What are SEO Auditing Tools
SEO auditing and monitoring tools let you check and maintain your on-page SEO standards. Affiliate marketers, with their dependence on Google search and SEO, should closely monitor their sites health with these free tools.
The tools range from website-based performance analyzing tools — to pc&mac applications that will do a complete site crawl and technical analysis. We did not include paid tools like Ahref or SEMrush – they also have some analysis tools for doing site audits. Nor did we include tools like WooRank which requires a credit card for the trial (though WooRank is a great tool). There are lots of tools in this area. We looked at scores and these came out as our favorites.
So if you are an affiliate or blogger looking for a free SEO checker or a free SEO report read on!
These are free tools – some people just can’t justify $1,200 a year for premium tools. Budgeting-wise $99/mo here, $79/mo there can really add up quickly. That money may be better spent on content or outreach.
Why Audit?
Auditing is your way of testing your site for compliance and quality with Googles standards as well as industry best practices.
Google is essentially auditing on every crawl. Your new articles are ranked based on performance and on-page quality.
What Matters for SEO
It all matters.
Somethings uncovered in an audit likely matter more than others. Heavily weighted on-page optimization items include; performance, mobile support, links and more. Here’s a really great infographic that will help understand weighting factors.
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Courtesy of Zippy.com. Select the image for the full content.
Are Premium Tools Better
Sure.
If you have the budget for a full license to some of the freemium products here you will have more capabilities and larger volumes to work with. If you have ahrefs or Semrush you will get some of this data.
Our Top 14 Free Tools
We looked at a number of tools that were free or had free trials with no credit card needed. Many of the tools provide “scores” – ignore this. These are subjective and subject to bias. Our test site ranged from 67-98!
Many of these companies sell services to improve performance or SEO. Just focus on the data. We categorize the tools.
- Crawlers – Tools that crawl and analyze your site
- Performance – Tools that measure your sites speed and responsiveness.
- Google – The Google mothership’s toolset
- WordPress – Tools for WordPress users
Go to our affiliate SEO guide for related SEO tips..
1– Site Crawler and Structure Analysis
These are the most widely used general purpose audit tools.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
SEO Spider is a powerful desktop application that will crawl your entire website and look for problems. The free version does up to 500 pages. If you want to do a deep scan of your website, looking for markup related issues Screaming Frog is invaluable.
Beam Us Up
Is very much like Screaming Frog. If you use these two tools when doing an audit of your site you will be sure to have a full picture. Beam us up is only available for Windows at this time.
SEOoptimizer
This does a very thorough audit and provides its findings. It will show the usual tag status but also a backlink profile and Moz score.
Lipperhey
Lipperhey also adds keywords and competition to its auditing and analysis tool. It does a very deep scan of your site and will take a few minutes. It reports all status code issues and meta descriptions as you would expect. One Interesting feature was the link distance. It is good to know if your content is orphaned from the navigation menus. They provide the usual analysis plus an SEO overview. Pages are ordered by importance to the site and their SEO “health” — nice feature.
Neil Patel SEO Analyzer
Neil Patel is hard to ignore given his success. His SEO tool provides SEO score, Speed Score, Backlinks and Pages Indexed. You can get much more information from something like Lipperhey but a visit to Neil Patel’s sie is always a worthwhile trip.
SEOMator
SEOmator had the usual reporting on structure, header tags and meta description, 404’s etc. But one interesting analysis was Content Quality. It reported the content by page length and checked for duplicate content.
Varvy’s SEO Overview Tool
A free online SEO audit tool, One thing that Vavry identified, that other tools did not, was a lack of inter-page navigation for some parts of the tested website.
A good datapoint overlooked by others.
2 — Site Speed and Mobile Responsiveness
GT Metrix
GT Metrix is one of the go-to sources for testing your site’s performance. It tests similar items to Google PageSpeed though often different results.
The waterfall feature helps you see where you have delays in your site loading.
Dareboost
Dareboost is much like GT Metrix but they give a lot more flexibility and options for testing.
If you make a free account you can change your Google region, target browser, the target device and more.
4 — Google
Analytics
Google Analytics – look at your site the ways Google does. You need to add the analytics tracking code to monitor.
Web Pagespeed Insights
Googles performance testing and mobility checking service.
Google Search Console
Google will list errors it finds when crawling your site. Your site and all permutations like www and non-SSL versions should be registered here.
3 — WordPress SEO Tools
Yoast SEO for WordPress Plugin
If you have WordPress Yoast is the most popular plugin for SEO. It will manage your sitemap, redirects and more.
All in one SEO Pack
If you are looking for a Yoast alternative, look no further than the original SEO kit for WordPress. Does everything Yoast does and also free.
Summary
If you care about SEO search traffic, auditing your website is really a requirement. It is much better to find and resolve any issues quickly. Yes, Google will report some issues to you in your webmaster account but not all. Your content may be ranked lower for unreported reasons like site performance.
With the number of free tools available there is no reason not keep your site and content as healthy as possible.