10 Best Technical SEO Tools You Need for Your Next Audit

Originally published on Prerender.
You want to do routine technical website audits for the same reason you take your car to see a mechanic – to make sure it’s working as it should.

Technical SEO tools are like the wrenches and hammers the mechanic keeps in a toolbox – they help you identify any potential errors or issues with your website so that you can fix them before they cause long-term damage. Website audits can also help improve your SEO rankings and visibility. Websites that load quickly and are technically well-optimized tend to get higher search rankings and more organic traffic.

In this blog post, we will discuss the 10 best technical SEO tools you need to get the most out of your next website audit.

*What are Technical SEO tools? *

Technical SEO tools are specifically designed to help you audit your website for technical errors and issues. They can help you identify problems such as:

Broken links
Incorrect, or missing, titles and metadata
Coding errors
Fixing these issues helps you improve your site’s performance. Plus, they offer many benefits that you can use to revamp and optimize your SEO strategy.

Optimize Your SEO Strategy With Technical SEO Tools

SEO audit tools offer a wide range of benefits, including gaining insights into your website’s inner workings. Also, they help identify how your competitors are optimizing their websites so you can reverse-engineer their strategies.

Technical SEO software can also be used for keyword and backlink research. You can take what you learn about your website’s keyword optimization and backlink profile, and use it to improve your website technically to make your on-page SEO and link-building efforts more effective.

Save Time and Costs on Manual SEO Audits

Technical website tools can also assist you by saving time and hefty costs on manual technical SEO audits. Getting a technical SEO specialist to audit your website and having your developers implement those recommendations can require a team of specialists working together, and specialists don’t come cheap.

You can automate the auditing process, which will help speed up results. Many of these tools are free or offer a free trial, so you can test them out before committing to them.

Find High-Converting Keywords for Content & Content Marketing

With every SEO expert clamoring to rank for high-converting keywords, technical SEO tools can help you rank for them before they can. Technical SEO tools give you useful information like your competitor’s website performance, backlink profile, and keyword rankings. Ranking for these competitive keywords can get your content to generate more traffic.

Gauge SEO Progress & Track KPIs

Most SEO audit tools generate automated reports that track your SEO progress over time, based on a set of practical key performance indicators (KPIs). This data can help you determine whether your website is running well and what still needs improvement. It can also help you compare your website to your competitors’ sites and make strategic adjustments to stay ahead of them.

Visualize & Conceptualize Data for Analysis

Converting raw data into visual elements like charts and infographics can help you understand the data more easily and identify opportunities for improvement. After analyzing that data, you can identify and address any web issues and apply the information to enhance your strategies.

10 Best Technical SEO Tools

To give you an extra edge in your website audits, here are 10 of the best technical SEO tools that we recommend having in your toolkit. These tools will help you identify opportunities, develop a more effective SEO strategy and further optimize your website for top performance.

list of 10 best technical SEO tools

Prerender
Prerender boosts search engine rankings by effectively prerendering Javascript during the search engine crawling process. It improves your crawl budget optimization and amplifies your page speed scores.

A convenient feature of Prerender is it detects when Google is crawling your page and creates an easily-crawled version of your website. It also renders JavaScript websites built with a wide range of popular frameworks and libraries like Angular, React, and Vue.JS.

It also detects whether it’s a bot or human user who is accessing your site so it can provide the best user experience possible for human users. Afterward, it renders an HTML version for the search engine crawler and interactive JavaScript for the human, so you can optimize your crawl budget without sacrificing user experience.

Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is a heavy-duty, yet flexible, website crawler that helps you audit your website for technical errors and issues.

Whether you have a large or small website, Screaming Frog can efficiently crawl and analyze your website in real-time. It’s an equally suitable SEO tool for beginner and experienced SEO professionals.

It helps extract and analyze data for common SEO issues, which can help you find ways to tweak your on-page SEO tactics.

Screaming Frog will let you crawl up to 500 URLs for free. Buying a license removes this limit and gives you access to more advanced features. If you have a new website, you can take advantage of its free version so you can audit your website without any additional cost, then invest in the paid license as your website grows. However, there are many Screaming Frog alternatives that you can use to meet your website’s specific technical SEO needs.

Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free SEO audit tool offered by Google that helps you monitor your website’s performance in the SERPs. It also allows you to submit and track your website’s XML sitemaps.

This tool is a must-have for business owners who want to make sure their website is receiving optimal search engine visibility. With Google Search Console, you can identify any errors or issues that may be preventing your website from ranking higher than it could.

