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SEO audit tools work to keep your website as effective as possible for your users. Whether you run a website offering products to consumers or are a service oriented B2B, conducting regular audits is essential to assuring your website content is relevant for the customer you’re trying to target. SEO audits work by creating an inventory of your website content, so you can become self-aware of any gaps, as well as the types of content that perform well. The insights you garner during an SEO audit will ultimately help you tailor content better to your target user, improving your conversion rates.
Originally, the only way to conduct a content audit was by hand (or by eye and spreadsheet). However, today, a wide range of SEO audit tools are available to make the job easier. Whether you are looking to improve your on-page SEO or analyze your competition, there is a tool that can help. Here are some of our favorites and how they can improve your user experience.
Steps of an SEO Audit
First, it’s important to understand how different SEO audit tools can serve different purposes. Tools can address one of four different analysis areas:
- Technical SEO (how your website performs and responds to updates, for example)
- Competitor Analysis (how you stack up against the competition)
- On-Page SEO (factors that drive performance on your own website)
- Off-Page SEO (factors that drive performance off your website, i.e. backlinking)
We’re breaking down tools in each of the four areas. A formal SEO audit will take an in-depth look at each of the four content areas and will turn the data into actionable insights that can drive your brand forward.
Best Technical SEO Tool: Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Screaming Frog consistently earns top marks for usability and insight generation that drive business action. Use it to:
- Identify duplicate content, 404s, redirects, and other performance issues that affect your ranking.
- Map the internal structure of your site so you can optimize through sitemapping
- Find the most and least used pages within your site
- Identify things that could be slowing loading times, such as large images
Best Competitor Analysis Tool: SEMrush
SEMrush is a perennial favorite among SEO and website analysis gurus. With features that aid in keyword analysis, SERP tracking, and competitor discovery, you can effectively outsmart the competition, and SEMrush adds new features all the time. Currently, you can use it to:
- See how keyword rankings change over time and device types
- Find the pages that drive the most traffic to competitor’s websites
- Use a Keyword Gap Analysis Tool to find keywords that you don’t rank for, but your competitors do
- Track your competitor’s performance across both Google and Bing
- Analyze search volume and performance of keywords across 115 countries
Best On-Page SEO Tool: SEMrush and Screaming Frog SEO Spider (Tie)
When it comes to analyzing On-Page SEO, there is no clear winner between SEMrush and Screaming Frog. The former recently launched its On-Page SEO Checker, which provides actionable insights for improving elements in body copy, meta tags, duplicate content, and relevancy.
On the other hand, Screaming Frog also produces a wealth of information that can help drive your brand forward. These include:
- Optimization of all your metadata
- Identification of “thin” content and issues with page loading
- Discovery of both internal and external broken page links that affect the user experience
- Help optimize your eCommerce site structure – for example, by using a new page depth tool to identify product and category pages that are buried in the site’s structure and hence difficult for a user to find
Best Off-Page SEO Tool: Ahrefs
Ahref stands out from the pack because of its unrivaled 12 trillion link index and content navigator. It also has a new site audit tool, launched in its most recent iteration. Some of its most notable features include:
- Domain comparison for backlink data and social media
- Assessing competitor link profiles for product reviews and PR outreach insights
- Content gap analysis to assess keywords your competition ranks for
- Reverse engineering of competitor linking strategies
- Monitoring of new media mentions of backlinks
The best SEO tools combine a high level of detail with a variety of tools that allow SEO experts to develop insights for the companies they serve. Though it may be tempting to try the tools for yourself, they are really only useful if you can turn them into action that creates more conversion opportunities for your brand. Vizion Interactive continually monitors the performance of SEO audit tools and leverages the best new features for your business success. A comprehensive SEO audit can help you find out where your website is performing well, as well as where you could use a little help. Analysis of your competition keep you ahead of the curve. For more information about our SEO audit services, please contact us today.
At Vizion Interactive, we have the expertise, experience, and enthusiasm to get results and keep clients happy! Learn more about how our SEO Audits, Local Listing Management, Website Redesign Consulting, and B2B digital marketing services can increase sales and boost your ROI. But don’t just take our word for it, check out what our clients have to say, along with our case studies.
