It’s not an exaggeration to say that SEO is not only an online business’s best friend but also its boss. There is no other way to get at the top of the search engine results and reach your target audience than SEO.
But SEO is not something you learn overnight. And, even when you do get the gist of it and start to feel confident in your strategy, a new algorithm update rolls out and you have to review your plan. That’s why monitoring and regular auditing your website is paramount and should become a habit.
Luckily, marketers and developers are constantly looking for ways to make their job easier, more accurate, error-free, and time-saving. There are several SEO tools that you can use to look for technical issues and look over your site’s performance.
We have narrowed the long list of SEO tools available on the web to the ones we like the most.
You might also be interested in WHAT IS WEBMASTER TOOLS IN SEO?
SEO TOOLS FOR AUDITS AND MONITORING
1. Google Search Console
Let’s start with the obvious choice: since Google is the biggest search engine and highest authority when it comes to SEO, it’s tools are a point of reference for anyone interested in SEO. The Google Search Console is full of SEO audit tools, including:
- Index Coverage, which provides crawl information from Google;
- Performance, a reporting tool that goes into insightful details about how your website is performing;
- URL Inspection Tool (which replaced the “Fetch as Google” tool), a tool that inspects your URL and finds crawling information, status information, etc.
- Sitemaps, where you can tell Google which pages are most important.
Mastering the Google Search Console is a continuous process, as it keeps on improving. Also, as you dig deeper into it, you find more interesting challenges in terms of SEO.
2. Screaming Frog
A tool with a name to remember, but also memorable in what it does, Screaming Frog’s SEO spider is amazing, especially if you have a big website. It easily crawls your website, reporting any errors, broken links, link building, redirects, and other SEO technical issues that can slow down your site’s performance.
3. UpCity’s SEO Report Card
A great free tool for making comparisons and getting reports about your website and the competitor pages is the SEO Report Card from UpCity. It tells you just about everything you need to know, from your website ranks to backlinks, SEO issues, and keywords research comparisons.
4. SEMrush
Although it can look a bit intimidating at first, SEMruah is another SEO tool that we love. The elaborate details it goes into and the level of reporting you can get with it will fast come to your service.
It can run reports of your whole website’s performance, or you can select specific pages to audit. It’s a really good keywords explorer that gives you insights like keyword ranking, search volume, keyword difficulty, SERP features, and so on. Besides gathering all this comprehensive data, it also makes it easy to filter the keywords, group them, and make your SEO strategy smoother.
5. Hubspot’s Website Grader
Launched in 2007, Hubspot’s Website Grader is a fantastic tool for a website audit. It splits the reported data into four main categories:
- Performance
- Mobile Readiness
- SEO
- Security
The Website Grader offers detailed insights on your website but also proposes actionable solutions for any weak points the page may have. This can be a very good beginner tool for those who have just started their SEO education.
6. MOZ
Subscribing to the Moz Pro plan (which starts with a 30-day free trial) gets you a collection of SEO tools to audit and monitor your website. Moz has their own robot crawler called RogerBot, that analyses up to 3,000 links to identify duplicate content, learn the canonical values, and more.
7. Check My Links
This free tool is awesome at checking the internal and external links on a page. The tool, as its name suggests, checks any link you give it and makes sure there are no broken links on it, and that the page is live. Check My Links is very fast at auditing a page, and it reports in a straightforward manner: it highlights all the good links in green and the broken links in red.
8. Woorank
Offering On/Off page SEO, issue detection, and other audit reports, Woorank is a neat tool to improve your SEO game. It also helps you see the big picture as far as your marketing strategy goes, and offers social media, usability, and content reports.
Too Many Options? Let Us Guide You!
We here at Australian Internet Advertising have seen it all. We are excited to test all kinds of SEO tools, and have discovered there is no cookie-cutter solution for SEO auditing and monitoring.
You could prefer a certain combination of the available tools, keep it simple with 1-2 tools, or have a whole arsenal, it’s up to you.
Our Search Engine Optimisation specialists can tell you what you need to keep an eye on when it comes to SEO, and which tools do the job best.
Contact us for more information about the tools available, how to pick the ones suitable for your business, and how to make the most out of them.
