The ever-changing search engine algorithms are a mystery, and digital marketers, entrepreneurs, and individuals know to keep up with the changes rather than try and solve its mysteries.
It is an unspoken rule to those who have been around in the world of online marketing that no matter how strategic you are with your website and content creation, there is a good chance that you will experience a drop in rankings at some point due to SEO errors.
It’s challenging to defend yourself from Search Engine mishaps, and an SEO audit is pivotal. Consider an SEO audit ready for eventualities. You can get back on track with the right audit process should a Google algorithm update hit you. So, a free SEO audit tool works like a parachute and insurance rolled into one.
What is a Free SEO Audit Tool?
A free SEO audit tool is a website or software that allows you to input a URL and receive a report on the website’s SEO performance. The report will include an analysis of the website’s technical SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO.
An SEO audit aims to identify issues preventing a website from ranking well on search engine results pages (SERPs). By fixing these issues, a website can improve its visibility and attract more traffic. Many free SEO audit tools are available online, and they can be a valuable resource for website owners looking to improve their site’s ranking.
What is an SEO Audit?
The word audit alone can fill you with dread immediately, but in the world of SEO, there’s nothing better for you and your site. An SEO audit involves searching through every part of your website to identify search engine issues and opportunities. With over 200 ranking signals, an SEO audit is definitely a must. (Backlinko, 2021)
The most common practice of using a free SEO audit tool is to pull all website data from Google Analytics and Google Search Console. However, there are now other tools that specialise in various website elements that prove to be extremely helpful in SEO audits.
Through SEO audit, you get to determine the ranking signals that you have and the areas that you need to improve on.
The good news? You can perform it by yourself. The problem is that if you are not a seasoned search engine expert, you might not be able to interpret the data and take the necessary actions for your website’s SEO.
Fortunately, there are free SEO audits that you can get from trusted SEO agencies today. But wait, wouldn’t it be better that you do it all by yourself? Isn’t that more cost-effective, considering that there are now many tools you can use?
Here are some of the free SEO audit tools that are available today. Keep in mind that even though these tools are available, they have their limitations. This means that you won’t be able to get the most comprehensive SEO audit that your website needs.
Free SEO Audit Tools
Listed below are free SEO audit tools you can use:
Google Analytics
You can do almost everything with Google Analytics—you can analyse the trends and your site audience. It also allows you to check your site speed, geographical data, and more. Using the tool requires you to add a code to your website, and the whole process will be automated.
Google Analytics is a reliable website SEO checker and one of the best SEO tools you can use today.
SEMRush
SEMRush is a robust research and auditing tool that has a free version. Its Side Audit tool can crawl through your web pages to flag issues regarding your AMP implementation, JavaScript and CSS, internal linking, meta tags, SEO content, HTTPS security protocols, website crawlability, and loading speeds.
Their website SEO checker can scan for over 100 technical and SEO errors and, at the same time, run thematic reports. With every audit, your website will be assigned an overall health score and scores for other aspects.
On the other hand, the technical SEO audit will show a list of top issues that must be fixed. Additionally, there are notes on how to fix the issues. However, the instructions are not so detailed, which means further research is required.
The free version is good, but if you want to unlock the full potential of the SEO audit tool, you can choose from three pricing plans.
Google Search Console (GSC)
Google Search Console is another Google platform where site owners can monitor their site’s performance in the search engine. It features a few SEO audit tools to help users resolve technical SEO issues.
One of the things you can get from the Google Search Console is that it will tell you whether Google’s web crawlers can access your site. Then, the technical SEO audit tool will have several reports that will provide detailed insights into important search factors. The SEO report you get from GSC can help you further improve your search engine rankings today.
The Core Web Vitals SEO report, will show you the pages that are based on real-world data. There is also a mobile usability report that involves analysing your mobile website.
This is a free SEO site audit tool. To use Google Search Console, you only need to verify the ownership of your site.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is a highly efficient tool that extracts and audits data to fix SEO issues and improve on-page SEO, including incoming and outgoing links, meta tags, and more. It can scan small and large web pages while letting you view results in real-time.
With Screaming Frog, you can check all essential SEO factors, such as broken links, duplicate content, redirects, meta descriptions, and more. You can also analyse metadata and site architecture with it. It lets you see URLs blocked by robots.txt, meta robots, and nofollow tags.
One of the best things about this software is that you can schedule crawls to run at certain intervals and automatically export the data everywhere you like. You can also connect Google Analytics, and Google Search Console accounts to gain better insights into your reports.
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider has a free version with a 500-URL crawl limit, as well as feature limits.
Bing Webmaster Tools
Although Google is the top search engine today, there are other search engines out there you should consider. One of them is Bing. Bing can be a valuable source of relevant traffic, which is why it is worth exploring.
