My favorite SEO audit tools

From time to time I’m asked what tools I recommend for SEO and technical audits. So:

Screaming Frog SEO Spider – https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

• If you want to gather raw data about a site to slice-and-dice in your favorite data processing tools, it’s hard to beat Screaming Frog. Deeply configurable and provides enormous amounts of data about your on-site SEO implementation.

• Runs on Windows, Linux, Mac

• Free for small to mid-sized sites (up to 500 URLs), or $260/year for unlimited and to enable advanced features

SEMrush – https://www.semrush.com/

• Perhaps the most detailed SEO auditing tool available, will find everything from broken links to duplicate page titles and meta descriptions, plus competitive SEO monitoring, research, backlink audits, and more

• A major value is its huge backlinks database and competition research tools

• Not as user-friendly as Moz, but goes deeper

• If you have no other SEO tool, this is the one to have

• Starts at $130/month, and it’s a bargain for the data you get

Moz – https://moz.com

• Moz offers a number of super useful free tools, especially Keyword Explorer and Open Site Explorer.

• Moz’s “Moz Pro” paid service adds crawl tests, rank tracker, and ongoing campaign tools

• Much more user-friendly than SEMrush, with great at-a-glance dashboard charts.

• Oh, yeah, it’ll tell you about broken links too

• Starts at $100/month

Google Search Console – https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

• The tool formerly known as “Google Webmaster Tools”

• The straight dope on search traffic leading to your site

• Tells you exactly which URLs Google thinks are broken

• It’s free

Readable – https://readable.com

• Tells you whether your content is easily readable by humans

• Forces you to take a hard look at your own writing quality 😭

• This is a page-level tool, not site-level like the others on the list

• It’s cheap!

Taking my own medicine, rewriting my blog summary.

There are lots of other tools out there; this is far from an exhaustive list. But these are my go-to tools to start most SEO audits.