12 Best SEO Audit Tools & Software For 2024 (Top Picks)

Want to make sure your site is in the best shape to rank in the SERPs? Looking for an online SEO audit tool to help you find the SEO issues that might be holding you back? We’ve got you covered.

In this post, we’ll be looking at the best SEO audit tools and software solutions on the market. 

These tools will dig deep and comb through your site to uncover problems that might be compromising your performance in the search results, then show you how to fix them. 

We’ve included a mix of different types of the best SEO audit tools to make sure we’ve covered all bases.

The best SEO audit tools – summary

TL;DR:

  1. SE Ranking – Best SEO audit tool for most users. All-in-one SEO tool that’s surprisingly affordable. Includes report builder.
  2. Semrush – Best for enterprise customers. Priced higher than other tools but includes a huge number of tools covering SEO, content marketing, and PPC.
  3. SEO PowerSuite – Best budget SEO audit tool. Get their Website Auditor tool individually or as part of a bundle. Free version available. Downloadable software with free version.

#1 – SE Ranking

SE Ranking is our overall favorite SEO audit tool. It’s a surprisingly affordable all-in-one SEO platform that comes with a powerful website auditor, plus a rank tracker, backlink checker, on-page optimization tool, and keyword research tools.

SE Ranking Homepage

Despite its broad feature set, SE Ranking is surprisingly affordable. Plans start at a lower price than many of its competitors, so it’s great value for money.

The Website Audit tool is fantastic and makes it easy to find and fix website issues to send your rankings through the roof.

It’s lightning-fast and can crawl over a thousand pages in 2 minutes, so you can comb through huge websites in no time. Once it’s complete, it displays all crucial metrics (like total pages not indexed, overall health score, pages crawled, core web vitals, etc. ) in an easy-to-understand dashboard, with performance graphs to help visualize the most important data.

Alongside each issue identified, you’ll find full descriptions that explain it all in layman’s terms, and easy-to-follow quick fixes you can use to solve the problems.

Aside from full-site audits, you can also perform detailed audits to check specific pages, with laser-focused results.

You can share the results with your colleagues or clients using built-in reporting tools, and even have them sent straight to your email inbox.

What we particularly like is that you can go beyond site audits and optimize specific pages using the on-page SEO checker and content editor tools.

There’s lots more we could say about SE Ranking’s Website Audit tool (not to mention the other SEO tools it has to offer), but we don’t have time. If you want to learn more, we’d definitely recommend checking it out for yourself with a free trial.

Pricing

SE Ranking offers flexible pricing plans that start from $23.52/month. 

The cost depends on how often you want to check rankings, the length of your subscription period, the number of keywords you want to track, etc. You can use the calculator on their pricing page to work out a price based on your needs.

SE Ranking also offers a 14-day free trial with no credit card required.

Read our SE Ranking review.


#2 – Semrush

Semrush is the best SEO auditing solution for SEO professionals and enterprise customers. It’s a little more expensive than other options, but it comes with a suite of enterprise-level features and tools to help with more or less every aspect of your digital marketing campaigns.

SEMrush Homepage

Semrush comes with 50+ SEO, PPC, and content marketing tools in total. The Site Audit tool can be used to perform a comprehensive technical audit of your entire site, discover (and fix) on-site issues, and boost your ranking power.

It scans your website to check it against over 130 technical SEO issues. Then, it divides issues found into three categories based on their importance: errors, warnings, and notices. This enables you to prioritize your time and focus on those that need your immediate attention.

If you want to dig deep into a specific aspect of your site, you can run thematic reports. These reports provide deep, focused insights into areas like crawlability, site performance (loading speed, etc.), linking structure, multilingual performance (hreflang tags), etc.

You can automate your audit reports and let Semrush regularly monitor your site to make sure everything is moving in the right direction. Compare crawls to analyze the results of multiple SEO audits and determine whether the number of issues has increased or decreased over time.

For off-site SEO auditing, you can use Semrush’s Backlink Audit tool. This makes it easy to check through your link profile and identify and remove/disavow toxic links to avoid Google penalties.

And of course, we’ve hardly even scratched the surface of what Semrush can do. There are dozens of more tools to talk about, so make sure you check it out for yourself to discover everything it has to offer.

Pricing

You can sign up for a free account and get limited access to Semrush tools. Paid plans start from $129.95/month. A free trial is available for monthly plans.

