10 Best SEO Audit Tools (2024 Pros And Cons)

Looking for the best SEO audit tools? I’ve got you covered.

Anyone who’s trying to rank should be running regular site audits. That’s how you evaluate how well-optimized your website currently is and identify areas where you can improve.

I often run SEO audits for Blogging Wizard to find issues that might be impacting this site’s performance. And I’ve done the same thing for a lot of SEO clients whilst managing an agency in the past.

So naturally, I’ve tried out a bunch of different auditing tools in my time.

In this post, I’ll review and compare what I think are the best SEO audit tools on the market based on my experience with each of them. I’ll share my take on all their pros and cons, and discuss what/who I think they’re best for, to help you find the right solution for your needs.

#1 – SE Ranking

SE Ranking is my top pick for the overall best SEO audit tool. It had everything I was looking for—it’s flexible, comprehensive, and presents its audit results in easy-to-digest reports. Plus, it’s fantastic value for money as you get a ton of features at an affordable price point.

To test SE Ranking, I ran a full website audit of Blogging Wizard. It took around 5-10 minutes to crawl all 699 pages, which isn’t too bad at all.

I like that it tells you your overall ‘health score’ before you even get into the detailed report—this instantly gives you a rough idea of how well-optimized your site is.

If you’re a marketing agency or SEO consultant, this is also a useful metric to show to your clients. You can compare the site’s health score over multiple audits to show how things have improved over time and demonstrate your achievements.

I found the full report to be super detailed. SE Ranking checks your site against 130+ parameters and presents the results in one neat, easy-to-understand page. There are data visualizations like graphs and charts to illustrate various metrics. And you can download the report to share it with your clients (there are settings options to let you choose what to include).

Any issues SE Ranking identifies that may be hurting your site’s ranking power are displayed in one long list, alongside details on how to fix them. 

I also like that they’re categorized by severity (errors, warnings, notices, etc.) as this helps you prioritize the fixes that’ll have the biggest impact, so you don’t waste too much time on things that hardly move the needle.

There are lots more insights in the full audit report into things like your site’s links, page indexation, core web vitals, etc. And SE Ranking even comes with separate auditing tools for on-page SEO checks and SERP analysis, plus a bunch of other useful SEO tools.

One other thing to mention: SE Ranking has a report builder that you can use to collate data from most of their tools. If you have clients, this is super useful.

Key features

• Full website auditing. Check your whole website against 130+ parameters, identify and fix technical SEO problems, view raw crawl data, metrics, and data visualizations, etc.
• Export options. Download your reports as PDF files, send them directly to your partners/clients, or export data straight to Looker Studio.
• Backlink audit. Analyze your backlinks (or your competitor’s) and get a complete list of all referring domains alongside insights like follow/nofollow tag, domain authority, anchor text, etc.
• SERP audit. Analyze the search engine results pages for any keyword search query and uncover useful insights into the pages that are already ranking.
• On-page SEO checker. Check any page on your website against on-page ranking factors, and get a detailed checklist on what you can do to improve.
• White-label option. Use your own domain and tailor SE Ranking to your brand, then share access with clients as if it’s your own in-house software.
• Other marketing tools. Rank tracking, keyword research, content editing, social media management, review management, and more.

Pros and cons

Pricing

Plans start from $55/month, get 20% off with yearly billing. 14-day free trial available.

Read our SE Ranking review.

#2 – Morningscore

Morningscore is a good choice for those new to SEO. It takes all the complexity out of SEO auditing and even ‘gamifies’ the process to make it fun. 

As soon as you sign up, Morningscore will scan your website to extract a bunch of relevant SEO data, like the keywords you rank for, your backlinks, etc.

Then, it’ll use that data to give you your ‘Morningscore’. This is a metric that estimates what you would have paid Google Ads to rank as high as you do for keywords right now through SEO. In other words, it tells you the ‘value’ of your SEO efforts in dollars, which is a great motivator.

Switch over to the Health tab and you’ll see a comprehensive audit report about how ‘healthy’ your site is from an SEO standpoint. It gives you an overall health score out of 100, a list of issues it’s detected that might be hurting your ranking power, and an explanation of how to fix them.

But my favorite thing is how it uses your audit data to serve up personalized ‘health missions’.

These are gamified tasks that you’re invited to complete to improve your site’s SEO. And as you complete through, you’ll earn points and level up. Morningscore even tells you how much each mission is ‘worth’ in monetary figures to keep you motivated.

This is a feature I haven’t seen on any other SEO audit tools, and it’s honestly really cool. It’s ideal for beginners who struggle with staying motivated.