You can also use Google Search Console to analyze and benchmark your site’s performance and compare it to your competitors. This data can help you make necessary adjustments to stay ahead of the competition.

Google Search Console allows you to:

Submit your sitemaps to be crawled and indexed
Monitor your website’s overall performance and search traffic
Identify any indexing or crawling errors and issues with your website such as soft 404 errors
Identify keywords and search queries that are bringing traffic to your site
View the landing pages with the most traffic
Check hreflang implementation on a site

*Google Mobile-Friendly Test *
Another practical SEO tool offered by Google is the Google Mobile-Friendly Test. With this free tool, you can determine if your website is mobile-friendly.

Over the years, Google has led the movement towards mobile responsiveness in web development. That’s why they made the Google Mobile-Friendly Test to guide webmasters and technical SEO experts in giving their users a better experience on mobile devices. The tool also lets you identify any critical alerts or load time issues, and it helps you make sure your site loads and displays correctly on smartphones and tablets.

The Google Mobile-Friendly Test allows you to:

Check how visitors interact with the mobile version of your pages
See how well your pages display on different types of mobile devices
Test individual web pages or entire websites
Get feedback on what you can do to make your website more mobile-friendly
Send alerts if critical errors are found on your website
Identify issues that might cause a decrease in load times
A valuable feature of the Google Mobile-Friendly Test is that it gives you a score and breakdown of how mobile-friendly a page is. This information can help you determine where you need to make changes to improve your site’s mobile-friendliness.

Google’s Schema.org Structured Data Testing Tool
Structured data is information stored in a specific format, which allows search engines to better understand what the page is and what it’s about. With Google’s Schema.org Structured Data Testing Tool, you can identify errors in your site’s structured data markup.

It helps you ensure that your website’s structured data markup is accurate and error-free, which in turn can improve your website’s search rankings. It allows you to select the appropriate tool, the rich results test, or the schema markup validator. The rich results test tests your website to identify and preview the correct search engine-rich results. The schema markup validator approves all structured data embedded in your web pages to make sure it’s formatted correctly.

W3C Validator
The W3C Validator is a free, open-source tool that checks the markup validity of your Web documents in HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML, and other markup languages.

By using the W3C Validator, you can ensure that your web pages are debugged and error-free. This can help you avoid penalties that may be associated with incorrect or poorly-written markup and boost your overall search rankings.

Overall, website maintenance will be more efficient as you can solve any website code error that may arise.

Majestic
Majestic is a paid tool that helps you track and analyze your website’s backlinks.

Majestic is praised in the industry as an efficient performance tool that offers the largest crawler system and extensive backlink data repository for comprehensive backlink analysis.

By using Majestic, you can get a detailed SEO report of all of your website’s backlinks including:

Number of backlinks
Referring domains of these links
Anchor text associated with them
If you’re looking for a way to track and analyze your website’s backlinks, then be sure to try out Majestic.

*Barracuda Panguin Tool *
The Barracuda Panguin Tool is a free tool that helps you identify whether a website has been penalized by Google. This can help you determine the cause of your website’s poor rankings and take steps to fix them.

It also helps you track your website traffic when Google releases an update. With this, you can pinpoint what update penalized your website so you plan strategies to account for them.

Barracuda offers a wide range of features to help you make the best results-driven choices to optimize your site:

Mobile searches
On-site link optimization
Local and regional SEO insights
Data encryptions
Paid and organic visibility

Google Search Console XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap is a file that contains information about the pages on your website. The Google Search Console XML Sitemap is a free tool that helps you diagnose any problems with your sitemap. If an issue has been identified, you can then troubleshoot and monitor it quickly and easily without having to dig through your website’s code.

With Google Search Console XML Sitemap, you can make sure that your website’s pages are being crawled and indexed by Google, which is step 1 in improving your website’s search engine rankings. You can also receive alerts for any critical errors with your site, including indexing errors and spam. If you’re using Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), this technical SEO tool helps you to troubleshoot and resolve any issues that happen with them.

Botify
Botify creates the ideal mix of technical SEO, content, and search intent data to create a comprehensive keyword analysis.

Also, it gathers insights throughout each stage of the crawling and indexing process to efficiently automate any required SEO tasks.

From start to finish, Botify compiles:

Internal page rank
Broken links analysis
Page depth

Measure, Analyze and Optimize Your Website with These Top Technical SEO Tools

SEO is a complex process that requires careful measurement and analysis to improve your rankings. Using some of the technical SEO tools listed in this article can help you measure, analyze, and optimize your website for better search engine results.