Top 16 SEO audit tools to improve your natural referencing
Using the best SEO (Search Engine Optimization) audit tools allows you to carry out a precise analysis of all websites: your own and those of your competitors. Indispensable for SEOs and marketing managers, these SEO tools enable you to carry out a technical SEO audit, obtain a site's performance, identify its strengths and weaknesses, see which keywords the site is positioned for and whether it is an authority in its field by observing incoming links.
Let's compare specialised software for optimising your website's natural referencing in search engine results:
Tools for carrying out a technical audit of your website
The technical SEO audit consists of observing the technical criteria of the website. A well-designed website responds to a number of technical factors. It is necessary to use a number of SEO tools to check each point in order to identify weak points that need to be improved.
Screaming Frog to explore pages like Google
Exploring pages like Google's robots means crawling your website. With its SEO Spider tool, Screaming Frog is a crawler that gives you essential information about the path taken by a robot.
For each page, you can detect the following technical errors in particular:
- Title tags not filled in,
- 404 errors
- elements that prevent pages from being indexed,
- blocking URL parameters,
- broken links,
- non-compliance with the canonical URL principle,
- etc.
Here's an image of Sreaming Frog SEO Spider:
Screaming Frog is a free SEO audit tool for up to 500 URLs, but with limited functionality.
Screaming Frog prices: currently £149 per year for a licence that can be used on one computer, or around €170 to get unlimited use of all the features and check that all your pages are indexable.
Oncrawl for observing robot behaviour
When do Google's robots visit my site? How long do they spend on my pages? How many pages have they seen? How have they behaved on my site? There are so many different Google crawls (desktop bot, mobile bot) that it would take too much time to search for all this information by hand.
Oncrawl provides you with all the answers: by launching a log analysis, you can observe and analyse the behaviour of a Googlebot. This will tell you whether your site is technically up to the task: if the robots manage to visit all the pages on your site and stay there for a long time, that's a pretty good sign.
If not, the aim is to find the obstacles in the way of the robots and remove them. Price of the Oncrawl tool: from €39 per month to €1,900 per month, with a 14-day free trial.
Here is an image of the Oncrawl interface:
PageSpeed Insights to test site performance
In many sectors, website traffic is generated via mobile phones. If a visitor arrives on your site and has to wait 30 seconds before seeing the content of the page, they will have left long before... and so will your conversion rate!
It is therefore crucial to check the loading time of a web page and all the other elements that make up the performance of a site: cache, elements, speed, etc.
Google's PageSpeed Insights tool enables you to test the performance of your web pages and identify areas for improvement, including for display on mobile devices.
Price of PageSpeed Insights: analysis of website performance is free.
Google's structured data test tool
Google's structured data tag test toollets you test the display of microdata or "rich snippets / rich results" in Google search engine results.
By previewing the search result in Google (the SERP), you can check that the data has been properly integrated into the tags. If the display is not correct or the structured data does not appear, there is a technical error.
Price: free.
SEO tools for analysing page ranking
When analysing the performance of a website, you should also take into account the referencing of the web pages on your site. While you're naturally thinking about the famous keywords and positioning tracking, you also need to check the relevance of the semantics used, the internal links and any duplication of content that could potentially penalise natural referencing.
Cocon.se to obtain the site's internal mesh
Cocon.se is an SEO audit tool that looks at the structure of your site: it is very useful and practical for visualising your site's internal mesh, i.e. the way in which links are made between pages.
If you are applying the semantic cocoon technique to improve your site's natural referencing, this software is recommended: you can identify links that should not exist, isolated pages, pages that should not be linked together, etc.
Cocon.se price: in the form of credits.
An example of how to visualise the structure of a well-organised site in the form of a circular map:
Ranxplorer to identify positioned keywords
Ranxplorer is a formidable SEO tool for tracking your positions on every important keyword, as well as for keyword research.
Ranxplorer software lets you :
- see all the keywords on which your site is positioned,
- see which keywords a particular page is positioned on,
- see the traffic generated by a keyword,
- get ideas for keywords to target the most relevant ones.
You get the keywords that are positioned, but also the pages that are positioned on several keywords, such as long tail keywords, based on the largest database of results available in France (3 billion).
Here's a video on how one SEO uses Ranxplorer:
Ranxplorer price: from €19.90 per month per user.
Visiblis for checking the semantic affinity of pages
Visiblis is one of the most powerful tools on the market for analysing the semantic relevance of a web page in relation to the keyword on which it is supposed to be positioned in the SERPs.
Visiblis is also widely used by web copywriters to :
- Identify the vocabulary linked to a keyword,
- see which words are more important than others,
- optimise your text for natural referencing,
- optimise your title and meta description.
Find out more about Visiblis in the following video:
Visiblis prices: from €10 per month per user.
Kill Duplicate to find duplicate content, everywhere!
When we say everywhere, we mean absolutely everywhere on the web.
With Kill Duplicate, you can identify :
- your own duplicate content on another page of your site (internal content),
- your duplicate content on a third-party site (external content),
- content from another site duplicated on your site.
Copying and pasting the same content onto several pages of your site, or having its content stolen from you, is an absolute evil for your natural referencing! Google penalises sites that do this, and demands unique and original content that responds to the user's search intention for each page - that's the rule.
You must therefore ensure that each text and each page title is unique, and watch out for duplication by a malicious third-party site. Kill Duplicate is the ideal tool for detecting duplicate content, saving you precious time.
Discover Kill Duplicate in the following video:
Price of Kill Duplicate: from €19 per month for 100 URLS and 400 monthly scans.
Tools for checking authority links pointing to your domain
Some third-party sites link to web pages on your site. These inbound links can help or harm a site's natural referencing, reputation and authority in its subject area.
