The following are 3 of our favorite, go-to tools when performing a technical site audit; check them out!
1. Screaming Frog
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool is a website crawler that allows you to crawl website URLs (up to 500 for free!) and obtain key on-site data that will help you understand where your SEO might be lacking. Here are some of it’s features and capabilities:
- Find Broken Links: crawl a website URL and immediately find broken links which can be exported to an external file for fixing
- Discover Duplicate Data: uncover duplicate data within page titles, descriptions and headings
- Fix Page Titles & Meta Data: analyze page titles and meta descriptions and fix those that are too short or too long, or duplicates
- Generate XML sitemaps: create XML sitemaps with advanced configuration options
- Review Robots: find URLs blocked by robots.txt or tag directives
- Review Redirects: audit a list of temporary and permanent redirects
Screaming Frog is perfect for analyzing medium to large sites, where manually checking every page would be extremely labour intensive (or nearly impossible!) and where you can easily miss a redirect, meta refresh or duplicate page issue. All of the data is exportable, so you can easily view, analyze and filter the crawl data as it’s gathered and updated continuously in the program’s user interface.
And even if you need to crawl more than 500 pages (which is the maximum for the free license), the paid version is less than $200 annually for unlimited crawls.
2. SEMrush Site Audit
SEMrush’s SEO analysis tool offers another way to crawl your website at any time and review comprehensive technical audit results. For $69.95/month on their Pro plan, you can crawl up to 100,000 pages, 500 keywords and receive up to 10,000 results on an analytics report.
After an audit has been run, SEMrush generates an online report that details where potential issues could be, with an option to export the data. They also have a really cool comparative feature, which compares historical data to current changes, and whether or not the changes have had a positive impact on your SEO results. The tool also allows you to set up audit campaigns, where you can run an SEO-test of your site and make the following improvements:
- Add tags where they are missing
- Optimize internal and external links
- Edit titles, meta descriptions and HTML tags unique, keyword-rich, and search-engine friendly
- Correct broken links and broken images
- Find duplicate content pages
- Detect and remove or redirect error pages
These SEO analysis tools check issues that are related to crawlability, content, images, links, accessibility and coding. All issues found are divided into three groups depending on their severity: errors, warnings, and notices, so that you can prioritize your SEO issues and decide what to fix first.
3. Google Search Engine Console
Previously known as Google Webmaster Tools, the Search Engine Console is a totally free tool that helps you identify issues with your site, and continually keep it as optimized as possible. And don’t you want to learn from the Masters? The Console offers free webmaster courses through its online academy to teach users the quality and design guidelines to follow to ensure higher rankings on the Google SERPs. In addition, the Search Engine Console will help you find and address the following site issues:
- HTML improvements for missing or duplicate title and meta data
- Crawl errors, from broken links, etc.
- Malware issues
- Reviewing SiteLinks (identify who links to your site, who links to your site the most, and which content is linked the most)
- Monitoring search queries and top keywords
All three of these tools offer different features at different cost and time investments, and you may find only one is the best option for your website and your business. When choosing one (or all three!) you should consider the size of your website (and the number of URLs that need to be crawled), the size and capacity of your team to make site fixes, and the insights or goals you wish to achieve from the data, and from making SEO improvements.
Is there another technical audit tool that you find particularly useful, that we haven’t included in our list?
And if you’ve recently completed a technical audit and are still unhappy with the results you’re getting from your current site, it might be time for you to think about growth-driven design. To learn more, download a copy of our new eBook, An Introduction to Growth-Driven Design:
