Website audits require a significant amount of time and resources so how can agencies make this process more efficient? SEO experts review thousands of website pages to locate any mistakes and they often need help to complete this intense audit. Agencies often use tools to help their staff save time and accelerate the auditing process. There are a lot of affordable online tools available right now and they can make all the difference for your agency’s SEO expert and your auditing process. As they say, work smarter not harder so we’ve saved you time and listed the best SEO auditing tools to make your agency’s process more efficient.
#1 Screaming Frog
If you’re in a time crunch and need to analyze your client’s entire website then Screaming Frog is the right choice for you. Screaming Frog has a crawling tool, known as SEO Spider, and we recommend using it on a desktop to be able to handle a large amount (400+) of web pages. Once the crawl is complete, Screaming Frog will generate a report detailing all the SEO problems on the client’s website. The report will review over thirty of Screaming Frog’s SEO metrics such as meta descriptions, links, response time, anchor text, and security. The size of the website may dictate the length of the report and the number of possible SEO issues. So a larger the website with several SEO issues will result in a longer report than a large site that has been optimized properly with best practices. But our agency finds Screaming Frog to be so valuable that we use it to evaluate small to medium size websites as well.
Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider is a powerful website crawler that will make your process more efficient and allow your team to analyze a client’s audit results in real-time. Without Screaming Frog your agency could miss out on providing the client with insight and data that will improve their ability to make informed decisions about their SEO campaign.
Screaming Frog also offers free and paid software licenses so your business has options and can grow into their full menu of services.
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#2 Google Search Console
When your agency is just starting out make Google Search Console your best friend. This tool is a game changer for anyone just starting out in their SEO career because it’s free to use, provides great insight, and gives you a summary of the important things like broken links, page load speed, indexed web pages, HTML markups, etc. Once you have entered in your domain or URL prefix and verified your ownership of the account, Google will start measuring your site’s performance and you’re on your way to optimizing your website.
Google Search Console also allows you to disavow bad links, learn how Google’s algorithm sees your pages, and identify your website’s weaknesses. However, this tool does have some drawbacks because it is a free model. It’s specifically lacking in providing an undeniably accurate, real-time status of a website but it is still a great tool for a quick and affordable website audit because it comes directly from the top search engine.
Learn How To Fix Your Site With Google Search Console!
#3 SEMrush
SEMrush is a great tool for medium to large sized agencies that need to manage an effective SEO strategy. There’s a lot to like in this complex tool but here is a quick rundown of SEMrush.
SEMrush is very popular with SEO specialists because checking a website’s on-page health is indispensable to making and keeping a website user-friendly. Their SEO analysis tools check issues that are related to crawlability, content, images, links, accessibility, and coding. All issues found are divided into three groups depending on their severity: errors, warnings, and notices. Whether you manage a microsite or thousands of webpages with content and assets, detecting issues can be challenging and time-consuming. Your team cannot afford to spend a week scanning content for mistakes in the code or checking for broken URLs and that’s what SEMrush is here to do. SEMrush will save your team time and ultimately help your bottom line by becoming a more efficient SEO team.
When you analyzing your website you may find a variety of issues and not know where to begin but SEMrush allows you to filter the issues and address them individually. The Overview Report will show you the most important issues and the most frequently found errors on your website so you can get an idea of how much work your site needs. If you want to fix a specific issue throughout your entire website, then go to the Issues Report to see all of the webpages affected by that particular issue. Once you have addressed the findings in the Issues Report, filter your options and check out the Page Report that will list all issues found on your landing pages. It’s important to make sure that you address your website and landing page issues with the same business goals so you have a consistent solution.
SEMrush’s Pro Plan services start around $100 per month and they offer a variety of keyword research, crawling, and ongoing search positioning monitoring. The Pro Plan includes 10,000 results per report across both SEMrush’s domain and keyword analytics tools, and up to 3,000 reports or searches per day. As their plans and pricing advance, you could harness even more SEO power and spend up to $400 per month or create a custom pricing model depending on the size of your business. Although SEMrush has been edged out by their direct competitors like Moz in the past, it is still an affordable and effective tool for your agency. SEMrush is a powerful platform that will do just about everything your agency could need so it is definitely an option worth exploring when comparing SEO tools.
See What SEMrush Plan Is Right For You!
Please note that this is not a comprehensive list of all available SEO tools and this list is based on the opinions and experiences of Venta Marketing. Additionally, none of these tools can replace talented SEO specialists and these tools must be used by the right team with SEO knowledge.