If you’re like most people, the concept of an “audit” makes you cringe.
But if you’re an SEO professional – or the self-appointed person responsible for a website – you also know it’s an essential part of working with sites, especially as they grow to hundreds, if not thousands, followed by tens of thousands of pages.
We’ve used a lot of SEO audit tools as a part of the work we do at ScaleMath over the years. So, to help you pick the right ones for your needs, we’ve shortlisted our favorites along with why:
- Sitebulb
- Screaming Frog
- Ahrefs
- SE Ranking
- Semrush
- ContentKing
Before we dive in, there’s one important thing to note:
SEO audits are point-in-time snapshots of your site.
It’s crucial to remember this as many fail to realize this and, therefore rely far more on the data they gather from audits than they should.
At the time of writing, we’re building Workover. Currently pre-launch and only used internally at ScaleMath, this is a solution that will include things like:
- Easy integrations with your favorite CMS (WordPress, Webflow, and more)
- Real-time SEO auditing and monitoring: up-to-date crawling of your site so you always have the latest data you can actually take action on.
- And much, much more…
If you have any questions or want to be an early adopted, please get in touch with us at [email protected].
The best SEO audit tools
A quick note on how we evaluate and test software: All software recommendations we make are based on real, hands-on experience – often over the course of months (and, in the case of this post, years) with each of the tools we recommend.
Sitebulb
Sitebulb is our go-to solution for any time we need to run a point-in-time audit. It’s a beautifully designed solution that you can run locally on your own machine.
We’ve been using it as our primary desktop crawling solution for the past few years and still highly recommend it.
Pricing: Sitebulb has two main pricing plans: Lite and Pro. The Lite plan costs $13.50 per month for audits under 10,000 URLs, and the Pro plan costs $35 per month for audits up to 500,000 URLs. Beyond this, they also have an enterprise offering called Sitebulb Cloud, which supports up to 10 million URLs per audit.
Best suited for: Virtually anyone looking to crawl a site. Super simple to get started.
Learn more about Sitebulb here.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs’ Site Audit tool is a comprehensive and powerful solution for identifying and addressing website technical SEO issues. This tool is part of the Ahrefs Webmaster Tools suite and allows users to scan their websites for over 170 common SEO problems. The audit reports provide a thorough analysis without requiring advanced SEO knowledge or complex installation processes.
Recently, Ahrefs released its AI Content Helper, which can automatically evaluate published or draft articles and compare them against top-ranking posts for any search intent. It also provides recommendations on what can be improved, but it is still under development, and some features are currently unavailable.
Pricing: Ahrefs offers four pricing plans. The Lite tier is the cheapest plan, at $129/month, and is suitable for small businesses and hobby projects. The Standard tier costs $249/month and is best for freelance SEOs and consultants.
The Advanced tier costs $449/month and is primarily meant for in-house marketing teams. Finally, the Enterprise tier starts at $14,990/year and provides API access to Ahrefs’ database.
Best suited for: Ahrefs is best suited for SEO professionals and businesses requiring advanced keyword research tools, competitor analysis, and backlink tracking. It does not provide a free plan, which makes it unsuitable for hobby projects.
Ahrefs’ Site Audit tool provides a clear overview of a website’s SEO performance through its Health Score. This score is based on the number and severity of errors found during the audit, giving users an immediate sense of their site’s overall SEO health.
The dashboard then breaks down all identified issues in the All Issues Overview report, categorizing each problem by importance and showing how many pages are affected. This level of detail, combined with comprehensive issue descriptions and actionable fix recommendations, enables users to prioritize their SEO efforts effectively and address the most critical problems first.
Beyond technical SEO, the Ahrefs site audit tool allows users to examine backlinks pointing to their site, complete with metrics such as Domain Rating (DR) and estimated organic traffic; this provides a broader perspective on their site’s authority and visibility. The tool also allows users to see which keywords their site ranks for, offering a glimpse into their competitive standing in search results.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a powerful and versatile website crawler designed for technical SEO audits. It is an industry-leading tool trusted by SEO professionals and agencies worldwide, and offers a wide range of features to help improve on-site SEO by identifying and analyzing common issues.
Unlike most other tools listed in this post, this is not cloud-based – you can download and install it on your computer, and is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Pricing: The Free version allows users to crawl up to 500 URLs at no cost and provides basic functionality for small websites or those wanting to test the tool. The Paid Version is priced at £199 per year and offers unlimited URL crawling and a comprehensive suite of advanced features, including JavaScript rendering, crawl configuration, scheduling, custom extraction, integration with various analytics tools, and technical support.
Best for: Screaming Frog is suitable for many users, from individual website owners and small businesses to large enterprises and SEO agencies.
Screaming Frog offers a free version that allows users to crawl up to 500 URLs, while the paid version (£199 per year) removes this limit and unlocks advanced features. The tool excels at finding broken links, auditing redirects, analyzing page titles and metadata, discovering duplicate content, and reviewing robots’ directives. It also provides powerful extraction capabilities using XPath, CSS Path, or regex, allowing users to collect specific data from web pages.