Bing Webmaster Tools is a platform owned by Microsoft that allows users to manage and track the performance of their website in the search engine. Its Site Scan tool can crawl the site on-demand to check for common SEO issues. The tool will generate a detailed report page to view the results.
Although Bing Webmaster Tools doesn’t provide as much detail as other SEO tools, it still delivers valuable insights. Plus, it’s free to use, and once you sign up, you can immediately start tracking your site’s SEO score and health once you connect your website or web page.
SEO Analyzer
Part of the Ubersuggest SEO software by Neil Patel, SEO Analyzer is a site audit tool with an easy-to-use interface that will let you create projects for your website. Although it won’t allow you to schedule or filter your crawls like the other tools we discussed, you can start them quickly by entering the URL and clicking a search button.
The tool also has a section for site speed, showing you the average time it takes for your top pages to load. It comes with a free version, limited to three daily searches.
WooRank
WooRank can provide you with important information, along with tips to fix those problems on your website. One of the tool’s best features is the ‘Top Priorities’ section which tells you which issues to address first. May it be your internal links, broken links, meta descriptions, or other elements, WooRank is a reliable SEO auditing tool that can help improve your SEO score and increase your search traffic.
Another excellent feature is the social share-ability pane that contains social network data, including the number of comments, likes, shares, and bookmarks.
It also has a Chrome Extension that will deliver detailed reports with only a simple click on the icon. WooRank has a free version that is valid for 14 days.
It is one of the best SEO tools today used by small business owners and other website owners with a huge website.
Serpstat
Analyse your website using this all-in-one SEO platform through Serpstat’s audit report. The audit report delivers a list of website technical issues prioritised based on severity.
Using the tool, you can find issues, estimate optimisation levels, track growth dynamics, and get valuable recommendations to speed up your site pages.
It can perform an on-page analysis and technical SEO audits that can help you get an overview of the health of your web page.
Serpstat comes with a free version, in which users will be allowed up to ten requests per day of Site Audit, along with other features, such as Backlink Analysis.
Seobility
Crawl up to 1,000 pages with Seobility. This is one of the best SEO tools that will give you a thorough analysis to uncover crucial SEO issues. One of the best things about the tool is its Content Report feature, which provides a list of pages with content-related SEO issues.
The tool has a free version that lets you analyse one domain with one crawler.
Now, you are probably thinking, “With all of these free tools, why do I need to even hire an SEO agency to do it for me?”
These tools allow website owners to ensure their keyword rankings are high, and most have a backlink checker that checks backlinks pointing to various data points. They will also check for content quality on all the pages you have on your website, and they are all completely free.
Why Choose an SEO Agency To Conduct SEO Audits for You
Now, you are probably thinking, “With all of these free tools, why do I need to hire an SEO agency to do it for me?”
You can indeed access all of these free SEO audit tools by yourself. The thing is, do you know exactly what you are looking for? Or even if you do, do you know how to address every issue it finds?
One of the reasons for choosing an SEO agency to perform the SEO audit for you is that you don’t need to worry about anything at all, and you only need to find a credible SEO company that you think will suit your needs.
That’s why researching and comparing digital marketing companies are important. You need to know your options, sit with two to three companies, and from there, you can come up with a decision on which company will deliver your desired results.
How to Choose the Best SEO Company For Your Business
Once you have chosen an SEO company, they will take everything, and you don’t need to worry about anything. As you can see, most free SEO tools we listed in this post are limited.
On the other hand, when you let digital agencies do it for you, you can guarantee that they have access to all the best tools to give you a detailed report about your site.
Sure, you might think it won’t hurt to invest in paid versions of the tools, but it still comes down to—do you know what you’re doing? Unless you take someone in-house to do it for you, it could be one of the things you will dread every quarter, every month, or how frequently you want to conduct the SEO audit analysis.
The Benefits of SEO Audits
You can get many benefits when you conduct an SEO audit. Some of these are:
Improve Site Performance
Having your website up and running isn’t the end all be all. If you want your website to generate revenue, leads, and many more, you need to be improving it constantly. That’s where SEO audits come to play.
With an SEO audit, you get important information about any technical issues on your website. These technical issues may harm the user experience and derail what you have worked hard for online. Therefore, it’s essential to conduct regular SEO audits to ensure everything is working okay.
After all, Google loves a healthy website, and how your site performs is a significant ranking factor.
Determine the Keywords That You are Ranking For on Search Engines
Keyword research and analysis are part of your search engine optimisation strategies. But did you know you can tell which keywords you rank for through an SEO audit?
An SEO audit provides invaluable information about your organic presence and keyword rankings online. You can better optimise your content when you know precisely what you are ranking for and even what you’re not ranking for, and you can better optimise your content.
