SEO Audit Tools : In-depth Guide To Streamline Your SEO Strategy

The SEO audit diagnoses your website’s state of natural referencing. It enables you to analyze your site and identify any issues that may be preventing optimal organic search and natural referencing performance.

The SEO audit is not a one-time process. It is essential to conduct these analyses regularly to maintain a constant follow-up, which will help you generate traffic consistently.

You can delegate this audit to an agency or SEO specialist, who will provide a comprehensive diagnosis and recommendations for improvement. However, you also have various SEO audit tools to conduct your own audit.

What is an SEO audit?

An SEO audit is an analysis of your website’s as-is state. Take a moment to examine the current state of affairs regarding SEO. You look critically at the site and ask yourself: what is going well, what could use improvement, and what is simply going wrong and hindering us from achieving good results?

Of course, you decide how thoroughly you want to analyze. As an SEO specialist, I recommend scheduling this regularly, such as quarterly or semi-annually. That way, you always spot crucial problems relatively quickly and limit their impact.

Crawlability

What is the ratio of indexed pages to actual pages?
What is the website currently ranking for?
How does organic traffic move over time?

Content

Is the content on your website of sufficient quality?
What is the content structure of your website like? (internal linking)
Are there still topics your target group cannot find information about on your website?

Technique

Is your website readable (enough) for search engines?
Are your essential documents up to date, such as robots.txt and sitemap.xml?
Your website exists in multiple languages; is that clear to search engines?

Authority

How many domains point to your website?
What is the quality of these domains?
How does your website score compare to competitors?

Tools & Tracking

Have you set up everything necessary to track your SEO efforts and other relevant data?

Also Read: Best SEO Tools for Improving Organic Search Visibility in SEM

Why is an SEO Audit Important?

An audit is often still underestimated, as its added value is not recognized. Companies prefer investing their money in things that deliver immediate results rather than preparatory work. However, an SEO audit can be more attractive in the long term.

Identifying problems at the beginning of your SEO journey is more efficient than doing so later. Problems that come to light later create unforeseen circumstances and hurt your time, resources, and budget. Therefore, if you want to avoid chaos and unexpected costs, an SEO audit can be highly beneficial.

How much time does an SEO Audit take?

The amount of time you spend on an audit depends on your website. It makes sense that you spend less time on a website with 50 pages because you have to analyze far fewer pages, and (in theory) less can go wrong.

On the other hand, websites with thousands of pages have a more complex structure, are often older, and have been edited by multiple people, which means that problems/errors arise more frequently. Additionally, it takes longer to navigate through the various pages.

Then you must consider websites in different languages with varying content, possible subdomains, the CMS system (if it is also analyzed), and so on.

For our standard customers, small and medium-sized companies, we need an average of 8 to 10 hours to thoroughly perform the analysis. Anything more significant depends enormously on various factors and must be viewed separately.

For those dealing with travel websites, understanding travel SEO services can be invaluable, given the distinct challenges this sector presents. This knowledge enables the effective addressing of the unique dynamics and audience behavior associated with travel portals.

Tools that help with an SEO Audit

Of course, when analyzing a website, you don’t go through every page manually; for small websites, that may still work, but for larger ones, it’s absolutely not feasible. So what do I do to analyze pages?

On the one hand, I take samples, especially for content analysis. I randomly select a few different pages, some blog pages, category pages, and product pages… and get to work. In addition, I am also assisted by SEO audit tools that make my work easier, or should I say, more efficient.

Pro Tip: If you are not regularly involved in SEO, do not rely solely on these SEO audit tools. A tool becomes interesting only when the collected data can be correctly interpreted and prioritized. So always take someone who knows something about it. If not, you’ll be left with a long list of to-dos that may not be worth your time and money.

You can use many tools to help you with an SEO audit. These are my personal favorites:

SearchAtlas

What Is SearchAtlas?

SearchAtlas is a comprehensive SEO platform that integrates multiple tools to assist in keyword research, content optimization, competitor analysis, and SEO automation. It is tailored specifically for agencies, offering features such as white-labeling, client-specific dashboards, and flexible account management. The platform aims to reduce the need for multiple subscriptions by offering a comprehensive, all-in-one solution for SEO needs.

Why Use SearchAtlas?

Comprehensive SEO Toolset: SearchAtlas offers a wide range of SEO tools, including:

Keyword Researcher: Provides insights into keyword performance, helping users identify effective SEO strategies and adjust accordingly.
Competitor Analysis: Allows users to analyze competitors’ strategies, including their backlinks and keyword usage, to gain a competitive edge.
Content Optimization: Offers tools to optimize SEO content, such as long-tail keywords, audience insights, and AI writing assistance.
SEO Auditing: Performs real-time SEO audits to identify and fix technical issues, ensuring websites are optimized for search engines.

White-Label Capabilities: Agencies can rebrand the SearchAtlas platform with their own logos and subdomains, delivering a seamless, branded experience to clients. This feature also allows clients to create child accounts, enabling them to access reports and order histories without seeing data from other clients or the agency.

SEO Automation with OTTO: OTTO is an AI-driven SEO automation tool within SearchAtlas that provides recommendations for SEO improvements, such as optimizing titles, meta descriptions, and alt text. While OTTO offers automation, human oversight is encouraged to ensure quality and alignment with strategy.

Advanced Reporting and Analytics: SearchAtlas enables users to build custom SEO reports, visualize keyword rankings and achievements with graphs, and share insightful analytics with stakeholders. These features help demonstrate SEO progress and inform data-driven decisions.