Key features

• Website health check. Audit your site to find and fix issues, and get an overall website health score.
• Content auditing. Audit your website content to check for on-page issues like poor title tags, thin content, missing alt tags, broken images/links, etc.
• Missions. Gamify your SEO efforts with personalized ‘missions’, including ‘health missions’ involving audit tasks.
• Morningscore metric. See at a glance how much your site’s SEO is ‘worth’ in dollars.
• Other SEO tools. Link analysis, keyword research and tracking, SEO reporting, and more.

Pros and cons

Pricing

Plans start at $49/month, save 2 months when you pay annually. Get started with a 14-day free trial.

Read our Morningscore review.

#3 – Surfer SEO

Surfer SEO is a useful tool for content auditing and on-page optimization. It doesn’t do technical website SEO checks like the tools above, but it does a great job at auditing your written content (i.e. blog posts and pages).

Just enter the keyword you’re trying to rank for. It’ll analyze the SERPs to get information about what the top-ranking pages have in common.

Then, it’ll check your written content to assess how well-optimized it is, looking at on-page signals like content length, number of headings, NLP entities coverage, keyword density, meta tags structure, NLP sentiment, etc.

All audited content is assigned an SEO optimization score from 0-100, which updates in real-time as you edit it in the powerful Content Editor. 

You’ll also see optimization suggestions inside the content editor that tell you what you need to do to improve your score. And as of a recent update, you can now click the ‘auto-optimize’ button to let Surfer’s built-in AI optimize your content in one click.

I particularly like how Surfer doesn’t just tell you your own SEO score, but also the average/highest/lowest scores of your top competitors in the SERPs, so you know what you need to aim for to outrank them.

Note: I do have some issues with Surfer though. Primarily the price & usage allowances on plans for new customers. My editorial team uses Surfer heavily for Blogging Wizard and our other sites but we’re on a legacy plan with higher limits. If we weren’t on a legacy plan, I’d likely use Frase for content optimization instead. However, Frase does lack some of the content auditing functionality.

Key features

• Content audit. Audit all the content of every page on your site to extract metrics like their content score, position, traffic, etc., and find opportunities to improve.
• Optimization suggestions. Get suggestions on how to improve each piece of content to boost its content score and give it a better chance of ranking.
• Content editor. Write & edit your content in the built-in content editor, with real-time SEO scoring and optimization suggestions.
• Auto Optimize. Automatically optimize your written content and let AI naturally add relevant terms and phrases to boost your content score.

Pros and cons

Pricing

Plans start at $89/month and save up to $480 with annual billing. Get started with a 7-day money-back guarantee.

Read our Surfer SEO review.

#4 – SEO PowerSuite

SEO PowerSuite is one of the most budget-friendly SEO audit tools on the market, and it’s super powerful. But unlike most other tools, you have to download it and run audits from software on your PC, rather than in your web browser—that might be a deal-breaker for some.

I’d still recommend giving it a chance though. I think you’ll be surprised by how powerful it is!

SEO PowerSuite is an all-in-one solution. The Website Auditor is just one of four toolkits it comes with; the others being Rank Tracker, SEO SpyGlass, and LinkAssistant.

It crawls your site and audits every URL, image, video, etc. just like a search engine spider would. Then, it shines a light on issues that might be hurting your ability to rank, like indexation problems, broken links, poor site speed or usability, etc., and tells you how to fix them.

There’s also an on-page SEO tool that assesses how well-optimized the content on each individual page on your website is around on-page factors (e.g. content length, meta tags, title tags and headings, link anchors, etc.).

It’s a lot like Surfer in that it calculates an SEO score for the page, suggests relevant terms and keywords to include to increase topic relevance, and provides a built-in content editor for you to make changes.

Another thing I like about SEO PowerSuite is that you can schedule regular site audits so that it automatically runs crawls and builds reports according to your schedule. And that you can send white-label reports directly to your clients.

Key features

• Site audit. Crawl your entire website just like search engines to spot problems and opportunities for improvement.
• Technical SEO factors. Identify technical SEO factors that negatively impact SEO scores like ‘too big’ pages, broken links, server errors, broken images, etc.
• Onsite SEO factors. Audit your content to improve onsite SEO. Fix titles that are too long, empty meta descriptions, duplicate content, etc.
• Visualization. Visualize your site architecture with a map that shows you how each of your website pages are interlinked together.
• Other features. Utilize other SEO tools for things like rank tracking, competitor analysis, link building, SEO report building, content optimization, and much more.

Pros and cons

Pricing

Free plan available. Paid plans start $299/year, save up to 34% with a 3-year plan. 

Read our SEO Powersuite review.

#5 – Semrush

Semrush is one of the most expensive SEO audit tools on this list, but you get a lot for your money. It comes with over 40+ online marketing tools, including a full site audit, backlink audit, and on-page SEO checker.

As you’d expect from a premium, enterprise-grade solution, Semrush’s audit reports are more detailed than most. 