Boost Usability
Making your website look good is one of the goals, especially since it plays a role in your website’s usability. With an SEO audit, you can improve your site’s usability as it can help identify functional, navigational or structural weaknesses of your website. Spotting these issues will help you act on them fast to boost your site’s usability and improve customer experience.
This involves web development issues and improvements, structured data, and web design to internal links and page titles.
Make Better Content
An SEO audit doesn’t only involve the technical side of your website, but it can also analyse the quality of your content through various data such as missing keywords, content length, headers, and many more.
Increase Customer Satisfaction
It’s hard to have users come to your website when it doesn’t function as it should. You can minimise this risk by removing any website issues that can compromise the user experience on the website.
A good-working website will make users spend more time on your website. And also, the longer the time they spend on the website, the better it is for your website and overall rankings.
What Should Be Included in Your SEO Audit Report
There has always been an ongoing debate on what a website audit report should contain. Simply put, a site audit must include a complete picture of the website and all issues that may compromise the site’s performance.
So, what should be included in your SEO audit report?
As much as possible, your SEO audit report should have:
– Competitor profiles
– Site speed
– Site health
– Content duplication
– Visual experience
– Navigation
– Demographic Data
– Recommended actions
– Core Web Vitals performance
– Backlinks and referring pages
– On-page elements
– Crawl waste and crawl budget
The Different Types of SEO Audits
Did you know that there are actually different types of SEO audits, and all of them are important? What are these SEO audit types?
Technical SEO Audit
The technical SEO audit deals with the inner workings of your web page. Consider it the behind-the-scenes part that will let search engines crawl and index web pages in search of newly-updated content.
A technical SEO audit will allow you to see the state of your web page as it checks for any issues related to crawling, indexing, website speed, site and page structure, redirections and more.
When search engines are able to crawl and index your website effectively, the more likely your website will rank higher on the search engine results.
On-Page SEO Audit
Your on-page elements are displayed on your web pages—they are what people see when they arrive on your website. They could be in the form of texts, videos, images, links, and more. Search engines assess your on-page SEO to determine how valuable they are or what searchers would find on your website.
Your on-page SEO elements are your keywords, headings, content, meta tags, and more. An SEO audit will ensure all of these elements are in place and correctly formatted.
Backlink Audit
Backlinks are an important part of search engine optimisation. Having authoritative and relevant links on your website, the better it will perform on the search engine results pages.
A backlink audit ensures that all links pointing to and from your site are high quality. In most cases, the data of your competitors are used here to contextualise your backlink profile.
Local SEO Audit
If you run a brick-and-mortar business or a service-based business, then local SEO is essential for you. When you have a local SEO campaign running, conducting a local SEO audit is more important than ever.
Your Google My Business (GMB) page is the heart of your local SEO audit, and the citations, links, and reviews come next.
The Bottomline
A completely free SEO audit will give you a quick overview of the current state of your website. From there, you will be able to identify problems and get actionable recommendations to improve your SEO score and your overall website performance.
Get in touch with Evolving Digital today and get a comprehensive and free SEO audit.
FAQs
Are SEO audits worth it?
Yes, they are. SEO audits offer great support and actionable insights that will boost the overall performance of your website. It will also help you identify problems and get actionable recommendations that can increase your SEO results. Consider it reliable technical support that will help you achieve your goals.
How can I check my website ranking for free?
You can check your website ranking for free by using free SEO tools online. The ones we listed in this post can provide you with valuable information regarding your site’s current rankings.
Which SEO tool is used for SEO audit?
There are various SEO tools used for SEO audits. Whether you are planning to do competitor research, or it could be for your eCommerce, or perhaps, you want to enhance your title tags, page titles, or structured data, you will find just the right tool for that. Most of these tools also come with custom filters that will make your SEO audits a lot easier; plus, some of them are completely free.
How do I do a basic SEO audit?
A basic SEO audit should begin with a review of your website’s structure and architecture. This includes assessing your site’s navigation, URL structure, and overall organisation.
Once you have a good understanding of your website’s structure, you can then begin to evaluate your content. This means looking at both the quality and quantity of your site’s content, as well as assessing how well it is optimised for your target keywords.
After reviewing your content, you should then turn your attention to your website’s backlink profile. This involves conducting a link analysis to identify any low-quality or toxic links that could be harming your site’s ranking.
Once you have finished your audit, you should then create a plan of action to address any issues that you uncovered. By following these steps, you can ensure that your website is well-optimized and ready to rank highly on the search results.
Reference list:
- Google’s 200 ranking factors: The Complete List (2022), Backlinko. Available at: https://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors (Accessed: October 27, 2022).
- Mailchimp. (n.d.). SERPS: Everything you need to know about search engine results pages. Mailchimp Glossary. Retrieved October 27, 2022, from https://mailchimp.com/en-au/marketing-glossary/serp/
