What SEO audit tools can you recommend for novice website owners?

Running a scheduled in-depth checkup procedure for your website or blog using the right set of SEO audit tools is the best way to figure out why your current SEO progress seems to have stalled – even despite every hard effort you’re taking daily. So, if you decided to finally learn how to run this really indispensable and far-reaching endeavour on your own, you’re already halfway to the right target. Of course, it’s impossible to be purely perfect, but that should be your ultimate goal, right? So, before anything else, let’s face it – the time investment for your first website analysis will depend mainly on the scale of your website or blog. And considering that good research is all about submitting the right questions, here is a quick checklist backed with a couple of pretty good basic SEO audit tools for you to try them as a novice website owner – first and foremost. 

So, below let’s quickly run through the main stages of this really comprehensive endeavour. Given that you’re willing and ready to invest some time and effort – this more than just important doing will leave no stone unturned for your existing campaign in the Search Engine Optimization. And given that it’s actually a very sophisticated matter pulling together over two hundred of positive ranking signals – you can always find a lot of puny details that just need a one-minute-fix to start serving your general ranking progress over time. Or, vice versa, you might as well face a definitely massive issue, that actually seems too hard to be managed (at least without any third-party assistance), but still remains fully manageable – for you to spend much more time and effort, but finally get everything in place with it. Anyway, I believe that even with basic SEO audit tools, there would be a great opportunity for you to make things much easier and move your website or blog one step closer to that deserved #1 ranking in the list of the relevant SERPs. All that being said, let’s finally learn more about the way of running a standard SEO audit and tools you may find useful for having a good kickstart with that.

Website Checklist and Basic SEO Audit Tools for Beginners

Tier One: Strategic Planning

I recommend you to start with creating or at least reviewing your strategic objective, even in case you already have the one. Put simply, here is a fairly good example of determining long-term goals – and it's applicable both for your current SEO campaign, and the whole business you're running to that point. Set your objective using the S.M.A.R.T. principle – simply ask yourself whether your objectives are: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. For example, you can set your top priorities in a simple way like this – getting lead volume from organic search increased by 10% through the next 6 months, growing existing link root domain count from 25 to 75 within the same period, amplify your organic search visibility by a half during a given customized timeframe, etc. You got it.

Tier Two: Keyword Research & Analysis

I recommend starting with reviewing all your highest volume keywords to take a well-informed decision and pick your main pool to rank for in the next 3, 6, or 9 months. Just try to be realistic and feel free to take some short-term must-winning combinations to test what is trending and where demand probably tends to be decreasing. There are no special SEO audit tools for keywords – all you need is just to run sufficiently deep keyword research using basic online helpers, such as UberSuggest, Google Keyword Planner, Semalt Analyzer, or SEMrush tool. Ideally, to determine the real value and quality of every given keyword, don’t forget to run occasional PPC campaigns for the most profitable ones for validating intent – and you’re done.

Tier Three: Competitive Review

These actions are meant to cover at least competitive keyword research and a bit deeper analysis of the most benefitting link profiles owned by your closest niche competitors. While all about keyword research should be nearly self-explanatory, make sure to invest enough time in inspecting link profiles of your most successful opponents. Ultimately – to scrape their best findings and make most out of all possible link opportunities. That way, I recommend using such famous SEO audit tools, as Ahrefs Backlink Checker (Ahrefs), Moz’s Open Site Explorer (Moz), or my favorite Semalt Analyzer (Semalt).

Tier Four: Technical SEO Audit

And here we are finally coming to the point – given that technical issues can literally plague the whole online performance of your website or blog, technical analysis is arguably the most important part in overall SEO audit. So, the main goal of this endeavor is to detect all technical issues that may keep hurting your general SEO performance – both in terms of the live user experience, and from the viewpoint of Google's search crawling bots for indexing purposes. Now let me show you how to find the most prevalent issues – and the good news is that there are several use-proven SEO audit tools available at your service. 

Page Loading Speed

Your website's or blog's page loading speed will always impact not only user browsing experience and bounce rate, but is actually considered by Google itself as one of the primary ranking factors in its own way. Ideally, your pages should load under just one second, but of course, it's a really challenging task. Anyway, passing a three-second benchmark would be enough for you to determine in what way your website page loading speed actually impacts your ranking – in either a positive or probably negative way. Among the other SEO audit tools available for that purpose, I personally recommend using Pingdom (note, that it has a quick-fix step-by-step instruction to instantly accelerate yourself) or Google's Website Speed Tool for a standard speed-check procedure.

Mobile Friendly Web Pages

It comes without saying that your web source is expected to provide a sufficient level of mobile responsiveness for user browsing via smartphones or tablets – just because Google itself is betting on it as a quite strong ranking factor. So, don't take it lightly and make sure to check whether you're mobile friendly or not. As for me, I found Google's Mobile Friendly Check online tester tool to be pretty simple solution for that.

Redirect Issues

Basically, there are just two main types of redirects that can be dangerous for you and your ranking progress. But they can be easily fixed c I suggest using one of my champion SEO audit tools, namely Screaming Frog SEO Spider (Screaming Frog), or Semalt Analyzer (Semalt). Both options have been successfully tested with different types of redirects. Here they are:

• 302 Redirects – just enter your target URL, start scanning procedure, filter 302s, and simply press "export" to change them all to 301 redirects.
• Redirect Chains – a little bit more time-consuming task, I should admit. Nevertheless, there is a good way of locating redirect chains with one of those tools – after all, it's only up to you to decide which one to pick. Anyway, all you need over there is to set up advanced scanning options in config menu to make sure all redirects are necessarily followed so far. Apply changes, enter your target URL and complete the scan. Go to overview (otherwise, report) section to see redirect chains that need breaking – and you're done.

Indexing

It may seem like a no-brainer, but I insist that it's necessary to make sure the whole web source has everything in place with proper indexing. Given that you can only get actual web traffic when the entire website or blog is being indexed well, spending some time to check robots.txt file and sitemaps will always be a good idea for you to avoid any accidents or malfunctions related to the process of crawling and successful indexation by the search engines. 

• Robots.txt – everything is elementary, as all you need is to run a manual check of that file. There is a specific command that can sometimes purposely prevent certain web pages from being crawled by the search crawling bots. Keep searching for "disallow" command that might as well be used incorrectly so that it keeps instructing search engine spiders to keep away from the whole website/blog, or at least could stop robots from crawling certain page sections or separate URLs within your domain.
• Sitemaps – if you're on WordPress or Yoast, then you must already have everything in place by default. For all others, creating an XML sitemap and submitting it to the major search engines will be a strongly recommended (if not indispensable), to help crawling bots "read," "understand," and navigate throughout the website's structure for much more efficient indexing. Put simply, by placing a sitemap and getting your website organized in a crawling-friendly manner, you will make things easier for the search engines, allowing them to easily find out what every page is all about, see the most recent changes, quickly find the data under each section to finally crawl you accordingly. That way, I recommend using one of those professional online generators, for example, like this one: XML-sitemaps dot com. Given that there are many similar online services available in open access, you will surely find exactly what you need for creating, submitting, updating and managing sitemaps quickly and at ease.