Top 10 Website Analysis and SEO Tools You Should Try

Contrary to the common misconception, SEO is not a magic strategy where you can cheat the search engines to get ranked quickly and thus increase your traffic. On the other hand, SEO is a long-term game that requires consistency and hard labor.

Thankfully, there are now a lot website analysis and SEO tools that can assist you in this long, often arduous process, and on this guide we will discuss 10 of them, which in our opinion, are some of the best ones available.

Using these tools properly can turn your SEO strategy into the next level, allowing you to find out the areas where your site is currently lacking and how to optimize them further.

Without further ado, let us begin with the first one.

 

1. SEMRush

For most SEO practitioners, the name SEMRush shouldn’t be a stranger, being one of the most popular (and powerful) SEO tools available.

SEMRush, in essence, is a dashboard with various detailed reports of a web domain. Simply enter the site’s URL on SEMRush’s search bar, and you will get various information of the site from what keyword it is currently ranking, the search volume for that keyword, and so on.

SEMRush also offers various SEO-related features from the Site Audit tool, On-Page SEO checker, and their famous SEO Toolkit. The SEO Toolkit is extremely handy as you can get detailed reports on your competitors’ SEO approaches, identify your competitors’ traffic sources, identify keyword and backlink gaps, as well as in-depth keyword, backlink, and traffic analytics.

Very easy to use even for a complete SEO beginner, and although we can’t say that SEMRush’s packages are cheap, they are definitely worth it if you are serious about SEO.

Main Purpose: Keyword research and competitive SEO analysis

Key Features:

• Analyze various keywords and which ones will be valuable for your brand
• Easily find out the top competitors in your niche and who’s ranking on your target keywords
• Track your own target keywords and monitor the results of your SEO efforts
• Determine the most valuable keywords of your competitors

 

2. Google Search Console/Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools, and especially Google Search Console is very effective, and totally free tool for your SEO initiatives. In general, the Webmaster Tools are especially useful because they allow you to see your site just as Google sees it.

There are several tools included in Google Webmaster Tools. For example, there’s the Fetch as Google tool, allowing you to analyze how Google will crawl a specific URL. This is critical especially in measuring the SEO performance of your site.

Another useful tool is the Structured Data Testing Tool and Structured Data Markup Helper. Implementing structured data is now a relevant part of the SEO game, allowing you to be featured in rich snippets, which will translate to more traffic.

The list of useful tools don’t end just there, and considering the Google Webmaster Tools is totally free, you should definitely make the most of it.

Main Purpose: various aspects of site analysis

Key Features:

• Various analytics tools by Google. Meaning, you can see everything as Google sees it, which is extremely relevant for SEO

 

3. Ahrefs

In many ways, Ahrefs is quite similar to SEMRush, as both are powerful keyword analytic tools. A lot of similar features are shared between both tools. Both tools are great for keyword research, capable for processes like SEO competitive analysis, backlink analysis, topic ideas, and of course, keyword analysis.

The clear difference between the two is how Ahrefs shines in the backlink analysis department, while SEMRush has more powerful keyword analysis tools overall.

So, Ahrefs, is especially useful if you are looking for a backlink analysis tool, as many SEO practitioners regarded Ahrefs as the absolute best in this aspect.

In general, Ahrefs is a more robust and complete SEO analytics tool if you are looking to invest on one of them. However, Ahrefs and SEMRush working hand-in-hand, along with the other tools we have on this list, will be a more ideal approach.

Main Purpose: backlink analysis and keyword research, all-in-one SEO analysis tool

Key Features:

• Extremely powerful backlink analysis tools to check your competitor’s backlink, the quality of backlinks, and so on
• Decent keyword analysis tools and topic ideation
• A complete all-in-one SEO toolkit package

 

4. Check My Links

Check My Links is a Google Chrome plugin with one purpose, which as the name suggests, check all the links that crawl through your site to look for broken links.

Broken links, both internal and external is not a direct ranking signal for SEO. However, it can severely hurt the overall user experience, which can affect dwell time and bounce rate, which are direct ranking signals.

Check My Links as a tool is extremely easy to use, and will be extremely useful when your content has a lot of links.

Also, checking for broken links can be an effective link building tactic, a strategy often referred as “broken link building”. Here, you can analyze sites that can potentially give you quality inbound links, and check whether they have broken links. You can inform the webmaster regarding this link, and offer them to link your site instead,

Considering Check My Links is totally free, this is a very valuable tool to have in your SEO arsenal.

Main Purpose: check for broken links

Key Features:

• Checking for broken links in a matter of seconds, extremely easy to use

 

5. HubSpot Website Grader

Hubspot’s Website Grader is a web app capable to generate a personalized, detail report on several important metrics like:

• Whether your site is easily indexable and crawlable by Google and other search engines, as well as whether your site can be easily found by human readers
• Analyze your site’s page size, loading speed, and other key SEO metrics
• Analyze mobile-responsiveness of your site
• Analyze various security aspects of your site like SSL certificate. Security is a very important visitors’ concerns nowadays, and might affect your overall traffic.