Read our Semrush review.


#3 – SEO PowerSuite

SEO PowerSuite is a budget-friendly downloadable software solution that provides several powerful SEO tools in one package. 

SEO Powersuite Homepage

The free version of the tool is incredibly generous and premium versions are affordably priced, making it one of the best choices for small businesses and entrepreneurs.

SEO PowerSuite comes with four toolkits: a Website Auditor, Rank Tracker, SEO SpyGlass (backlink research tool), and LinkAssistant (for link building and management)

The Website Auditor is a full-featured app that provides on-page auditing, reporting, and technical SEO guides in one place. 

Just run the website analyzer and Website Auditor will crawl through your whole site and audit every resource: URLs, HTML, images, videos, JavaScript, etc. It works just like search engine spiders and lets you crawl through your site the same way bots from Google, Yahoo, or Bing do.

It quickly reveals issues affecting search engine indexation and rankings, like crawling issues, duplicate content, broken links, etc. For every issue, it tells you which pages are affected and how to fix them.

One of the coolest features is the Core Web Vitals module. This specifically audits SEO issues affecting the user experience and checks things like site speed and other performance indicators to provide you with a performance score. This is especially important in the wake of the Google Experience Update as issues with your Core Web Vitals can have a big impact on your ranking positions.

We also really liked the on-page SEO audit tool. It assesses the health of individual pages and checks how well optimized they are around the target keywords. It bases the analysis on web pages that are already ranking for that keyword and compares them to your own on-page stats to deliver custom optimization advice.

Pricing

You can download and use SEO PowerSuite for free with limited access to its tools. You can purchase a paid license to unlock premium benefits, which start from $299/year.


#4 – Serpstat

Serpstat is another powerful all-in-one SEO platform. It comes with 30 ‘growth hacking tools’ including a rank tracker, backlink analysis tool, keyword research tool, competitor research tool, and site audit tool.

Serpstat Homepage

The Site Audit tool is excellent and very easy to use. It scans your website for technical errors and labels them based on their severity as either high, medium, or low priority.

It also provides you with a Serpstat Domain Optimization (SD) score based on the number and severity of issues detected. This is Serpstat’s own metric to measure site health, and it’s a very reliable indicator of how well you’re doing and how much you still need to improve.

You can schedule automatic audits to be performed daily or weekly, or perform one manually at any time. Rather than wait around for it to finish, Serpstat will notify you in your inbox. White-label reports display all the important data clearly under your branding so you can share the results of your audit with clients.

The Page Audit tool is another cool feature. It lets you conduct an instant, express audit of a single page and check it against several ranking factors and SEO errors. It comes in handy if there’s a specific page that’s not ranking as well as you’d like it to in the SERPs, and you want to find out why.

Pricing

Serpstat plans start at $45/month when you sign up for 24 months or more upfront. You can try it out first with a free plan (limited access and credits).


#5 – Raven Tools

Raven Tools is an industry-leading SEO reporting tool with a built-in site-auditor.

Raven Tools Homepage

You can use it to run comprehensive audits of your site, create and share white-label SEO reports, research new backlink opportunities, conduct in-depth competitor research, and more.

The Site Auditor works like most of the other tools we’ve looked at so far: it quickly crawls through your site to find all the desktop and mobile SEO issues that might be hurting your ranking positions. 

Then, it generates a report showing your overall site health score and provides a checklist of all the issues found in order of importance. You can tick items off the list as you fix them.

But the reporting tools are where Raven Tools really shines. They’re a lot more visually appealing than other tools, with beautifully-visualized charts and graphs, and customizable widgets. You can easily integrate your audit KPIs into these marketing reports.

Pricing

Raven Tools plans start from $39/month when billed annually. You can get started with a 7-day free trial.


#6 – Surfer SEO

Surfer SEO is a popular content optimization platform that is well suited for SEO content audits.

Surfer SEO Homepage

Surfer takes a different approach to many other site auditing tools. Unlike its competitors, it doesn’t focus solely on finding and fixing technical, site-wide SEO issues (like duplicate content, crawling issues, site speed, etc.). 

Instead, it provides an in-depth analysis of your content structure and on-page ranking factors and provides a step-by-step guide on how to rank higher using data from your biggest SERP competitors.

