Top Tools to Use for SEO Auditing

You know you have an SEO problem, but don’t know how to fix it, or maybe you just don’t know where to start. What’s a B2B marketer to do? A fantastic way to start is by performing a site audit.

A site audit is an in-depth evaluation of your website, done by using a variety of online tools, with the goal of gaining an understanding of how to improve your page’s natural search ranking. While a site audit is a bit time consuming, the methodical procedure of performing it forces you to take a close look at many elements of your website, and then document and prioritize issues that come up.

I’m going to take you through the tools I used when doing a site audit of Optify.net.

Wayback Machine: This free tool tells you when your site was first crawled and how many times it has been crawled since then. You can even see exactly what days your site was crawled. Although there is nothing you can do to change when your domain was registered, this is still good information to have.

Open Site Explorer: Brought to you by SEO Moz, this tool is used in a site audit to tell you your page’s authority, inbound link quantity and quality, and what anchor text currently exists. This tool has basic free features like domain and page authority scores. To get your full link quantity, quality, and anchor text, you have to be a member.

Optify Keywords: The best way for me to look at keyword performance is by using Optify’s keyword marketing tool. Keyword examination is important because it helps us identify gaps in content, site structure, and link strategy. Optify helps your keyword strategy be at it’s greatest potential.

Optify Pages: One of the greatest features of Optify is being able to see what’s bringing down your SERP (search engine results page) ranking on a page by page basis. After assigning a focus keyword to a page, Optify’s pages application creates an actionable list of improvements you can make that will automatically boost the likelihood of that page being on the golden 1st SERP.

Site Function in search: By entering “site:http://www.yoururlhere.com” into a search engine like Google or Bing you are able to see how many of your pages under that domain they have indexed. This is a key to understanding where your page stands in a particular engine. You can also scan through the pages to make sure no glaring errors exist.

Google Webmaster tools: Google Webmaster Tools has an abundance of tools that are perfect to use when performing your site audit. The Google Webmaster tools I use for performing a site audit are duplicate content, HTTP crawl errors, 404 page errors, robot exclusions, and sitemap xml. These tools are designed to make sure your site is as “healthy” as possible. Webmaster Tools are free to use, but to begin using them you have to download a HTML verification file and upload it to your website.

Google page speed: A fast loading page means better usability, a metric that search engines pay a lot of attention to. Google’s Page Speed application test analyzes your website and then offers fixes, already prioritized. This site audit tool does almost all the work for you, all you have to do is make the changes.

All of these are great site audit tools. The key is to use each one effectively and then spend time analyzing and prioritizing your findings. You can’t use tools for every part of a site audit, but these site audit tools make the harder parts a whole lot easier.

–Blake – @BlakeCrist

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