10 Best SEO Audit Tools for 2024: Uncovering the Pros, Cons, and Hidden Gems

Best SEO audit tools 2024

1 – SE Ranking

jetoctopus vs seranking stands out as the best SEO audit tool for 2024, combining flexibility, comprehensiveness, and user-friendly reports. This affordable SEO tool offers incredible value, providing a wealth of features that cater to various needs.

SE Ranking Website Audit

I tested SE Ranking by conducting a complete website audit on Blogging Wizard. The tool efficiently crawled all 699 pages in about 5-10 minutes, which is impressive.

One feature I appreciate is the overall ‘health score’ presented before diving into the detailed report. This score offers a quick overview of your site’s optimization, making it especially beneficial for SEO consultants and marketing agencies to share with clients. You can track the health score over multiple audits to showcase improvements and your effectiveness as a consultant.

The comprehensive audit report is rich in detail. SE Ranking evaluates your site against over 130 parameters and neatly organizes the findings on one page, complete with graphs and charts for visual clarity. Plus, you can download the report to share with clients, customizing what to include to suit your needs.

Any issues that might affect your site’s ranking power are listed in a single, categorized list (errors, warnings, notices, etc.), which helps prioritize the most critical fixes. This ensures you focus on changes that will significantly impact your site’s performance rather than getting bogged down in minor details.

The audit report provides valuable insights into various aspects, including your site’s links, page indexation, and core web vitals. SE Ranking also includes dedicated tools for on-page SEO checks and SERP analysis, alongside other advanced SEO tools.

An added bonus is SE Ranking’s report builder, which allows you to compile data from their various tools—this feature is particularly useful if you serve clients.

Key Features

  • Comprehensive website auditing: Evaluate your entire site against 130+ parameters, identify and resolve technical SEO issues, and access raw crawl data and metrics with easy-to-read visualizations.
  • Export options: Download reports as PDF files, share them directly with partners or clients, or export data to Looker Studio.
  • Backlink audit: Analyze your backlinks or competitors’ backlinks, providing a complete list of referring domains along with insights such as follow/nofollow tags, domain authority, and anchor text.
  • SERP audit: Analyze search engine results pages for any keyword query to uncover useful insights into currently ranking pages.
  • On-page SEO checker: Evaluate any page against essential on-page ranking factors, with a detailed checklist for improvements.
  • White-label option: Customize SE Ranking with your domain and branding, allowing you to share access with clients as if it were your in-house software.
  • Additional marketing tools: Includes rank tracking, keyword research, content editing, social media
  • management, and review management.

Pros and Cons

  • Pros:
    • Exceptional value for money
    • Comprehensive audits covering 130+ parameters
    • Clean and easy-to-read visual data
    • Flexible audit and report export options
    • Includes various other SEO tools
  • Cons:
    • Pricing may increase for large websites due to page auditing limits

Pricing

Plans start at $55/month, with a 20% discount available for yearly billing. A 14-day free trial is also offered, making it one of the best SEO tools for small businesses and bloggers in 2024.


This tool is among the top SEO software for 2024, offering advanced and easy-to-use features, making it a prime choice in the best SEO audit tools and keyword research tools available today.

2 – Morning score

Morningscore is an excellent option for beginners looking for easy-to-use SEO tools in 2024. It simplifies the complexity of SEO auditing and even gamifies the process, making it both enjoyable and engaging.

Morningscore Homepage

Upon signing up, Morningscore scans your website to gather a wealth of relevant SEO data, including the keywords you rank for and your backlinks.

This data is used to calculate your ‘Morningscore’—a unique metric that estimates the amount you would have spent on Google Ads to achieve your current ranking for these keywords through SEO. Essentially, it provides a dollar value to your SEO efforts, serving as a great motivator.

By navigating to the Health tab, you’ll find a comprehensive audit report detailing your site’s SEO health. This report includes an overall health score out of 100, a list of identified issues that may be impacting your ranking power, and guidance on how to resolve these problems.

One of my favorite features is the personalized ‘health missions’ that Morningscore generates based on your audit data.

These gamified tasks invite you to complete specific SEO improvements, and as you accomplish each mission, you earn points and level up. Morningscore even quantifies the monetary value of each mission, keeping you motivated throughout the process.