For example, it might be that you’re failing to rank because of your content length. If so, Surfer will tell you how many words you need to add or remove to land in the sweet spot on each of your pages. 

Or, it might be that you’re struggling to rank because of your keyword density, page speed, or meta tags structure. Whatever the case may be, Surfer will let you know how to fix it. All you have to do is provide your URL and target keyword, and Surfer will do the rest.

Aside from content auditing, you can also use Surfer to automatically create winning article outlines and writing briefs, optimize your written work in the built-in text editor (with real-time feedback and suggestions), and more.

Pricing

Plans start from $89/month with annual discounts available. Try with a 7-day free trial of their features.

Read our Surfer SEO review.


#7 – Nightwatch

Nightwatch is best known as a keyword rank tracker. However, it also offers a powerful Site Audit tool.

Nightwatch Homepage

You can use Nightwatch to monitor and optimize your on-page SEO performance. Discover issues like broken links, error pages, and missing metadata, then learn how to fix them.

You can sort through your audit results with filters and prioritize your most important URLs, compare audits with historical data, set up automated white-labeled reports, and more.

However, the best thing about Nightwatch is its accurate local rank tracking capabilities. Once you’ve completed your site audit, you can track how it affects your search engine visibility by monitoring your daily rankings across all major search engines. 

Nightwatch has one of the most accurate rank trackers on the market and lets you track your organic positions in over 100,000 locations worldwide, down to the zip code level.

Pricing

Plans start at $32/month when billed annually. You can try out Nightwatch with a 14-day free trial.


#8 – JetOctopus

JetOctopus is a fast, affordable, technical SEO audit tool. It offers a powerful SaaS crawler and log analyzer with no usage limits.

JetOctopus Homepage

This is another advanced auditing tool built for serious SEOs. It has more of a learning curve than other tools and might not be the best choice for beginners, but if you want access to advanced features, it’s a great choice.

JetOctopus offers lightning-fast crawling speeds and can handle any page volume without slowing down your PC. You can get live logs with just 2 lines of code for your developers. Easy integration with Google Search Console means you can extend your crawling and log data with data from GSC.

With all that data at your fingertips, it can be tough to know where to start. Fortunately, JetOctopus helps you to handle big data easily with segments. 

Pricing

JetOctopus offers flexible pricing based on page volume, starting from $176/month.


#9 – Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is another leading website crawler used by thousands of SEO professionals and agencies. It helps you boost your on-site SEO with data extraction and SEO auditing.

Screaming Frog Homepage

You can use SEO Spider to crawl through websites of all sizes efficiently and gather the results in real-time. Find broken links, check your redirects are set up correctly, analyze your page title and metadata optimization, see URLs blocked by robots, and visualize your whole site architecture with cool visualizations.

You can download it and crawl up to 500 URLs for free, which makes it a great option for small websites on a tight budget.

Pricing

You can start out with the free version. A paid license costs £149/year.


#10 – SEOptimer

SEOptimer is a free SEO audit and reporting tool trusted by some of the world’s biggest brands.

SEOptimer Homepage

It’s super easy to use. Just visit the site and enter your URL to get your free website analysis. The free analysis is pretty comprehensive and gives you a bunch of on-page optimization recommendations, grades your page based on how well optimized it is, tells you what keywords you’re ranking for in different locations, and provides a bunch of other useful insights.

In addition to the auditing tool, SEOptimer also offers a bunch of other free SEO tools including a meta tag generator, keyword generator, sitemap generator, and more.

Pricing

You can try out SEOptimizer for free. When you’re ready to upgrade, paid plans start from $19/month.


#11 – Labrika

Labrika is an AI-led SEO toolset with a fantastic built-in SEO auditor.

Labrika Homepage

The site-auditor checks over 200+ ranking factors and feeds the results back to you in one ultra-actionable report.

The Content Optimizer is another cool feature. It’s powered by AI and helps you create content that ranks based on an analysis of the top 10 pages already ranking for the target keyword in the organic search results.

Pricing

Plans start at $15/month billed annually. A free trial is available.


#12 – Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool

Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool is a free SEO audit tool made by Google to help website owners implement structured data effectively.

Google Structured Data Testing Tool Homepage

You can start by using Google’s Rich Results test to see what kind of rich results your page could benefit from and preview how they’ll look on the search results page. This will help you to identify opportunities to boost your SERP visibility.