You get a clear picture of top-level metrics, like your overall site health, crawlability, internal linking errors, warnings, etc. at a glance. And you can click on different areas of the report to open up more detailed explanations. For example, what each identified error is and how to fix it.

Semrush’s backlink audit is superb too. They have the largest backlink database in the world, so it’s capable of uncovering links that other tools miss, and faster. 

Another feature I like is that Semrush lets you compare past audits side-by-side and track resolutions and metrics over time. This makes it easy to measure SEO progress and prove results to your clients.

Key features

• Site Audit. Run a comprehensive audit of your site and  get a report with information about your site health, errors/warnings/notices, crawlability, internal linking, site performance, and more.
• Log File Analyzer. Audit your log files for information about how search engines interact with your site, including what your most crawled pages are, what errors are found during crawls, etc.
• On Page SEO Checker. Audit all the content on each page of your site and get suggestions and ideas to help optimize them, based on competitive analysis.
• Backlink Audit. Audit your site to get detailed information and insights about each of your backlinks, including a list of referral domains and metrics like toxicity schore, anchor distribution, etc.
• Other features. Enjoy 40+ other useful tools for digital marketing including keyword research, link building, competitor research, content marketing, social media management, and more.

Pros and cons

Pricing

Plans start from $129.95/month and save up to 17% with annual billing. Get started with a free trial.

Read our Semrush review.

#6 – JetOctopus

JetOctopus is an enterprise-level solution made for those serious about technical SEO audits. It provides log file analysis and deeper technical insights than most but it isn’t ideal for beginners, and it has a high starting price.

JetOctopus’ crawler scans your site to look for technical issues that might be hurting your SEO, like page duplicates, 404 errors, low-speed pages, etc. Meanwhile, the logs analyzer looks at your site’s live logs stream and bot visits to better understand how search engines interact with it.

There’s also a backlinks module that audits your site’s link profile, a GSC console that monitors impressions, clicks, and other keyword insights, and more.

JetOctopus excels at scanning large sites. Its crawler works faster than any other tool I’ve tried, and even its lowest-priced plan tier includes 500k crawled pages and 2 million log lines, which should be more than enough even for large sites.

Key features

• SEO Crawler. Let the crawler audit your whole site to identify problems that might be negatively impacting your SEO, like 404 errors, low page speed, orphan pages, duplicate pages, etc.
• Logs Analyzer. Analyze your site’s live logs stream to get insights into how search engine bots crawl it.
• Google Search Console integration. Integrate with GSC for insights into impressions, clicks, keywords, etc.
• Backlinks auditing. Get a list of all the site’s referring backlinks & domains and analyze them.

Pros and cons

Pricing

Plans start from around $366/month billed quarterly. Save $1,080 when you pay annually. There’s no free trial but you can book a demo with JetOctopus.

#7 – Nightwatch

Nightwatch is billed as a powerful keyword rank tracker, but its built-in Site Audit tool is pretty great too.

It offers pretty much the same insights as other audit tools: A list of issues, a description of what they mean, and instructions to help you fix them. Plus, an overall site health score and insights into things like crawlability, site speed, etc.

I like that you can segment your audit findings by URL with Nightwatch—this is something you can’t do on a lot of other audit tools. I also like that you can see a summary of all previous audits to compare past versions and track improvements over time.

And of course, Nightwatch’s best feature is its rank tracking tool. It pairs well with the site audit tool as after you’ve audited your site and used it to fix some issues, you can track how those changes affect your ranking positions closely.

The only thing I don’t like about Nightwatch is the way pricing is based on the number of keywords you want to track, rather than the number of pages you want to audit. If you don’t care about the rank tracker at all, you can end up paying for allowances you don’t need.

Key features

• Site Audit. Analyze, fix, and optimize your website’s technical and SEO performance with the Site Audit tool.
• Site Health. Get an overall score of your site health based on the audit results.
• Audit comparison. Analyze and compare historical audits to see how you’ve improved and how far you still have to go.
• Automated reports. Build and export white-label reports in minutes, and deliver them to your clients.
• Rank Tracker. Analyze your local SERP rankings for every target keyword and get notified about changes in your ranking positions.

Pros and cons

Pricing

Plans start from $39/month, and save up to 20% with yearly billing. Get started with a 14-day risk-free trial.

#8 – Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is another powerful website crawler and log analyzer that you can use for detailed technical SEO audits. It’s hugely popular, but as with JetOctopus, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to beginners.

Screaming Frog is another desktop-based tool, so you need to download the software to your computer before you can use it. 

There’s a free version that lets you crawl up to 500 URLs, which is more generous than most and might be enough for small websites. And you can always pay to upgrade for more.

It runs all the usual checks to find issues like broken links, faulty redirects, indexation issues, duplicate pages, poorly optimized titles and meta descriptions, etc.