Understanding the importance of backlinks for SEO
These external links - known as backlinks - are of quality when the sites are related to the subject of your site: this is known as the Trust Flow. Another factor of popularity to be taken into account is the volume of links pointing to your site, known as Citation Flow: the more quality links your site has, the higher its Trust Flow and Citation Flow.
Since evil is everywhere, you need to monitor the links pointing to your site to guard against negative SEO, disavow low-quality links and vary the anchors on which links are made, otherwise you risk being penalised by Google for over-optimisation and seeing your page's natural ranking fall considerably.
Majestic SEO for analysing the quality of inbound links
Majestic SEO allows you to sift through all your inbound links and see which pages on your site these backlinks point to.
Majestic SEO is renowned for its reliability and the quality of the information it provides, such as :
- URLs of pages linking to your site,
- referring domains
- link anchors,
- the Trust Flow for your domain, indicating the total quality of the backlinks obtained,
- Citation Flow with the volume of links,
- etc.
Here is an example of a website audit using the Majestic tool:
Majestic price: from €46.99 per month per user.
Alternative to Majestic: Ahref
Google Search Console for disavowing toxic links
Have you identified the external links that are damaging your natural search engine optimisation? Now you need to disavow these links: the process involves telling Google that you are denouncing these links. To disavow these links, you need to use Google Search Console: list the URLs to be disavowed in a .txt file and download it online from the dedicated page.
The tutorial below may help you to disavow links:
Price: free.
The best SEO software for analysing competing sites
A website audit would not be complete without analysing competitor sites to discover their keyword strategy and identify the competitive context on each of them. Here are 2 SEO audit tools to spy on your competitors!
SEObserver to see the competition on a keyword
Here is an example of an SEO audit carried out with SEObserver to obtain the level of competition on the query "tarte au chocolat" searched for more than 14,000 times per month:
There are a number of relevant indicators provided by the SEObserver tool to assess the competitive context for the query:
- the first 10 pages positioned on this keyword,
- The Trust Flow (TF) for each page positioned and its associated domain,
- the number of referring domains (Citation Flow ) for each page positioned and its associated domain (RD),
- the number of organic keywords and the organic traffic generated by each page, both taken from SEMrush statistics.
We put ourselves in the shoes of the "lapopottedemanue.com" site to see if it was powerful enough to rank for the query "chocolate tart" by entering the URL to compare the site's power with that of competing sites.
Result: the context is far too competitive. The positioned domains have obtained many backlinks and benefit from a much higher Trust Flow.
Prices for SEObserver: from €99 per month for one user.
Ranxplorer for finding keyword ideas from competitors
As we saw above, Ranxplorer can be used to identify which keywords your site is positioned for. But Ranxplorer doesn't stop there... The great strength of the tool lies in its ability to spy on competitor sites and identify the sites that attract the most traffic.
Example of website analysis
Let's take the example of the "lapopottedemanue.com" site and see how we can find keywords on competing sites!
In the image below, we have entered the URL of the lapopottedemanue.com site. The Ranxplorer tool identifies competing sites:
We go to the "missed keywords" tab, select marmiton.org as competitor 1 and compare.
In the image below, we obtain all the keywords for which the site marmiton.org is positioned, but for which the site lapopottedemanue.com is not positioned:
We can export the list of keywords and draw on ideas for keywords that are consistent with the site's theme to attract more traffic.
Bonus: read our tutorial on how to spy on your competitors' sites by exploiting the full potential of Ranxplorer.
Other free SEO audit tools
Free SEO of a website is not 100% possible. However, you can use a free SEO tool to cross-reference the data provided by Google's free tools.
Google Analytics to measure conversions and more
You need a website analysis grid with relevant metrics and indicators to evaluate the performance of your on- and off-site actions.
Google Analytics provides an impressive amount of data, including :
- traffic acquisition sources
- visitor behaviour
- conversions for each page,
- the number of views for each page,
- useful information about your site's audience (areas of interest, technologies, etc.),
- etc.
This will enable you to identify pages that are not generating any traffic, and therefore logically few or no conversions. While analysing the performance of a website is free, the time you spend on it must be regular and included in your man-day budget.
Here's a video tutorial on how to use Google Analytics:
Lighthouse for analysing page performance
Google Lighthouse for chrome is, as its name suggests, an extension for the Chrome browser. Lighthouse is an open source tool designed to improve the quality of web pages.
Designed for developers, it can be used to carry out technical performance audits to optimise website accessibility and compatibility with progressive web apps.
The tool provides a report on the status of the web page, specifying any shortcomings and indicators for optimising the page.
Watch a test SEO audit with Lighthouse in the video below:
Alyze: free SEO analysis tool for web pages
Most SEO beginners start by using Alyze.
The advantage: the SEO analysis is free and you get indicators to identify the strong or weak points of a page, such as :
- the keywords used
- in which tags the important words are found,
- warnings if your title or meta description are invalid,
- warnings if the structure of the page is not technically compliant,
- information about the links on the page, etc.
In the image below, for example, the Alyze tool provides information on how to optimise the home page of the "lapopottedemanue.com" site:
Experienced professionals switch to paying tools that are more powerful, reliable and accurate.
Web Developer Toolbar to view certain information on a page
The Web Developer Toolbar plugin is a free SEO tool: it's an extension that you can install on your Chrome or Firefox browser to observe the technical criteria of a web page.
This plugin is useful when you want to focus on a particular element of the page.
For example, you can choose to :
- disable the display of images,
- disable CSS,
- observe meta tags,
- look at the structure of titles on a page,
- test a very large amount of data,
- etc.
Here is an image of the Web Developer Toolbar plugin integrated into the Chrome browser:
Article translated from French