![seo audit tools](https://inksem.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/seoaudittools.png)
1. What is an SEO audit?
An SEO audit is an analysis you perform on your website’s as-is situation. So take a moment to look at 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 advise you to schedule this regularly, for example, quarterly or semi-annually. That way, you always spot crucial problems relatively quickly and limit their impact.A. 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?
B. Content
- Is the content on your website qualitative enough?
- 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?
C. Technique
- Is your website readable (enough) for search engines?
- Are your essential documents active such as your robots.txt and sitemap.xml?
- Your website exists in multiple languages; is that clear to search engines?
D. Authority
- How many domains point to your website?
- What is the quality of these domains?
- How does your website score compare to competitors?
E. Tools & Tracking
- Have you set up everything necessary to keep track of your SEO efforts and other data?
Why is an SEO audit important?
An audit is often still underestimated in the sense that 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 much more efficient than later. Problems that come to light later create unforeseen circumstances and hurt your time, resources, and budget. So if you want to avoid chaos and extra unforeseen costs, an SEO audit can undoubtedly help.How much time does an SEO audit take?
How long you spend on an audit strongly 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 of thousands of pages have a more complex structure, are often older, and have been edited by several people… which means that problems/errors arise more quickly. In addition, it just takes longer to go through the different pages. Then you have to consider websites in different languages with different content, possible subdomains, the CMS system (if that 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 aids in addressing 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 would still work, but for larger ones, absolutely not. So what do I do to analyze pages? On the one hand, I take samples, especially when it comes to 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 work easier, or should I say more efficient. PRO TIP: If you are not regularly involved in SEO, do not be guided solely by these SEO audit tools. A tool only becomes interesting once 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-do’s 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:1. SEMrush
![](https://inksem.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/semrush.png)
What is SEMrush?
SEMrush is probably the most used by SEO professionals as the top SEO tool. With its hundreds of features, it presents itself as an essential SEO audit and research tool. This American competitive analysis service has existed since 2008 and is one of the most comprehensive on the market. SemRush collects data from the results of different search engines and presents them as results. 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 in the SERP (results page) of websites positioned on the same keyword and observe the appearance of new 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.
2. Ahrefs
![](https://inksem.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/ahrefs.png)
What is Ahrefs?
Launched on the market in 2011, Ahrefs quickly established itself as an essential tool in natural referencing. One of its strong points is constantly controlling and verifying the links pointing to a website. However, the interest of Ahrefs is no longer limited to the overview of the backlinks of a website. This SEO tool is an excellent help for SEOs and web marketers.Why use Ahrefs?
The company offers a free version that allows you to use site features: Site Explorer (organic volume search, inbound link checker) and Site Audit to perform the 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 to identify popular keywords on Bing or platforms like Amazon or 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 it is reached
- Has an extensive index of backlinks.
3. Google Search Console
![](https://inksem.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/googlesearchconsole.png)
What is Google Search Console?
Search Console is Google’s analytics tool. This SEO management interface is offered free of charge by Google 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 the SEO traffic resulting from 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.
4. Ubersuggest
![](https://inksem.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/ubersuggest.png)
What is Ubersuggest?
Acquired in 2017 by Neil Patel, this application is a great tool to audit and help you optimize your SEO content. Indeed, Ubersuggest is a keyword generator that allows you to find short-tail keywords and long-tail expressions. It pulls up expressions and words related to a keyword and the most common user searches. Ubersuggest used to be free, but it’s not anymore! 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 on the targeted vital query: thanks to various metrics such as the volume of monthly searches, the estimated competition for paid and organic search, its cost per click;
- Check if the keyword is gaining or losing popularity or if it has seasonal trends;
- Access SEO statistics to analyze the competition: the SERP analysis provides access to the ranking of the 100 best sites positioned on the targeted keyword, the estimated traffic on each web page, with the authority score of the site and the number of shares on social networks;
- All via a clear, readable, and accessible interface.