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The following free SEO audit tools are an important part of your website’s ability to rank well in the search engines. It can’t just be assumed that everything is in working order and that search engines will love your website. Problems with pages can easily slip through the cracks as your website evolves.
Even the most established sites need an overhaul to make sure that they comply with Google’s quality standards. The rules and expectations of SEO are constantly changing, which means that you need to stay on top of your website’s technical aspects.
There are some basic features and fundamentals to consider with your website. What happens when your visitors navigate to the site? Can they find content in the best location or are they faced with complicated navigation and 404 errors? The quality of the content is also important to keep users engaged with your site.
This means the quality of the writing, the relevance of the information, the images used and the accuracy of data. You will also want to consider your use of keywords, your meta descriptions and the way you share your content.
This is sometimes easier said than done. There are two options available for website owners – either bring in a team to perform a comprehensive SEO audit of your website or get your own in-house team to use these tools and do it themselves.
The DIY approach is more appealing for those that want the cheapest, most simple option. However, there are some downsides. Your own staff might not have the expertise to carry out a full technical assessment of the site.
However, there are some simple free SEO tools that you can use for a reliable and basic approach. For example, don’t underestimate how helpful a simple spreadsheet can be. You can organise all your pages and keep track of current data and changes that are made. This permanent record might be useful in the future when you need to undo any changes.
Here are some other free SEO tools that you can use to make things easier.
Google Analytics is a great starting point for any SEO audit because this is the search engine you need to impress most. This analytical tool helps you to see the content that brings in the most traffic. You can get a better impression of what works and what doesn’t in order to improve your site’s performance.
Another great feature about Google Analytics is that you can export data into a spreadsheet. This is a time-saving device that leads to a more informative report about your website.
Screaming Frog is a user-friendly tool that can create a crawl report of your website. It will organise the pages with crucial data on factors such as the page title, status code, word count and other important data. This automated crawler helps flag any key technical issues.
For example, you can see duplicate URLs, issues with the keywords in the titles and any disproportionate word counts.
Backlinks are an important factor when analysing your SEO performance. You need to know where your backlinks are coming from and the reputation of the incoming websites. This isn’t something that you can do without help from a third party tool.
SEO Moz Tools gives you a clear list of backlinks for all of the content on your site. This means that you now have a way of comparing the performance of different pages to see which ones are performing well and which ones aren’t.
The more data that you have on these backlinks and their origin, the better prepared you are to improve your site. Again, this is a user-friendly, time-saving tool that any website can benefit from.
This final online tool focuses on the keywords used and the way that your website’s content ranks. Keyword stuffing and over-optimisation is a big problem for many sites and Google will penalise accordingly.
The SEMRush full report goes into detail about the use of organic keywords and their relation to the pages on your website. As with the information on the backlinks, the more you know about a page’s performance, the better equipped you are to deal with any issues.
The four tools above are a great way to get started when analysing key SEO components: keywords, backlinks, content data and traffic. Any new website owner can take advantage of these free SEO audit tools to make some basic improvements to their website.
If you do so, but find you need further help and advice, contact SEO Advantage. We can help you take your SEO audit to the next level.