Local SEO Optimization: The platform offers tools like heatmaps to help businesses understand their visibility on Google Maps in specific geographic areas, allowing for more targeted local SEO strategies.

Also Read: Best Rank Tracking Tools To Use

SEMrush

What is SEMrush?

SEMrush is probably the most widely used SEO tool by SEO professionals. With its numerous features, it presents itself as a vital SEO audit and research tool. This American competitive analysis service has been in operation since 2008 and is one of the most comprehensive on the market.

SemRush collects data from search results across different search engines and presents them. Its price starts at $119.95/month; this offer is aimed at marketing beginners and small internal teams.

Why use SEMrush?

As we said, it is a complete tool allowing you, in particular:

analyze web page traffic sources;
track organic keywords;
analyze your backlinks: analyze the power and relevance of backlinks, their number, and their evolution over time;
Observe the ranking of websites on the same keyword in the SERP (search engine results page) and note the appearance of new competitors.

SEMrush offers an “Automated Reports” tool. This feature enables you to schedule recurring analyses via email on the subjects you specify beforehand.

SEMRush offers you the opportunity to compare yourself with your competitors:

Find the keywords on which your competitors are positioned.
Compare your positions on these keywords;
analyze their paid searches;
analyze their backlinks (number and quality), etc.

This essential tool provides an overview of your competitors’ SEO strategies by simply entering the URL of the site you want to analyze.

Ahrefs

What is Ahrefs?

Launched in 2011, Ahrefs quickly established itself as an essential tool for natural referencing. One of its strong points is its constant monitoring and verification of links pointing to a website.

However, Ahrefs’ interest is no longer limited to a website’s backlink overview. This SEO tool is an excellent help for SEOs and web marketers.

Why use Ahrefs?

The company offers a free version that lets you use the Site Explorer (organic volume search, inbound link checker) and Site Audit to perform an SEO audit of your website. All features are available for a flat rate starting at $99 per month

Its strength lies in its overall SEO monitoring and position monitoring in particular:

“Content Explorer” feature: to identify your best-performing content;
Creating effective SEO content: the tool provides long lists of keywords, with search volume and valuable information, to set up an appropriate content strategy. Ahrefs also offers the option to identify popular keywords on Bing and on platforms like Amazon and YouTube.
Realization of exciting complete reports thanks to an interface based on graphics: the SEO tool also allows you to create objectives and set an alert when they are reached
Has an extensive index of backlinks.

Google Search Console

What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is Google’s analytics tool. Google offers this SEO management interface free of charge to website owners/web admins. Thus, to use it, you must prove to Google that you are a website owner or technical manager.

This tool helps to ensure that your site is indexed correctly by the search engine. It also offers many features to measure SEO traffic driven by this indexing.

Why use Google Search Console?

First of all, because it is entirely free!

Then, this tool made available by Google makes it possible to measure the effectiveness of your SEO and to ensure its follow-up on this search engine through many features:

Monitor the indexing of your pages.
Report errors on your pages.
Offer many interesting KPIs: impressions, number of clicks, average click-through rate, average position on the search engine, etc.;
Report data relating to the site’s loading times and mobile compatibility.

Even if it is not as complete as other tools that offer competitive analysis or help with content creation, use it!

Ubersuggest

What is Ubersuggest?

Acquired by Neil Patel in 2017, this application is a great tool for auditing and optimizing your SEO content. Indeed, Ubersuggest is a keyword generator that helps you find short-tail keywords and long-tail keywords. It pulls up expressions and words related to a keyword and the most common user searches.

Ubersuggest used to be free, but it’s no longer free! The subscription price now starts at $12/month for an offer aimed at entrepreneurs and small businesses managing 1 to 3 websites.

Why use Ubersuggest?

This tool is dedicated to keyword strategy. These features will allow you to refine your semantic strategy. In particular, you will be able to:

Identify the web pages best positioned for the targeted vital query, using metrics such as monthly search volume, estimated paid and organic search competition, and cost per click.
Check whether the keyword is gaining or losing popularity, or whether it shows seasonal trends.
Access SEO statistics to analyze the competition: the SERP analysis provides rankings of the 100 best sites for the targeted keyword, estimated traffic for each page, site authority scores, and the number of social shares.
All via a clear, readable, and accessible interface.

Ubersuggest offers one of the best traffic analytics tools. Their offer remains the most competitive in the market for small needs, even though the tool has become chargeable.

Many other tools exist to audit and optimize your SEO. Many offer similar services (some paid, some free). Under these conditions, choosing the right one cannot be easy. To best analyze your SEO, you may need to choose SEO audit tools that complement each other.

In any case, most SEO audit tools offer free trials: go for it to choose the most suitable solution, and one that you will like the most in terms of use!

What can you expect after such an analysis? A comprehensive document explaining each human check-in language, supplemented with precisely the problem (if it occurs) and what should be done to solve it. All these checks are collected into a single table with a designated priority, so everyone knows the next steps.

Result

Such an audit can often seem overwhelming to some. It is often an extensive document with a lot of jargon. It is therefore essential that you go through the SEO audit with an expert for a clear explanation. This way, you immediately know where the problems are and what needs to be done, and you can report them to your superior more quickly. This is often done in a presentation to make it more visual, but it is certainly not required.

The SEO audit is valuable because it serves as a guideline document for the entire SEO process. After every task is completed, you and another party can refer to the document to see the next steps.

Ready to get started with your SEO audit yourself? Or are you still looking for a party to guide you in this? Then we can, of course, help you. Contact me if that is the case! 🙂

SEO Audit Tools : In-depth Guide To Streamline Your SEO Strategy