6 of the Best SEO Tools for Auditing & Monitoring Your Website in 2022
Updated: Feb 15
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of optimizing a website so that it ranks higher in search engine results pages for certain keywords or phrases. This can be a great way to boost traffic to your website and increase sales. In this blogpost, we will look at five SEO tools that can help you improve your website's SEO.
1. HubSpot Website Grader
The goal of marketing is to generate traffic and qualified leads via the company’s website. That’s why, as marketers, we need to understand exactly what we can do to improve the SEO of that website.
With HubSpot’s Website Grader, simply enter the URL of your website to automatically receive a report card with actionable insights about your SEO efforts. From there, you can sign up for the HubSpot Academy SEO course that teaches you how to improve your website's SEO, user experience (UX), and more.
With the HubSpot Website Grader, you can:
Website performance: Learn about your website’s performance in seconds, and identify specific performance issues and receive clear, actionable feedback on how you can fix them.
On-demand support: Receive how-to education on how you can improve your website.
Improve specific website issues: Gain access to a five-lesson HubSpot Academy course on Website Optimization so you can understand how to improve upon your website’s specific problem areas.
Optimize for mobile: Discover how to optimize your website for mobile.
Boost web security: Learn how you can implement website security best practices.
Enhance the user experience: Personalize your website’s UX to create a delightful experience for users.
2. Google Search Console
Google Search Console has a number of tools available to help you appear in the SERPs for the search terms and phrases your target audience is looking for.
If you’re the owner of a business or an SEO on your marketing team, Search Console can help you conduct an initial SEO analysis from scratch or update your existing SEO strategy with fresh keywords. Google Search Console monitors, debugs, and optimizes your website — and you don't need to know how to code to benefit from this tool.
Here are some examples of website elements Google Search Console will teach you about and help you optimize:
Keywords: Learn about the keywords your webpages are currently ranking for.
Crawl Errors: Identify any crawl errors that exist on your website.
Mobile Responsiveness: Understand how mobile-friendly your website is and discover opportunities to improve the mobile experience for your users.
Google Index: See how many of your web pages are in Google’s Index (if they aren't in Google's index, you can use the tool's URL Inspection Tool to submit a page for indexing).
Analytics and Metrics: The website-related metrics that matter most to you, like clicks, impressions, average click-through rate (CTR), and average position.
3. Google Analytics
Although Google Analytics has a paid version, the free version of the product can help you manage your website’s SEO — this is especially true if you pair Google Analytics with Google Search Console. In doing so, all of your website’s SEO data will be centrally located and compiled, and you can use queries to identify areas for improvement with the keywords and phrases that you want your website and web pages to rank for.
Other ways that you can use the free version of Google Analytics to understand and improve your SEO are:
Filtering your referral traffic: Get rid of the traffic that has the potential of ruining SEO reports, such as fake traffic.
Compare organic versus non-organic website traffic: Understand where your visitors are coming from and optimize those channels to increase traffic.
Determine engagement metrics: Use Site Content Reports to determine engagement metrics on each web page, engagement for the directories and pages on your website, page exit metrics, as well as acquisition, behavior, and conversion of landing pages.
Review the Multi-Channel Report’s Assisted Conversions feature: Identify which of your channels led to the most conversions and the value they bring to your business.
4. Internet Marketing Ninjas
Internet Marketing Ninjas is an SEO-focused company with a variety of free tools you can use to compare your website against the competition, optimize web pages for certain keywords, generate meta tags, and increase organic traffic to your website.
Here are some examples of the free Internet Marketing Ninja SEO tools you can take advantage of:
Broken link tool: Identify broken links and redirects and use the site crawl feature to generate an XML sitemap of your website.
Image metadata: See all of your page links (external, internal, etc.) on your web pages to review what’s working well and what’s broken or needs an update.
On-page optimization tool: Use this to evaluate your web page content, meta information, and internal links.
Side-by-side comparison: Compare the SEO of your web pages versus a competitor’s web pages.
Page load time: Analyze page-load time and how long each component of a web page takes to fully display.
5. Google Trends
Traditional SEO tools like the ones we've already discussed are great for conducting research and audits when your business is already established. But what if you're starting a new business venture and want to know what popular industries, topics, and ideas people are exploring? Google Trends is a great place to explore untapped potential that can yield a large keyword landscape for your website.
You'll want to note that Google Trends isn't where you'll get granular data. This tool performs best when you use it as a compass to set a direction for your SEO strategy, and then pair those insights with a more robust software like HubSpot's SEO Marketing Tool.
Here's what you should look for in Google Trends:
Trends: Look for trends in specific countries or regions of the world.
Popular topics: Find popular people and long tail keywords related to them.
Comparisons: Compare and contrast trends over time.
6. Check My Links
Check My Links is a Google Chrome extension that you can use to ensure your links on both internal or external web pages work. For instance, if you were to search a term on Wikipedia, Check My Links would be able to tell you how many links that Wikipedia page has in total and how many of those links are broken.
This is helpful because you can make corrections to broken links immediately (or hopefully, before a page goes live). Check My Links is ideal for developers, content editors, and web designers according to its creators.
Here are some more examples of what Check My Links can do:
Identify broken links: Check each link on your webpages and identify all invalid links.
Auto-highlight issues: Quickly see the good links in green and the broken links in red.
Export broken links for further analysis: Copy all of your bad links to your clipboard in one click.