Top 5 SEO Tools for Site Audits

For an in-house team or an SEO Agency, SEO audits are a crucial function before, during, and after an SEO campaign. When outlining your KPIs and monitoring growth, it’s important to have a univariate approach.

In the early years, Online Marketers & SEO agencies were limited in the ways they could gain intel. Fast forward to today, we are away with the bricks and mortar, spoilt for choice with effective SEO audit service tools. The evolution of SEM has provided us with many useful tools we can utilise for SEO campaigns. We’ve analysed them and outlined the most useful ones to integrate into your SEO site audit process below.

Top 5 SEO Audit Tools

Majestic

Majestic is a great tool to use when looking for insights into link analysis. The link intelligence software allows you to analyse your own backlink profile. Unlike related tools such Majestic focuses specifically on backlinks and link profiles. While this may sound limiting, Majestic is a champion of its niche and excels at providing accurate backlink analysis, being especially useful when conducting competitor analysis.

Notable Features:

• Comparing domains – This feature allows you to compare your backlink profile against your competitors. By doing so, you can easily prioritise areas of focus in the long term. An easy example of this is if your competitors have a healthier backlink profile than your business.
• Building Hitlists – Since you are able to analyse your competitors backlink profile, you can also build a reputable hitlist of links. This allows you to easily export the data which highlights the sites your competitors are being linked from. The next step from this would be outreaching to said links, but that’s a topic for another day! As well as an idea generation exercise, it can also be an effective reverse engineering strategy.
• Anchor Text – To ensure your link profile is healthy and Google does not penalise you, it is important that the keywords you are targeting in your links are varied. Majestic provides visibility on your anchor text ratios, which means you can easily make amendments if your profile begins to appear to be engineered unnatural.

SEMrush

SEMrush is a great tool that can be used for practically all of your SEO, PPC, SMM and Keyword research needs. This fantastic tool is recognised for being an ‘all-in-one’ suite for improving online visibility. Not only is SEMrush a fantastic way to carry out your next site audit, but also your content marketing strategy!

Notable Features:

• Rank Check – SEMrush provides you with current organic search terms you are appearing for. Although we would recommend searching these terms manually to gage where you are appearing, it is a quick and convenient way of understanding what terms you have visibility on.
• SERP Features – There are over 10 organic search types that can be used to gain visibility. The tool not only provides clear visibility on the current search features being utilised, but also the assets you have but are not utilising. An example of this is you may have 10 FAQs not linking to your domain. Or 10 featured Snippets not linking to the domain. by using the SERP feature, you can gage the assets you have and gain some quick wins.

Page Speed Insights

Page Speed insights is a tool created by Google. After a quick crawl of the site, it scores the speed of your website across mobile and desktop out of 100. After doing this, it then generates recommendations the improve your current score. This is a great way to tie together the metrics measured in the previous tools!

Notable Features:

• Does what it says on the tin! It’s important to note that Google favours mobile performance and usability over desktop when crawling. So even if you’re a B2B service, and the majority of you’re traffic comes from desktop in the 9-5, you should still take it as a priority fix if mobile speed is unsatisfactory.

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is a website crawler, that uses an SEO Spider that helps you improve onsite SEO. This is done via extracting the data obtained and auditing it for common and prominent SEO issues.

Notable Features:

It is an all-in-one tool, and once adding in your domain you can obtain valuable sitewide intelligence on the following:

• H1/H2 tags
• Images
• Meta Keywords/Descriptions
• Site Structure
• Page Titles
• Response Codes
• Canonicals
• Response Times

It’s important to note that these insights can provide a greater understanding as to how your site performs as a whole. With this data, you can easily get these areas fixed and optimise.

Google Analytics

Lastly but certainly not least, Google Analytics is an easy to use traffic analytics tool which provides insight on user behaviour. We would highly recommend every website owner has this integrated, and becomes confident of using it independently.

• Conversion Tracking- Google Analytics allows you to track user conversions onsite and allows you to set up targets for specific metrics. You can set these targets up on “goals” and it is a feature that allows you to recap monthly on sales and leads. You can also integrate this data with a CRM.
• Locations Tracking – Whether you’re a B2B or B2C organisation, selling locally or internationally, locations tracking can be great. You’ll be able to easily gain insight into which specific areas are getting you the most traffic.

Should You Pay For a SEO Audit From an Agency?

While using free auditing tools can give you basic information about your SEO performance at no cost other than your own time, this may not lead to a list of audit or recommendations that is complete or fully effective. An audit conducted by an SEO agency, on the other hand, is likely to include an even more comprehensive list of data, more effective use of audit tools, and even more in-depth analysis of the data that was collected. This can provide a better and more complete audit, but you will need to account for the cost of an SEO audit.

Round-Up

If you’re conducting a site audit, and don’t know where to start when analysing current performance, these tools are a great place to start. However, don’t ignore the benefits of using a specialised SEO agency to conduct an audit for you. Audit service agencies provide detailed audits with strong, strategic recommendations on how to improve your SEO.

Polaris is an award-winning SEO agency in London specialising in both B2B SEO and E-Commerce SEO.