Aleh Barysevich — July 3, 2019 — July 3, 2019
SEO analysis is a never-ending search for opportunities to improve your website, be it fixing issues, polishing the content or spying on rivals’ strategies.
Each aspect that adds up to your site’s performance in search engines will naturally demand thorough research and careful data evaluation, as well as a keen eye for details to discover the missteps and room for improvement in each. Yet all the deliberate efforts and time invested in it will pay off big times.
The real choice you have is between trying to handle that many-sided task manually or grab a helping hand from a myriad of SEO analysis tools out there. To make a weighted choice, let’s go over the core aspects that a comprehensive SEO analysis tool would dig into for you:
1. Technical SEO and usability audit
Point errors scattered all over the site – be it broken links or pages loading forever – may ruin user experience; unintentional indexation restrictions may be blocking search engine crawlers out of your site; inefficient site architecture may break the internal link-juice flow throughout the pages. An SEO audit tool that can crawl your site in-depth and help you uncover technical issues timely will certainly save you hours of racking your brain over the consequences later.
2. On-page optimization analysis
Another essential part is optimizing your content and metadata to its full potential around the search intent you target. Good tools for SEO analysis would not only help you pinpoint the flaws, but they would also provide actionable recommendations on how to tailor each and every page element considering your target topic and best SEO practices.
3. Competitive intelligence
Competitive SEO analysis is part science and part art. Comprehending your competitive landscape can help you uncover the winning peculiarities and traits your rivals’ pages have in common, as well as spot their oversights. A good SEO analysis tool would allow you to benchmark your own pages against the top competitors to see how you compare and help you reverse-engineer the raw data gathered from the top SERPs.
To help you find the best fit for your routine, I’ve tested a number of the best SEO tools and looked into the bright sides and drawbacks of each.
1. WebSite Auditor
WebSite Auditor is an SEO analysis tool providing comprehensive insights on your site’s tech health, as well as its optimization potential. The tool crawls each and every page and resource on your site and serves an in-depth site audit report featuring 50+ technical and on-page SEO factors for you to revise, fix or discover an opportunity behind.
The tool covers a vast number of website analysis areas: from site architecture to internal PageRank / traffic distribution, from indexation and crawlability to all kinds of broken, redirected or non-friendly URLs, from duplicate or missing metadata to hreflang errors. The dashboard is extremely intuitive: each factor is accompanied by a short description, actionable how-to’s, and a list of involved URLs. In addition, WebSite Auditor is equipped with an in-app sitemap and robots.txt file generators.
On the page level, WebSite Auditor allows you to analyze any page of your site for the keywords you target with it and compare its optimization level to the top-ranking pages in a search engine of your choice.
Looking through the sections dedicated to each page element – from meta details and body tag to link anchors and image alts – you get full keyword usage statistics and a side-by-side comparison to your SEO competitors’ pages, along with page-specific recommendations on how you could improve the content and metadata. Inspecting the top pages’ details also helps you uncover winning tendencies and best-performing kinds of content for the topic.
WebSite Auditor’s own TF-IDF tool supplies you with an extended list of keywords and phrases harvested from rivals’ pages. The most prominent keywords that you are missing out on, as well as the keywords you might be overusing, are pinpointed for your consideration. With all the ideas and stats at a glance, you are well-armed to create topic-driven content with keywords supported by the semantically relevant context.
Cool feature
Content Editor module – a page optimization playground where you can see how each change impacts the optimization rate on-the-go. A finalized version of the page can be exported to HTML, ready for re-uploading to your site.
Pricing
Starting from $ 124 for the license key (one-off) with a minor maintenance fee after 6 months (from $ 4.44/mo), the number of projects you can create and pages you can analyze is unlimited in any paid version. Full trial available, no credit card details required.
2. Google Search Console
The next tool for a thorough analysis of Google’s relationship with your website is, undoubtedly, Google Search Console, a free SEO analysis tool by Google itself. Google Search Console provides all kinds of insights on your site’s well-being, helping you analyze and improve its search performance.