Then, it presents the results in a huge spreadsheet that can be easily exported to apps like Google Sheets or Excel. The spreadsheet format is a little intimidating compared to the kind of slick, visual reports you get with other tools, but some prefer it for digging into big data.

Key features

• SEO Spider. Crawl and audit your site to extract useful SEO data. Find, fix, and optimize issues that might be holding you back.
• Log File Analyser. Identify the URLs Googlebot and other search engine bots are crawling, and how frequently, identify large and slow pages, and extract other useful search bot data.
• Schedule audits. Schedule crawls to run at your preferred intervals and automatically export the data anywhere.
• XML sitemaps. Generate XML sitemaps and image sitemaps to help search engines to understand and index your site better.

Pros and cons

Pricing

Free version available. The paid version starts from $259 Per Year for a 1-site license.

#9 – Serpstat

Serpstat is another powerful and flexible SEO auditing tool that provides very detailed reports. I don’t love its UI as much as some of the other tools I’ve tried, but I can’t fault its functionality.

There are two different SEO audit tools: Site Audit and Page Audit.

Site Audit runs a complete crawl of your entire site to find on-site SEO issues. You get a detailed description of every issue found and instructions on how to fix them, organized by priority level. 

Plus, you’ll also see graphs and data visualizations to illustrate the audit findings, and your Domain Optimization score, which measures overall site optimization—it’s essentially Serpstat’s version of what most other tools call ‘site health’.

Page Audit scans individual pages to see how well-optimized they are. It looks at on-page signals like meta tags, headings optimization, page speed, Hreflang and lang attributes, external link optimization, image optimization, etc. 

These are the same sorts of insights you get in other on-page auditing tools like Surfer. But unlike Surfer, Serpstat doesn’t have a built-in content editor for you to make changes in

Aside from the auditing tools, Serpstat also comes with powerful keyword research tools, a competitor analysis tool, and more.

Key features

• Site Audit. Crawl all the pages on your site to find and fix issues that might be hurting your performance.
• Page Audit. Check individual pages and get suggestions for on-page SEO improvements.
• Keyword research. Discover, analyze, and cluster keywords for your SEO campaigns.
• AI content generation. Create SEO articles and meta tags with the power of generative AI.
• Competitor analysis. Audit your competitors’ website’s to uncover insights about their SEO strategies.

Pros and cons

Pricing

Plans start from $59/month, save 2 months when you pay yearly. Get started with a free trial.

#10 – Google Search Console

Google Search Console is one of the best free SEO auditing tools out there. It’s made by Google to help website owners and SEO professionals identify and fix issues that might be negatively impacting their search presence.

Right off the bat, one of the main drawbacks of Google Search Console is that you need permission to access the properties (i.e. websites) you audit. So you can’t use it to audit your competitors like you could with some of the other tools we’ve looked at.

It also won’t tell you what to do to optimize the actual content on each of your pages and win better positions. For example, it doesn’t look at on-page signals like title tags, keyword placement, meta descriptions, internal links, etc

But it can check your site for important technical issues related to things like security, crawlability, indexing, mobile usability, manual penalties, etc. All of these factors have a major impact on your ability to rank on Google. So, it definitely deserves a place in your toolkit.

If nothing else, you should definitely be using Search Console’s coverage report to make sure all the pages you’re trying to rank are correctly indexed in the Google Database. If they aren’t, they won’t appear in the SERPs.

The Page Experience, Core Web Vitals, and Mobile Usability auditing tools are super useful too. They’ll let you know if Google has found any issues affecting the user experience on your website pages, such as issues with page speed or mobile responsiveness. And as we know, user experience is now a big ranking factor.

Key features

• URL inspection. Inspect any URL on your site to audit it and get detailed crawl, index, and serving information straight from Google’s index.
• Performance report. See how your website is doing in the Google search results & what keywords are driving traffic.
• Indexing. Get insights into how Google discovers and indexes your pages, and identify any coverage issues that might be stopping you from ranking.
• Mobile usability audit. Check your site is optimized for mobile and find and fix issues like text that’s too small to read, clickable elements that are too close together, content that’s wider than the screen, etc.
• Core Web Vitals. Audit your site’s Core Web Vitals—a set of metrics that measure the user experience in terms of loading time/performance, interactivity, visual stability, etc.
• Experience reports. Page experience, core web vitals, mobile usability.

Pros and cons

Pricing

Google Search Console is completely free to use.

Final thoughts

Those are my top picks for the best SEO tools on the market this year.

The best choice for you will depend on what kind of audits you want to run (technical SEO, on-page SEO, backlink audits, etc.), the features you need (e.g. automated audits & reports, log file analysis, content editor, etc.), and your budget.

While you’re here, check out our roundup of content optimization tools—they can help you get all of your website content ready for search and give it the best chance of ranking.

You might also want to take a look at these SEO reporting tools, and our roundup of the latest search engine optimization statistics.

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