Best SEO Audit Tools

Semrush is the best SEO audit tool, closely followed by Ahrefs Site Audit Tool. These are our top recommendations for clarity into your website’s search engine visibility and technical performance. Yet other software programs may suit you better depending on your exact SEO (search engine optimization) strategy and business goals.

These tools can be used by you or your team to conduct SEO audits. However, we’ll explain later in the article why working with SEO professionals, who use these tools on a daily basis to audit sites, is often the best option.

We’ll also give an overview of the highest quality SEO audit tools money can buy – as well as the free SEO audit tools worth signing up for. So if you’re desperate to diagnose and improve your domain’s SERP (search engine results page) rankings, look no further than this list.

Best SEO Audit Tool: Summary

We’ve over a decade in advising businesses on search engine optimization strategy – so we know what it takes for a website to get seen online. Often the first step of an SEO overhaul is a thorough SEO audit.

Here’s the best SEO site audit tools, based on our research:

1. Semrush Site Audit: Best for Automating Site Crawls

Industry-grade SEO tool Semrush is the gold standard of site audits. It runs a website crawl faster than similar programs we’ve used and delivers plain-English results, so webmasters can easily see what needs fixing.

Some of its handy automation features include scheduling audits and getting email alerts once audits are complete. That saves you manually checking your browser tabs to see when they’re ready to review. Unlike Screaming Frog, you can use it all in-browser and don’t need to download anything onto your computer.

Pricing: With a free account you can run a technical audit that crawls up to 100 URLs. You’ll get an interactive report on how to fix a range of basic issues discovered. Paid plans start from $119.95 per month and greatly increase the number of pages you can crawl (up to 100,000 on the Pro plan, 300,000 on the Guru plan or a million on the Business plan).

2. Ahrefs Site Audit Tool: Best for Clear Visualization

A favorite of SEO professionals, the Ahrefs site audit tool runs a crawl of your site to uncover technical and on-page issues. The tool checks your website against over a hundred common SEO issues. Results are presented in a color-coded dashboard, which is handy for those who prefer clear visuals when analyzing data. It’s pretty accessible for beginners because for each issue you can click to view instructions on how to fix it.

Pricing: It’s free to use for your own site if you connect Google Search Console or upload certain HTML files. Or you can crawl restricted domains by subscribing to the Advanced plan from $399 plus taxes per month.

3. Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool: Best for In-Depth Analytics

If you want incredibly detailed information about any and all of the URLs on your site, Screaming Frog Spider is your sharpshooter. As well as standard technical info about your URLs (such as status code and indexability), you’ll also get insight into canonicals, crawl depth, the size of the page and even the word count. This range of specific data makes the Spider tool flexible and useful for masterful content tweaking.

Pricing: You can crawl up to 500 URLs for free, or pay for an annual subscription ($209 per year) to access features like save crawls and compare them. If you’re just looking for a site audit tool then this is a far more cost-effective solution than Ahrefs.

4. Lumar Analyze (fka Deepcrawl): Best for Site Audit Customizations

Rebranded from Deepcrawl as of September 2022, Lumar.io has broadened its remit to include wider site performance analysis, and not just technical SEO metrics. For webmasters who are fairly experienced in SEO, the Lumar Analyze tool gives a great breadth of audit options. Throughout the site audit process, you’re able to specify just the kind of data you’re looking for.

The platform includes a nifty tool for crawling by industry (eg ecommerce, financial services, travel and hospitality, plus more). There’s a good number of options for crawl preferences, including the option to assess URLs from analytics tools such as Adobe Analytics or Google Analytics. You can even specify the crawl speed (up to 450 URLS per second) versus a maximum number of URLs. This means SEO managers can balance their time against the level of site data they need.

Pricing: Lumar does custom pricing based on a business’ particular needs. However, users can expect to pay in the ballpark of $150-$200 per month for Lumar Analyze connected to Google Search Console and Analytics, plus Data Explorer, Log File Manual Upload as well as Segmentation for 500,000 URLs.

5. SISTRIX: Best for Visibility Data

Analytics can seem confusing, especially as different SEO tools offer wide-ranging results that don’t always match up. SISTRIX is a reliable SEO audit tool that provides visibility metrics for your websites. The “visibility index” is calculated using the database of Google’s top 100 search results SISTRIX crawls weekly.

A major use case for this tool is competitor analysis, as you’ll easily determine which other domains rank for your target keywords. You can also search a domain’s visibility by country, giving you even better insight into international markets. This is particularly relevant if you’re expanding into new territories.

The user interface is bold, colorful, and clear so you shouldn’t have much trouble finding the data you’re after.

Pricing: For $99 per month, you can crawl 30,000 URLs over three projects; upgrade to 500,000 URLs over 15 projects for $199 per month; 2 million URLs for $349 per month or 4 million URLs for $599 per month.

6. Sitebulb Website Auditor: Best for SEO Beginners

As it’s quite new, Sitebulb benefits from occupying a more specific niche than existing SEO audit tools. While it’s not a traditional crawler, the website auditing tool identifies website issues in a simple-to-understand way. Piggy-backing off Google Chromium, it runs through your browser to render web pages.

Appreciating the difficulty on communicating SEO issues to wider business stakeholders, the Sitebulb team invented “Crawl Maps” to depict audit results in diagram form. And they’ll plan a tree for every new free trial user.