While not being a go-to tool for competitive intelligence, Google Search Console lets you create first-hand reports on how your website is being crawled, pinpointing broken pages and pages with any crawl anomalies, ambiguous restrictions or duplicated ones without canonicals. As it comes to indexing and understanding your pages’ contents, Google Search Console offers detailed reports on mobile usability, drawing your attention to problematic areas, and on structured data usage on your site, listing the valid items and the ones with syntax errors that require fixing. The Links report lists all the internal and outgoing links to your pages and shows the top linked pages for you to see where the linking power is steered to.
In terms of content optimization, Google Search Console won’t give you hints on which keywords to add and where. However, lots of valuable strategic insights can be found in the Performance tab. The report lets you explore the queries your site already ranks for, detect the pages that might go up from page 2 to page 1 with minor efforts, track down the inefficient pages that rank high but have low CTR, or learn which queries are coming from a certain device or country to improve your mobile or local targeting.
Cool feature
The URL Inspection tool that allows you to retrieve the indexed version of a certain page as it’s seen and fetched by Google, check for AMP errors, structured data errors, and indexing issues.
Pricing
Free.
3. On Page SEO checker
On Page SEO Checker from SEMRush is another SEO analysis tool that helps you put together a huge volume of SEO data. During a quick setup, you choose the pages you wish to gather optimization ideas for, your target location, language, and device.
Next, based on the data from SEMRush and by comparing your pages to the top SEO rivals for the target keywords, the tool supplies you with strategic, UX, semantic, content and new backlinks ideas. The pages are automatically prioritized based on the number of ideas gathered, traffic growth potential and ease of implementation. Switching to any page’s individual dashboard, you’ll be able to see where the room for improvement is: a better-choice page that already ranks for the keyword, a SERP feature opportunity you might win, major page elements you need to add keywords to, or optimal content length you should consider.
The semantic ideas section will offer a number of semantically-relevant keywords used by rivals, along with TF-IDF stats. And the Top 10 Benchmarking feature will analyze how your target page compares to rivals’ in a number of aspects like content length, referring domains, keyword usage, markups, and others, highlighting the factors you fall behind with.
Optionally, you can set up Site Audit in the same project for the tool to generate technical SEO ideas based on the found issues. Once the pages have been crawled, you can check the overall number of onpage errors, warnings, and notices, as well as thematic reports dedicated to crawlability, security issues, load speed and internal linking structure. For task prioritization, you may refer to the handpicked top issues, based on severity and the number of affected pages.
Cool feature
Integration with Trello that allows you to send reports with optimization ideas for individual pages directly to your Trello board, turning insights from your project into ready-made tasks.
Pricing
Starting from $ 99.95/mo for 5 projects, up to 20K pages per project. Full trial available, credit card details required.
4. WooRank
WooRank is a web-based SEO analysis tool running automatic website audits and providing optimization ideas for boosting traffic and visibility. With the tool, you can crawl up to 10K pages of your site to spot a wide range of on-page issues (meta details being too long, too short or duplicate, body content being duplicate, thin or blank), accessibility and usability troubles (5xx server errors, 4xx client errors, redirect chains and loops, mixed content). The tool will also report non-indexable pages or pages buried too deep, as well as canonical and hreflang implementation issues.
Running a review for an individual page, you can revise your meta details as they appear in the SERPs, see the keywords your page is currently optimized around, and check for any structured data, mobile usability and page speed issues.
Promotion section will show where you stand in terms of backlinks, social media presence and local directories reviews associated with your site. If you add your target keywords and connect your Google Analytics account to the project, the Measurement section will keep you updated on your ranking performance and traffic stats in addition.
Tracking up to 3 competitors along with your site, you can see how your pages compare in terms of content optimization, off-page efforts, and rankings, and dig into competitors’ SEO strategies: detect the weak spots to surpass them in, or ideas worth adopting.
