdict

Overall, Ahrefs is an excellent tool for anyone looking to improve the SEO of their website. It is accurate, comprehensive, and offers a wealth of features to help you understand and improve your website's SEO.

However, it is pricey for beginners or small businesses and can have an unpleasant pay-per-click usage limit.

You should look at Semrush instead if you want similar performance for a more affordable price.

Try Ahrefs

Google tools:

Google offers some excellent free SEO audit tools that are great for any website owner:

9 – Google Search Console (Best Free SEO Audit Tool)

Google Search Console (GSC) is a free SEO audit tool from Google itself that provides detailed insights into how your website performs in Google search.

All website owners use Google Search Console to track their site performance. You can also connect GSC to Google Analytics for more convenience.

It gives you information like what keywords are driving the most traffic and what queries your page is ranking for. You can also see your core web vitals and any errors or SEO issues with your site.

GSC also shows you crawl errors, such as broken links and slow pages, which can hurt your SEO performance.

10 – Google Analytics

Google Analytics is great for tracking website performance and user engagement. Google Analytics is an excellent source for keyword research, as it can show you the SEO keywords driving your website's traffic.

I don't need to tell you more about GA, as you probably know it already. Every website owner uses Google Analytics.

11 – Google Keywords Planner

Keywords Planner is a free tool in Google Ads that help you research and find relevant keywords for your website. It's a great way to get ideas for what keywords to target for your content and SEO campaigns.

Use it carefully, as Google shows you traffic data for ads, not organic search results.

12 – Google PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights is a free SEO audit tool from Google that shows you how well your website performs in terms of page speed.

It gives you a detailed report on optimizing your pages for better performance, including recommendations on caching, minifying assets, and compressing images.

It also gives you a score (out of 100) for mobile usability and desktop performance, which you can use to track the progress of your optimization efforts when dealing with SEO issues.

13 – Google Mobile-Friendly Test

Make sure your website is mobile-friendly with Google's Mobile-Friendly Test.

Other Free SEO Audit tools:

Page speed is one of the ranking factors for Google. Therefore, ensure your pages are as fast as possible on all devices; it is essential for improving your SEO.

14 – Microsoft Bing Webmaster Tools

Microsoft Bing also offers a free SEO audit tool called the Bing Webmaster Tools.

This tool is similar to Google Search Console and provides detailed insights into your website's performance in Bing search. It gives you information like keywords driving the most traffic, crawl errors, sitemaps, and more.

Other Website Analytics Tools:

15 – GTmetrix

GTmetrix is a free tool that helps you track the speed and performance of your website. It shows you how long it takes for your pages to load, what resources they load, and recommendations for optimizing your website's performance.

It also provides detailed reports on your website's performance on mobile and desktop devices.

16 – Pingdom Website Speed Test

Pingdom is another free website performance monitoring tool that helps you understand how your website performs in terms of page speed.

It also gives you recommendations for optimizing your website, such as caching and minifying assets. Finally, it provides detailed reports on user engagement and other metrics related to your website.

17 – SEO Site Checkup

The SEO site checkup tool offers a comprehensive analysis of your website's SEO, helping you identify areas for improvement. It provides detailed reporting with clear explanations of what needs to be changed to improve your search engine ranking.

The reporting tool also provides detailed insights on technical issues and how to optimize your web pages for maximum visibility in the search engine results pages.

Additional tools not reviewed in this article:

Ubersuggest, Moz Pro, Serpstat, SpyFu, Site Analyzer, Growth Bar SEO, and Site Checker Pro.

SEO Audit Best Practices

The best way to improve your SEO is by conducting an SEO audit of your website. The process involves using various SEO audit tools to analyze your web pages and identify any SEO issues that may hurt your rankings.

You can then use the information from the site auditing tool to fix these SEO errors, like broken links, and improve your website's performance.

You should also focus on optimizing your pages for better web page speed. This will help make your website faster and more responsive, which is essential for improving user engagement and SEO performance.

Improve Your Website's SEO with the Best SEO Audit Tools

An SEO audit can benefit your website's search engine optimization efforts. When conducting a site audit, you should look at the following areas:

1. Content quality and relevancy: Ensure your content is up-to-date, relevant, and helpful to your readers. Check for spelling errors, grammar mistakes, and broken links. Avoid duplicate content at all costs. You can use Copyscape or Grammarly duplicate content checkers to track plagiarism.
2. Keyword optimization: Research keywords related to your business and use them strategically in titles, headings, meta tags, images, and content.
3. Site structure: Ensure your webpages are well-structured, with a clear hierarchy. This will make it easier for search engine robots to crawl and index your content.
4. Site speed: Optimize the loading time of your website by compressing images, eliminating unnecessary code, and using a reliable web hosting provider.
5. Mobile-friendliness: Make sure your website is optimized for mobile devices and can be easily viewed on a variety of screen sizes.
6. Link building: Build quality links to your website by creating content other sites want to link to and collaborating with influencers in your industry.

You can improve your website's visibility and rankings on search engine result pages with the right SEO strategies and the best website audit tools.

The most popular SEO audit software include Semrush, SurferSEO, and Ahrefs. You should also use free SEO tools like Google Search Console and Google PageSpeed Insights.

SEO audits can be conducted manually by looking at competitors' web pages or using automated SEO audit tools to save time.

The best SEO audits are those that use a combination of both manual and automated audits for a more comprehensive analysis.

FAQ

Conclusion – Best SEO Audit Tools

Now that you know the best SEO audit tools and how to use them, it's time to put them into action!

A site audit is an essential part of any digital marketing SEO strategy. By closely examining your web pages and identifying areas for improvement, you can ensure your website is optimized for search engines.

And remember: the better your website ranks in search results, the more traffic you'll get.

The best SEO audit tools I recommend you use:

• SurferSEO
• Frase
• Semrush

So what are you waiting for? Start using these SEO tools today and see improved rankings in no time!

Thank you for reading; I hope this article helped you understand what SEO audit tools are and how to use them.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments below!

About The Author

Ecombridges

Sebastian is the founder of Ecombridges and an expert in online business and blogging. After getting his Master's in Business Engineering, he worked in IT and sales for Big Tech. Since then, he's managed a diverse portfolio of SaaS software, blogging businesses, e-commerce stores while also doing freelance consulting for small businesses.

On Ecombridges, he shares in-depth tutorials and insightful product reviews based on his firsthand experience. He recommends tools and strategies he trusts and uses in his online businesses, ensuring you receive genuine and actionable advice.

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