Everyone wants their website to rank on search engines and for potential customers to find them. However, if your website is not ranking the way you want it to, then there is probably something wrong. This is why you need an SEO audit conducted. There are plenty of free SEO audit tools out there to help you find the issues, opportunities, and improve your website's visibility.
How We Tested These Tools
SEO professionals from Aphonic Solutions always work with sites built on WordPress, Shopify, Laravel, or any other custom-built platforms since they encounter broken links, indexing, canonicalization, slow page speed, duplicate content, and other technical SEO related issues during maintenance or optimization of such websites. Consequently, in putting together this list of the best SEO tools, we have taken into account many aspects including ease of use, technical SEO capabilities, reporting capability, free version, and affordability.
| Tool | Best For | Free Version | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Search Console | Technical SEO & Performance Tracking | Yes | 9.5/10 |
| Ahrefs Webmaster Tools | Backlink Analysis & Site Audits | Yes | 9/10 |
| SEMrush Site Audit | Website Health Monitoring | Limited | 8.5/10 |
| Ubersuggest | Beginners & Content SEO | Limited | 8/10 |
| Screaming Frog SEO Spider | Advanced Technical SEO Audits | Up to 500 URLs | 9/10 |
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is one of the most popular SEO tools. It provides insights into how Google finds and displays your website in search. It offers reporting on everything you need that impacts Google ranking. Google Search Console offers insights into challenges that your website might be facing. From indexing errors, crawl issues, to mobile usability issues. These issues can be resolved before they affect your rankings. Apart from technical checks, Search Console provides performance data like clicks, impressions and average position. This allows you to see your website's overall performance, which pages are driving the most traffic, and which pages might need attention.
Key Features of Google Search Console
- Performance Reports (clicks, impressions, CTR)
- Index Coverage
- Mobile Usability
- Link Reports
Who Google Search Console is Best For: SEO specialists, site administrators and business owners.
Our Experience
Google Search Console is one of the first tools that we use to get an idea about a website’s technical SEO performance. It helps us detect pages with indexing/crawl errors, performance issues, mobile usability errors, and low organic traffic in SERPs.
Rating: 9.5/10
Who Needs It: Website owners, agencies, bloggers, and businesses that want to boost traffic from Google.
Ahrefs Webmaster Tools
Ahrefs is another trusted platform in SEO. Also, its free Webmaster Tools version offers various features even without a paid plan. It helps you monitor your site’s overall SEO performance by highlighting broken links, technical problems, and keyword performance trends.
Key Features of Ahrefs Webmaster Tools
- Complete site audits to detect technical SEO challenges
- Backlink monitoring and analysis
- Insights into organic keyword rankings
- Basic checks for site security and loading speed
Who Ahrefs is Best For: Website owners who want a professional, reliable SEO audit tool at no cost.
Our experience
Ahrefs Webmaster Tools is the tool that we use for performing backlink audit and technical SEO audit. This tool allows our specialists to manage the list of referring domains, analyze guest post backlinks and find out technical SEO problems.
Rating: 9/10
Website owners/managers/Marketers/Experts/b2b: Website owners and marketers who would like to improve their link building and technical SEO strategies in Google.
SEMrush Site Audit (Free Plan)
SEO is incomplete without SEMrush. It is one of the most reliable tools in the SEO industry. SEMrush’s free version can provide substantial value & features. With the free plan, you can audit up to 100 pages on your site. The tool crawls your website, checks for technical errors, errors that you should be aware of and some suggestions for improvement; you will be guided in what to fix first! This helps you prioritize the fixes that are going to have the biggest impact on performance and rankings.
Key Features of SEMrush Site Audit
- Checks for on-page SEO improvements
- Crawlability issues
- All HTTPS setup and security checking
- Conducting site performance and speed checking
Who SEMrush is Best For: Website owners, bloggers or small businesses with a website of under 100 pages.
Our experience
SEMrush is our choice for fixing the most common issues on the websites. Website owners can use SEMrush for creating the website SEO maintenance plan and technical SEO optimization strategy.
Rating: 8.5/10
Website owners/managers/Marketers/Experts/b2b: Small businesses, bloggers, and website owners that want to outsource SEO maintenance tasks and technical SEO issues detection.
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is a great tool for marketers, bloggers, and small businesses. It is powerful and beginner-friendly. Ubersuggest makes it easy to understand what’s working on your site and what needs improvement.
Key Features of Ubersuggest
- SEO Audit with Performance score
- SEO keyword ideas to incorporate into your content strategy
- Competitor Research to review the ranked performance of your domain
- Backlink insights for the abilities to backlink to in the future
Who Ubersuggest is Best For: New marketers and website owners looking for a beginner-friendly, easy-to-use, all-in-one tool for SEO.
Our experience
Ubersuggest is our SEO tool for conducting an in-depth content SEO analysis and finding issues that need to be fixed on the website. With Ubersuggest, we scan sites for broken links, redirect chains, and other technical SEO issues. However, Ubersuggest’s content SEO audit feature allows suggesting high-volume keywords that could be integrated into the website’s content strategy. Therefore, Ubersuggest’s most valuable features are keyword research and content SEO audit.
Rating: 8/10
Website owners/managers/Marketers/Experts/b2b: SEO newbies, bloggers, and small business owners.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
If you are looking for more technical aspects of SEO, Screaming Frog is one of the best SEO audit tools. The free plan allows you to crawl 500 URLs, and also offers an overview of your site's structure, and shows you issues you should be concerned about with site performance. This tool helps you find broken links, metadata missing and in-depth information that can make the difference in your rankings.
Key Features of Screaming Frog SEO Spider
- Finds broken links on your website
- Check the accuracy of redirects
- Finds duplicate content
- Deeply analyzes page titles and meta descriptions
Who Screaming Frog SEO Spider Best For: Experienced users who seek valuable data analysis based SEO auditing tool.
Our Experience
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a must-have for technical SEO auditing. It allows our specialists to detect broken links, redirects, thin/duplicate content pages, canonicalization issues, and other problems on websites with less than 500 URLs.
Score: 9/10
For Whom: SEO experts, developers, and webmasters with a high degree of proficiency.
Common SEO Issues These Tools Can Help You Identify
- Broken internal/external links
- Missing/duplicate meta titles/descriptions
- Duplicate, thin, or low-quality content
- Indexing/crawl errors
- Slow page speed
- Poor mobile usability
- Redirect chains
- Missing image alt tags
- Poor website structure
- HTTPS/website security issues
Frequently Asked Questions
Related Resources
- Top 5 Website Speed Optimization Tools
- Top 5 Free Tools to Check Website Speed
- Top 5 Digital Marketing Tools to Generate More Leads
- Top 5 Tools to Monitor Website Uptime
- Top 5 AI Tools for Productivity
Our Recommendation
When thinking about SEO for your website, Google Search Console becomes an essential tool especially if you are new in the realm of SEO. The tool becomes a means through which a direct communication channel can be created between website owners and Google. Screaming Frog SEO Spider becomes useful for technical SEO audits while Ahrefs Webmaster Tools become helpful for analysis of backlink profile and referring domains. In most cases, our SEO professionals at Aphonic Solutions make use of all these three tools for audit of websites.