Once you’ve implemented schema markup, you can use the Schema Markup Validator to test it and make sure the structured data embedded in your web pages is valid. It’ll notify you of any issues so you can fix them.

Pricing

Both Google’s Rich Results Test and Schema Markup Validator are completely free to use.


Frequently asked questions

What is an SEO audit?

An SEO audit is a detailed inspection and analysis of your website’s search engine optimization. It aims to identify problems and errors that may be negatively impacting your website’s visibility on search engines like Google.

An SEO audit might include:

  • Checking that your site is being crawled and indexed correctly.
  • Analyzing content for on-page SEO problems and providing content optimization recommendations.
  • Making sure there’s no duplicate or thin content harming your SEO.
  • Checking that your site has a good user experience (mobile optimization, quick loading speed, etc.

Typically, an SEO audit is carried out with the help of an auditing tool (like those included in this list). These SEO audit tools are capable of scanning your site and checking hundreds of pages very quickly, then providing you with a detailed report showing the results and what needs to be done.

Why do SEO audits matter?

SEO audits are crucial to any SEO marketing strategy. Without auditing your site, you can’t be sure that there are no website issues holding you back from reaching your organic ranking potential. 

Once you carry out an SEO audit, you know what needs to be done to improve your site’s SEO health. After you’ve fixed any issues the audit throws up, you may see your average ranking position for your target keywords increase which, in turn, can help you drive more organic traffic and cash in on more sales opportunities.

Before running a site audit, it is important to ensure that you are tracking your target keywords so you can easily monitor fluctuations in rankings. Several of the tools in this list such as SE Ranking include this functionality. You can learn more in our post on rank tracking tools.

SE Ranking also has a report builder which means you could use it to create SEO reports that include a site audit report.

And if you’re wondering whether SEO, in general, is worth the effort, check out our SEO stats article

How do I do an SEO audit?

The first step is to choose an SEO auditing tool. You can’t go wrong with any of the options on this list, but we’d recommend SE Ranking.

Here’s how to do an SEO audit on SE Ranking. From the main dashboard, scroll down to your project and click the three dots next to it, then click Website Audit.

You can choose whether to run audits automatically or execute one manually. If you’ve already run an SEO audit before, you’ll see a green button that says Restart Audit. Click that, then Launch Audit to start.

You’ll see a progress bar showing how long the audit’s been running. If you’re auditing a huge site with thousands of pages, it can take a while to complete.

Once the audit has finished, you’ll see an overall ‘health score’ on the overview page that gives you an idea of how well optimized your site is at a glance.

Next, go to the Issue Report to see a complete breakdown of all the issues identified. Start with the most critical issues (those denoted with a red cross) and fix them. If you click on an issue, SE Ranking will explain it in more detail and provide instructions on how to fix it.

A lot of issues are fairly easy to fix. For example, if you use WordPress, some issues will just require a few tweaks to the settings of your WordPress SEO plugin.

How often should I perform an SEO audit?

There’s no strict rule about how frequently you should audit your website. However, a good rule of thumb is to perform a site audit at least once every 6 months. That’s the minimum, but if you have the time, once every quarter (or even bi-monthly) would be even better and enable you to catch SEO issues more quickly.

How long do SEO audits take?

The amount of time it will take you to complete an SEO audit depends on the size of your site. For smaller websites with only a few dozen pages, it might only take a minute or two. For huge websites with hundreds of thousands of pages, it could take a couple of hours or more.


Final thoughts

That concludes our roundup of the best SEO audit tools. All that’s left for you to do now is pick one and try it out! In case you need a reminder, here are our top three favorites:

  • SE Ranking is the best SEO audit tool for most users, all things considered. It’s an all-in-one, affordable SEO toolkit with built-in auditing and a powerful report builder.
  • Semrush is the best choice for enterprise customers. It’s another all-in-one solution that includes a huge number of tools to help with SEO, PPC, and content marketing. It offers the very best, more advanced features on the market—but it doesn’t come cheap.
  • SEO PowerSuite is a budget-friendly, downloadable SEO audit software solution that offers excellent value for money. You can download the Website Auditor tool individually or get access to it as part of the PowerSuite bundle.

We hope you found something suitable for your needs in this list. Good luck!


Disclosure: If you buy through links on our site, we may make a commission. This helps to support the running of Startup Bonsai.