7 Best SEO Tools For Auditing & Monitoring Rankings
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Are you using the best SEO tools to maximize your organic traffic? As digital marketers, it is important to understand and utilize the proper tools to best optimize for search engines!
We’ve gathered a list of the 7 best tools for auditing and monitoring your SEO rankings! These tools will help you identify the following:
Technical SEO
Domain Performance
Competitor Analysis
Keyword Research + Tracking
SEO Content Research
Site Speed Analysis
Mobile Friendliness
Rich Snippet Analysis
The tools can be used based on your business needs and goals. We’ll explain how the tools can benefit your overall SEO strategy and some tips and tricks to best ways to utilize each!
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Overview: Screaming Frog is a tool that crawls your entire website to improve onsite SEO. The tool can be used for both smaller and larger websites, which performs efficiently and allows digital marketers to find issues such as - but not limited to:
Broken links
Page titles and Meta descriptions
Meta keywords
Headings
Duplicate content
Missing alt tags
Image sizes
Pricing: Screaming Frog SEO Spider both have free and paid features. The free version has a crawl limit of 500 URLs, while the paid version offers unlimited crawl limit + additional features such as technical support, structured data validation, custom robot.txt, and more!
Ahrefs
Overview: Ahrefs is a popular tool that many digital marketers use to increase SEO performance. The tool is an all in one platform that can be used for different purposes. Ahrefs can provide the following insights - but not limited to:
Domain rating
Number of backlinks + Referring domains (tracks lost & gained overtime)
Keyword research + Rank tracking
Content analysis
Competitor analysis
Pricing: Ahrefs offer free learning materials before purchasing for a subscription. Monthly pricing may vary depending on your business needs and goals. You can choose between 4 different plans: Lite, Standard, Advanced, & Agency.
Semrush
Overview: Semrush is an alternative which offers similar functionality to Ahrefs. Digital marketers use the tool to make informed decisions, not limited to SEO:
Semrush provides insights to the following:
SEO, PPC, & SMM
Keyword Research
Competitive Research
Content Marketing
Campaign Management
Pricing: Semrush offers 3 different levels of subscription for small teams, growing businesses, and larger agencies. They also offer a free trial for each level of subscription for you to test! You can choose between Pro, Guru, and Business plans.
SEO Site Check Up
Overview: SEO Site Check Up is another tool that can efficiently audit your website, and check other technical issues on your website. The tool can provide reports such as:
Heading tags
Unfriendly SEO URLs
Missing Google Analytics integration
Missing structured data
Speed Test
URL Canonicalization
Titles + Meta descriptions
Recommendation: SEO Site Check Up is a powerful tool that can be used to compliment the insights you receive from Screaming Frog. The tool also provides a score /100 which indicates the strength of your website, in terms of the technical errors found.
Pricing: The tool offers a free version but is limited to basic reports. You can choose to subscribe and access additional features such as related keywords, competitor domains, broken links, and more!
There are 3 different types of subscriptions that you can choose from - Basic, Webmaster, & Professional.
Can’t decide so far?
If you want to compare the functions of the SEO tools above, you can check out a comparison chart that further explains how the tools stack up against each other!
Google Mobile Friendly Test
Overview: Google Mobile Friendly Test is a free tool that allows digital marketers to simply enter a URL, and find out if the website is “mobile friendly”. It analyzes the URL based on accessibility, and overall mobile responsiveness.
The tool also offers additional recommendations to improve mobile friendliness, after analyzing the URL.
Pricing: The Google Mobile Friendly test too is completely free for all users!
PageSpeed Insights
Overview: PageSpeed Insights is a free tool by Google. The tool provides insights to technical issues that are slowing down your website and recommends the best ways to improve speed. You can test for both mobile and desktop scores.
Recommendation: It is recommended to find the balance between mobile/desktop and ensure that both are optimized for a better user experience (which benefits SEO). Additionally, PageSpeed Insights is a great tool to use, along with the free Google Mobile Friendly Test, as it further specifies technical speed issues.
Pricing: PageSpeed Insights is completely free for all users!
Rich Results Test
Overview: The Rich Results Test tool performs very similar to the Google Mobile Friendly Test. You simply need to enter the URL to begin testing and view the rich snippet for the specified URL.
Recommendation: The tool can also be used to test if you’ve implemented structured data correctly on your website!
Pricing: The Rich Results testing tool is completely free for all users!
SEO Tools Summary
All In One SEO Tool
Tool Recommendation: Ahrefs & Semrush
On-Page + Technical SEO
Tool Recommendation: Screaming Frog SEO Spider
SEO Score + Technical/ On-page Issues
Tool Recommendation: SEO Site Check Up
Mobile Responsiveness
Tool Recommendation: Mobile Friendly Test
Website Speed Score + Insights
Tool Recommendation: PageSpeed Insights
Rich Snippets + Structured Data Test
Tool Recommendation: Rich Results Test
The tool recommendations above will help improve your SEO strategy, by providing insights to perform an SEO audit, competitor research, and monitor performance effectively!
Written by Jason Serafica
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