Advanced users may be happy to know that Screaming Frog SEO Spider goes beyond basic crawling by offering integrations with Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and PageSpeed Insights APIs. This lets users fetch performance and user data for all crawled URLs, providing deeper insights into a website’s SEO health.
SE Ranking
SE Ranking’s Website Audit tool is a powerful solution for conducting thorough technical SEO audits. One of its key features is the ability to analyze up to 150,000 pages per project, which makes it suitable for both small and large websites. The audit tool provides a clear and intuitive dashboard that overviews a site’s health, including crucial metrics such as crawled pages, URLs found, top issues, Core Web Vitals, and an overall health score. This high-level summary allows users to quickly assess the state of a website’s SEO and prioritize areas for improvement.
Pricing: SE Ranking offers an Essential plan ($65.00 per month) for individual SEO professionals. This plan provides one manager seat and five projects, and 500 keywords are tracked daily.
The Pro plan is positioned as the “Agencies’ Choice” at $119.00 per month. It expands capacity to three manager seats, thirty projects, and 2,000 daily tracked keywords.
For larger operations, the Business plan starts at $259.00 per month and provides five manager seats, unlimited projects, and 5,000 daily tracked keywords.
Best for: SE Ranking’s flexible pricing and feature set make it particularly appealing to growing agencies and in-house marketing teams who need scalable SEO solutions that can adapt to their expanding client base or increasing project complexity.
But that’s not all. The Website Audit tool goes beyond surface-level analysis by offering over 120 metrics for an in-depth examination of a site’s technical SEO. It covers many factors, including HTTP status codes, page depth, server response times, redirects, link attributes, meta robot tags, etc.
The audit report also provides detailed insights into specific elements such as images, CSS, and JavaScript files, helping users optimize these resources for better performance. SE Ranking’s audit tool also offers custom crawler settings that can tailor audits to focus on specific areas of concern or exclude irrelevant checks.
Like some other tools we discussed above, SE Ranking’s Website Audit tool can track progress by comparing metrics over time. Users can generate reports demonstrating improvements and achievements to compare audit results from different periods. This feature is particularly valuable for agencies and SEO professionals who need to showcase their work to clients.
Learn more about SE Ranking here.
Semrush
The Semrush Site Audit tool has become one of the most popular tools in the SEO auditing industry. It offers a comprehensive solution for identifying and addressing technical SEO issues. It scans websites for over 140 potential problems, ranging from crawlability issues to HTTPS implementation errors. This breadth of analysis ensures that users can get a holistic view of their site’s health.
Pricing: It offers three subscription plans with increasing capabilities and features that cater to a range of users, from small teams to large enterprises. The monthly prices range from $139.95 to $5,000 and above.
Best suited for: Semrush is best suited for businesses and digital marketers who regularly work on multiple projects and want data-driven insights to guide their SEO strategies.
One key strength of Semrush’s Site Audit tool is its ability to prioritize issues based on their severity and impact. By categorizing problems into errors, warnings, and notices, users can focus their efforts on the most critical areas first.
Additionally, its ability to compare crawls over time provides valuable insights and can help you analyze which SEO strategies work best. People also like its ability to generate detailed reports on various aspects of technical SEO, including crawlability, site performance, internal linking, and international SEO considerations.
Learn more about Site Auditing in Semrush here.
ContentKing
ContentKing (now Conductor Website Monitoring’s SEO Auditing tool) used to offer several key features that made it a powerful solution for maximizing search engine visibility.
However, since the acquisition of the platform, it is unfortunately no longer a solution we can wholeheartedly recommend as we no longer use it.
However, if you’re willing to get on a sales call and pay egregious enterprise contracts, Conductor Website Monitoring provides a continuous, real-time overview of on-page SEO performance. This 24/7 auditing approach allows users to discover issues and changes as they happen rather than waiting for a scheduled crawl to complete.
Pricing: ContentKing is a paid platform without publicly available pricing structure information.
Best for: It is well suited for enterprise clients with no regard for budget.
Additionally, the user interface includes built-in reference material that explains each issue and why it needs to be addressed, making it accessible even to team members without extensive SEO training.
Learn more about ContentKing here.
After Action Report – Get Ready to Run Your Next Audit
We hope you’ve enjoyed our shortlist of recommended SEO auditing tools.
Don’t forget to consider some of Google’s first-party SEO tooling, including:
- Google Search Console
- Google Analytics
- PageSpeed Insights
They’re tools in our arsenal, and that alone should be enough of a reason for them to be in yours, too. 😉
👋 Looking for input from a team that’s worked with category-leading companies – possibly like yours? We’re here and always happy to help! Use the contact widget in the bottom right-hand corner to get in touch or apply to work with us here.
Let's build better together.
