Technical aspects of SEO are usually overshadowed by content creation and backlink building. But, if you ignore the technical side of SEO, you are going to seriously hamper your website’s performance. Technical SEO is all the things that make up a website that helps search engines crawl, index and render the site as efficiently as possible. Regularly auditing your site’s technical SEO health is important to keep your website high performing. Luckily, there are plenty of technical SEO tools that can help simplify the process of complex audits and help you identify and fix issues more easily.

In this guide, we will explore how technical SEO tools make complex audits simple. We will also show you some of the best tools available in the market and what they can do to help you boost your website’s SEO health.

Technical SEO Audits are Important.

Before jumping into the tools, let’s first understand the importance of conducting regular technical SEO audits:

1. Site Performance: A slow loading website will increase the bounce rate of your website, and this will affect the user experience and SEO rankings.
2. Crawlability & Indexing: Your website needs to be crawled by search engines like Google and indexed their content. This can prevent certain pages from getting indexed, which is bad for your site’s SEO.
3. Mobile Optimization: As mobile searches are on the rise, it is crucial to make sure your website is mobile friendly to rank well and please your users.
4. Security: User trust and SEO rankings depend on a secure website (HTTPS). If you make a technical SEO audit, you can identify security issues.
5. User Experience (UX): Rankings are greatly influenced by a good user experience. Broken links, missing images, improper redirects these things can ruin UX.

Types of Technical SEO Issues

Technical SEO can be quite complicated and there are many different issues that can affect a website’s performance. Here are some of the common problems that need attention during an SEO audit:

1. Crawl Errors: These are when search engine bots cannot crawl a page or the entire website.
2. Broken Links: Some search engines will penalize you for dead or broken links, thus leading to poor user experience.
3. Duplicate Content: Having the same or same content on several pages weakens your SEO efforts.
4. Site Speed Issues: Slow page load times can damage your rankings and user experience.
5. Mobile Usability: Search engines and users are looking for mobile optimized websites.

Technical SEO Tools: How They Help Simplify Site Audits

A manual technical SEO audit can be a tedious and time consuming process. This is where the SEO tools come into play. They allow you to:

Identify technical issues quickly: Automated reports allow you to find possible issues with your website, without spending time checking each page manually.

• Fix issues efficiently: SEO tools can identify problems and give actionable solutions and even help you fix the problems directly.
• Gain in-depth insights: There are many tools that will give you detailed analytics about the health of your website’s SEO and will make suggestions on how to improve your rankings.
• Track SEO progress: You can also track audits over time to see how you’re improving and what areas you can work on improving.

Top Technical SEO Tools to Use

Now that we know the value of technical SEO tools, let’s take a look at some of the best tools to simplify audits and fix SEO issues.

1. Google Search Console

Google Search Console (GSC) is the most popular technical SEO tool used by many people, providing a full set of features to audit, monitor, and troubleshoot a site.

Key Features:

• Crawl Errors: GSC will find crawl errors on your site and fix them for you quickly.
• Indexing Issues: It tells you how many of your pages Google has indexed.
• Mobile Usability: Mobile usability is a critical aspect of mobile first indexing and GSC gives us insights into it.
• Search Performance: You can see view clicks, impressions, and rankings to see how you’ve performed on SEO.

Why It’s Great for Technical SEO: Google Search Console is connected directly to Google’s search engine so it’s an important tool to understand how your site is performing in the search results.

2. Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a website audit tool that crawls your site and gives you detailed information about some technical SEO issues.

Key Features:

• Crawl Reports: The in depth crawl report of Screaming Frog will identify broken links, redirects and duplicate content.
• Page Speed Analysis: It also helps you optimize for better performance and analyze your pages load time.
• HTML Improvements: It looks for missing title tags and meta descriptions, and other important basics which are important for SEO.
• Why It’s Great for Technical SEO: For large scale websites, this tool is great, as you can crawl up to 500 pages for free. Screaming Frog is a great all in one tool for technical SEO audits and gives you insights into nearly every aspect of your site.

3. Ahrefs Site Audit Tool

As you can see, Ahrefs is famous for its backlink analysis but its Site Audit Tool also has superb technical SEO auditing features.

Key Features:

• Crawl Reports: It provides detailed crawl reports with broken links and server errors or a missing meta description flagged.
• SEO Health Score: Ahrefs gives you an overall SEO health score that lets you know how strong or weak your site is.
• Site Speed: It is a tool to check the performance of your site and provide suggestions to make your site load faster and give better user experience.

Why It’s Great for Technical SEO: Ahrefs is a powerful SEO analysis and recommendations platform. This is an excellent tool for users who want to do backlink analysis and technical SEO insights simultaneously.

4. SEMrush Site Audit Tool

Another popular SEO tool with a Site Audit Tool to detect and fix technical SEO problems in your website is SEMrush.

Key Features:

• Crawl Errors: Helps identify crawlability and indexing issues that are critical to have search engines able to see all your important pages.
• Mobile Optimization: It tests mobile usability and provides suggestions to improve mobile performance.
• Security Issues: Security issues such as HTTP/HTTPS issues are identified by SEMrush and your site is secured.

Why It’s Great for Technical SEO: SEMrush offers a complete audit tool for all the major technical SEO aspects. For businesses looking for a comprehensive solution, it’s a top choice.

5. Moz Pro Site Crawl

For those who are new to SEO and want a user friendly interface, Moz Pro is another great tool for in depth technical SEO analysis.

Key Features:

• Crawl Issues: Moz Pro checks for issues such as missing the titles, broken links and duplicate content.
• Page Speed Analysis: It analyzes the speed of page loading and provides tips for performance.
• Link Health: Moz Pro helps to monitor internal and external link health to ensure no issues that could impact SEO exist.

Why It’s Great for Technical SEO: Moz Pro’s Site Crawl is a simple, easy to use tool with a clean interface that makes it easy to identify and fix technical SEO issues.

Technical SEO Tools FAQs

1. What are website audit tools? Website audit tools are software that looks at your website for technical issues like crawl errors, broken links, slow loading times and mobile optimization problems.
2. When it’s time to do a technical SEO audit? You should do a technical SEO audit at least quarterly or when you do significant changes to your website.
3. Are technical SEO tools able to fix problems automatically? There are some tools like Screaming Frog that will give you suggestions for fixes, and others like SEMrush that will let you fix things directly in the platform.
4. Do small websites need technical SEO tools? Yes, even small websites need to do regular technical audits to achieve the best possible performance and search engine visibility.
5. What role do technical SEO tools play in mobile optimization? Mobile usability issues are identified by technical SEO tools and ways to improve mobile friendliness are suggested for rankings.

Conclusion

Technical SEO is a part of any website’s overall SEO strategy. Using the right technical SEO tools will help you work more efficiently to audit your site and fix issues. No matter if you need basic crawl insights from Google Search Console or are looking for more advanced tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush there is a tool for every need and budget.