Pricing: A 14-day free trial, or one user can get a basic SEO audit (10,000 URLs) for $135 per year. To get an advanced audit (up to 2,000,000 URLs), more tips, audit comparison and history it’s $378 per year for one user.

7. Pi Datametrics SEO Platform: Best for Cannibalization Tracking

A partner of Lumar.io, Pi Datametrics SEO Platform is a slightly less well-known SEO audit tool. It’ll help you keep track of organic rankings, technical SEO issues and competitor analysis. It’s also great for heading off keyword cannibalization issues – which is when your web pages are competing over the same keywords – that could earn penalties from Google.

It’s easier to find the cannibalization tool in Pi Datametrics’ platform than it is on Ahrefs, for instance. The frequency of the platform’s data updates put it ahead of competitors in the hunt for cannibal pages. Due to its hefty computation, it may be overkill for most SEO projects.

Pricing: It’s on the pricier end, with subscription starting at $1,500 per month. This puts it squarely in the enterprise-only client market, as Pi Datametrics SEO Platform definitely isn’t affordable for small businesses and freelancers.

8. Content King SEO Auditing: Best for Ongoing Site Monitoring

Another cloud-based SEO audit tool, Content King’s USP is constantly feeding data into live monitoring reports for you to view whenever you have time. This gives website managers on-demand access to vital analytics without the downtime between domain crawls.

It’s more dynamic than competitors such as Semrush and Ahrefs which both provide a snapshot of your site’s health at a particular point in time. Content King’s user interface actually feels more like playing a strategy game than any other SEO tool on this list. In fact, the cartoon King character guides you through the tutorial. So there’s an enjoyable whimsy element, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Pricing: Costs are charged based on the number of pages your site has (excluding 404s), rather than the frequency of crawls. This stands in contrast to monthly-credit-based systems such as Semrush. Pricing is on request, and there’s a free trial.

9. Botify Analytics: Best for ecommerce SEO Site Audit

Whereas many of the audit tools on this list are aimed squarely at SEO experts, Botify caters to business leaders in the ecommerce sector. That means it’s on the more user-friendly side, as well as providing analysis for improving revenue-critical pages that you might not find so readily using other tools. Owners of larger retail websites will benefit most from the conversion and engagement data tools found on Botify. It’s a secret weapon for ecommerce SEO strategy.

Pricing: Botify offers three packages at various price points, depending on the number of URLs you need auditing. As they’re aimed at enterprise level, you’re looking at minimum $50,000 investment per year.

Best Free or White Label SEO Audit Tools

When it comes to SEO audit tools, it’s not just the paid ones you should have in your back pocket. Affordable SEO tools are just as valid, though you must be careful which ones you choose. As the big dog in the search engine park, Google maintains several essential SEO tools – you absolutely must get these.

Just because they are open-source does not mean free SEO audit tools are any less valuable to your technical SEO analysis. On the contrary, free tools are a core component of many paid programs; they run on data fed using APIs. In this way, they can be thought of as white label SEO audit tools.

Here are our recommendations for the best free or white label SEO audit tools:

1. Google Search Console

Accurately identify bugs in your SEO set-up that prevent Google from ranking your website higher on SERPs. With this tool, you can quickly find out if your site is struggling with spam, indexing errors or usability issues. You can also check your performance on core web vitals. The best part is you know you can rely on Google to convey accurate indexing information, more than any other third-party tool.

2. Bing Site Scan

Bing powers around 4% of global search engine market share, as it also powers Yahoo Search. It shouldn’t be neglected, despite Google’s pre-eminence. Under Bing’s Webmaster Tools is a site scan crawler that reveals technical SEO flaws. Combine this with Bing’s SEO reports for a more well-rounded view of your domains’ search engine viability.

Google is not the be-all and end-all. Ironically, though, you can sign up for Bing’s SEO audit tool access by connecting your Google Search Console account. Of course, you can always manually submit your sitemap to Bing through Webmaster Tools so it crawls your domain.

3. Lighthouse Chrome Extension

A nifty yet powerful little tool to diagnose issues with SEO metrics on any domain. It identifies issues with site speed and loading (to name a few) on desktop or simulated on mobile, and works best if you run it using Incognito mode on Google Chrome. After a few short minutes you’ll get a color-coded report with actionable insights into website performance, best practices, SEO and accessibility.

If you can’t read the results very clearly in the small window, try Google PageSpeed Insights for a bigger display.

Should I Get Professional SEO Support?

Enlisting the services of an SEO firm is something we strongly recommend for many reasons. We’ll even offer you our SEO services cost comparison tool for free to help you find one for the best price.

Firstly, the SEO landscape is always changing. It’s difficult to stay on top of unless you know where to find the latest industry news and how to interpret it. Google algorithm updates are just one of the ever-changing goal posts of website rankings.

Moreover, SEO isn’t a one-off thing, it takes consistent efforts over long periods of time. It never stops. Remember, you could lose user traffic to any web page at any time, without notice. This could be for a rainbow of reasons, including a competitor suddenly overtaking you, or your website gaining a penalty from a search engine.

SEO is getting harder and harder, but it’s also getting more important to businesses for survival. This is particularly true in the fields of ecommerce, consultancy and local businesses. Fortunately, our unique SEO service provider tool makes it easy to find the right professional. All you have to do is let us know the rough details of your project and we’ll match you with the SEO expert your business truly needs.