Hubspot’s website grader is also very easy to use, simply input your URL and email address, then you’ll get a score of 1 to 100 along with a detailed report. You get all this in just a matter of seconds.

Also, Hubspot offers various SEO tools to help your SEO activities, and let’s not forget the fact that HubSpot’s blog is an excellent information source not only for SEO but also for other marketing activities.

Key Purpose: site performance analysis

 

6. BuzzStream

BuzzStream is a relatively affordable tool to manage your outreach efforts in getting more backlinks.

Backlinks are extremely important ranking signal for Google SERP. Yet, the outreach process in getting these inbound links can be painful and difficult, quite similar to cold calling. BuzzStream can significantly help you in this arduous process from researching the relevant site/people, designing an effective email message, and keep track on who have accepted your link requests.

An extremely important feature is how BuzzStream can effectively identify outreach candidates based on their industry and how they are engaging in various different social media platforms. So, you can effectively determine the quality of the inbound links.

Main Purpose: link building management

Key Features:

• Identify key candidates of inbound link outreach
• Keep track of the inbound link candidates that have accepted your link requests, and those who don’t
• Design effective email messages for your outreach

 

7. Upcity SEO Report Card

Upcity’s SEO Report Card is a free tool to analyze how your site currently fares against your competitors’ sites.

Considering it’s totally free, except your contact information, the SEO Report Card offers a fairly detailed report covering various SEO aspects like:

• Inbound Link Analysis: a fairly detailed report on the total number of sites that link your site
• Rank analysis: a report on where your page(s) currently rank on major search engines. When you first enter your information, you will need to enter a target keyword. Your report will be based on this keyword
• On-site optimization analysis: mainly covering the keyword density throughout your page
• Indexing analysis: a report of how many pages on your site have been indexed by the search engines
• Accessibility analysis: from your site’s load time and whether it’s easily indexable by Google
• Authority metrics: a report on your current level of authority

Main purpose: site analysis

 

8. Screaming Frog SEO Spider

SEO Spider by Screaming Frog is a very powerful, and relatively affordable tool for any SEO practitioners.

As the name suggests, the SEO Spider crawls your website according to your URL, and analyze the site for important SEO issues. Doing this process manually can be extremely frustrating and time-consuming, especially for large sites. With SEO spider, you can do it in just a matter of minutes instead of hours or even days.

SEO Spider is also fairly easy to use with an intuitive interface. If necessary, you can export parts or all of the report into an Excel sheet. This is also useful as you can upload .csv file format to various SEO tools.

You can use SEO Spider for free with several feature limitations like limited configurations, source code, and you can only scan 500 URLs per site. You can also use the full-version of the tool for around $160 annually.

Main Purpose: site analysis

 

9. Moz’s Pro Tools

Moz Pro is an all-in-one SEO suite widely regarded as one of the best in the business. The catch? it’s not exactly on the affordable side, as the cheapest package will cost you $99 monthly.

However, if you are serious about your SEO effort, the Moz Pro toolkit will be totally worth it, offering virtually anything you need to monitor and control your SEO tactics in just one dashboard. The Moz Pro can analyze various ranking signals from search visibility, competitor rankings, keyword analysis including local keywords, to the highly advanced SERP features.

Also unique to Moz Pro is the Crawl Test Tool. Here, Moz’s web crawler -the RogerBot- will crawl your URL and analyze up to 3,000 links. This is a pretty powerful feature on its own, and you will also receive a very detailed email report detailing the data for every crawled page.

As mentioned, not a cheap tool, but a great investment if you are serious about SEO.

Main Purpose: very detailed site analysis

Key Features:

• Virtually everything you need on SEO analytics from ranking signal analysis, keyword analysis, backlink analysis, traffic analysis to an advanced site crawler

 

10. Found SEO Audit Tool

This SEO Audit Tool by Found is a totally free and easy to use site analysis tools. With the SEO audit tool, you can easily identify common SEO issues on a specific URL where you can quickly take action to fix them.

As mentioned, it is very easy to use. Simply enter your site URL, and you will get an automated SEO audit report covering three main aspects:

• External link analysis: analyzing both the quantity and quality of your external links
• Content analysis: checking the content optimization aspects like keyword density and META data
• Technical: on-site optimization factors like XML sitemap and various others

Once you are done, you can also download the result as PDF for documentation and sharing purposes.

Main purpose: as the name suggests, SEO audit

 

End Words

The 10 SEO tools we have shared above are certainly not the only ones available. However, they are among the best and the most effective ones to assist you with your SEO activities. Keep in mind that each tool has its own advantages and disadvantages, covering different aspects of SEO. The key here is to combine several tools in one integrated approach to cover the different areas. While SEO can be a long-term, difficult process, having the right tools can tremendously help you. You can also request an SEO consultation to ensure you use them the right way.