Cool feature
Marketing Checklist, which is a tailor-made, prioritized checklist of steps you may undertake to improve your site’s optimization, with an additional option to get help from a WooRank’s certified expert.
Pricing
Starting from $ 59.99/mo for 1 project with up to 2K pages. Free trial available, credit card details required.
5. SEObility
SEObility is another online SEO audit tool that helps you detect the issues that might be holding your site from climbing up the SERPs.
With SEObility, you can crawl up to 100K pages within one project and get an overview of the technical, structural and content issues. Navigating through technical and meta dashboard, you can find crawling stats, URL details, status codes breakdown, as well as any neglected meta tags and page attributes. Structure analysis will uncover problems related to internal linking, anchor texts distribution, and pages’ distance from homepage.
Based on the pages crawled, you get a detailed report on content duplication issues and text quality. The tool extracts the keywords most frequently used across your website and raises an alarm if multiple pages are competing for the same keywords, to prevent wasting ranking potential.
Checking any certain page, you may look closely into its anatomy and detect the page elements optimized poorly. Analyzing competitors’ pages the same way, you can sport their target keywords and spy on the strategies they stick to.
Apart from performing SEO analysis, SEObility allows you to track rankings of your website alongside your rivals’ to spot any fluctuations or opportunities springing up.
Cool feature
As part of the content quality audit, SEObility reports on duplicate paragraphs within one page, content pieces appearing on multiple pages, and even typos (apart from the complete page duplicates).
Pricing
Free version covers one project with up to 1K pages. Paid plans start from $ 50/mo with free trial available, credit card details required.
6. ContentKing
ContentKing is a real-time SEO auditing and change management tool that is designed to take your worries away and help you improve your site’s visibility in search engines.
This SEO analysis tool scans all the pages and reports on a wide range of aspects holding your site back: indexability issues, broken links, pages buried too deep, load speed and mobile readiness, and many more.
Each page is scanned for meta details being unique and in place, and is checked for social markups like OG and Twitter Cards, Schema markup, and Google Analytics tracking codes. Integrating your Google Analytics and Search Console, you can also see how pages perform to prioritize your optimization efforts.
At the end of the crawl, ContentKing arms you with an actionable to-do list based on all the pitfalls found.
The tool does not run in-depth content analysis, but only checks for titles, descriptions, and headings; still, it can provide insights on competitors’ overall SEO efforts.
Cool feature
Re-canning your website incessantly, ContentKing alerts you with emails on any technical issues or page-level changes popping up, for a well-timed and informed reaction.
Pricing
Custom pricing depending on the amount of pages, starting from $ 19/mo for 1K pages. Free trial available with limitations, no credit card details required.
7. Website Grader
Website Grader is one of those free SEO tools, which is more of an express SEO analysis service running a quick review of your domain.
The service quickly scans the homepage to check on major aspects like performance, mobile usability and SEO. The performance report does not go into detail much but only shows the overall stats for the homepage’s size, speed and a few more factors adding up to it. The mobile usability section reports whether your page is responsive and whether the content fits into viewport. Additionally, the tool gives a heads-up in case there are security/SSL certificate issues.
In terms of SEO analysis, Website Grader only checks on the most basic things: availability of a sitemap, presence of meta title, description and headings, showing errors in case those are missing. While the tool does not crawl the website in-depth and won’t provide any keyword usage stats or optimization advice tailored for your pages, it’s still a handy option for a super-quick overview.
Cool feature
Website Grader has no killer feature (funny tooltips, though) but appears to be the most express tool from the list, giving a sneak-peak on a website’s wealth.
Pricing
Free.
Summary
Same way as with any buying decision, your choice will depend on many subjective aspects: your specific needs, the areas your workflow focuses around the most, your budget, and many more. Yet, knowing what kind of SEO tools are out there and having an idea about their cons and pros can help you make an informed choice and consolidate your efforts in the winning direction. Hopefully, the post helped you find a promising candidate to try out!
Digital & Social Articles on Business 2 Community
(78)