This innovative feature is unique to Morningscore and is especially beneficial for those who may struggle with maintaining motivation in their SEO efforts.

Key Features

  • Website health check: Conduct a thorough audit of your site to identify and resolve issues, and receive an overall health score.
  • Content auditing: Analyze your website content for on-page issues such as poor title tags, thin content, missing alt tags, and broken images or links.
  • Missions: Gamify your SEO journey with personalized ‘missions,’ including health missions that focus on specific audit tasks.
  • Morningscore metric: Quickly see the estimated dollar value of your site’s SEO performance.
  • Additional SEO tools: Access link analysis, keyword research and tracking, SEO reporting, and more.

Pros and Cons

  • Pros:
    • Unique gamification of the SEO auditing process
    • Personalized health missions enhance motivation
    • Extremely user-friendly, perfect for beginners
  • Cons:
    • Audit reports may lack the detail found in other tools
    • The Morning score metric can occasionally underestimate actual SEO traffic

Pricing

Plans start at $49/month, with a two-month discount available for annual payments. You can also begin with a 14-day free trial.

Morningscore is one of the best SEO audit tools for 2024, making it a fantastic choice among the top SEO software for small businesses and bloggers. Its innovative features, including the best keyword research tools and advanced SEO tools, make it a valuable addition to your SEO toolkit.

3 – Surfer SEO

Surfer SEO is an essential tool for content auditing and on-page optimization in 2024. While it doesn’t perform technical website SEO checks like some other best SEO tools, it excels at auditing your written content, such as blog posts and web pages.

Surfer Audit

To get started, simply enter the keyword you’re aiming to rank for. Surfer analyzes the SERPs to identify commonalities among the top-ranking pages.

Next, it evaluates your written content, assessing how well-optimized it is by looking at key on-page signals like content length, number of headings, NLP entities coverage, keyword density, meta tags structure, and NLP sentiment.

All audited content receives an SEO optimization score ranging from 0 to 100, which updates in real-time as you make edits in the robust Content Editor.

Inside the content editor, you’ll find optimization suggestions that guide you on how to enhance your score. A recent update introduced an ‘auto-optimize’ button that allows Surfer’s built-in AI to optimize your content with a single click.

What I particularly appreciate about Surfer is that it not only provides your SEO score but also displays the average, highest, and lowest scores of your top competitors in the SERPs. This feature helps you set clear goals to outrank them.

However, I do have some concerns with Surfer, primarily regarding its pricing and usage limits for new customers. My editorial team extensively uses Surfer for Blogging Wizard and our other sites on a legacy plan that offers higher limits. If we weren’t on a legacy plan, I would likely consider using Frase for content optimization instead, although Frase lacks some of Surfer’s content auditing functionalities.

Key Features

  • Content audit: Evaluate all the content on your site to extract important metrics like content score, position, and traffic, identifying opportunities for improvement.
  • Optimization suggestions: Receive actionable suggestions for enhancing each piece of content to boost its content score and improve its ranking potential.
  • Content editor: Write and edit your content within the built-in content editor, benefiting from real-time SEO scoring and optimization suggestions.
  • Auto Optimize: Automatically enhance your written content, with AI adding relevant terms and phrases to improve your content score.

Pros and Cons

  • Pros:
    • The best tool for auditing written content
    • Leading on-page SEO optimization capabilities
    • Powerful AI-driven content editor
    • Analyzes SERPs to aid in ranking strategies
  • Cons:
    • Lacks technical, whole-site SEO audits
    • No free version or free trial is available
    • It can be expensive for new users
    • Low usage limits on most plans

Pricing

Plans start at $89/month, with savings of up to $480 available through annual billing. Additionally, you can try it with a 7-day money-back guarantee.

Surfer SEO is among the top SEO software for 2024, particularly favored by small businesses and bloggers looking for affordable and easy-to-use SEO tools. It stands out as one of the best SEO audit tools available, featuring advanced capabilities and excellent keyword research tools to enhance your SEO strategy.

4 – SEO PowerSuite

SEO PowerSuite is one of the most budget-friendly SEO audit tools available in 2024, yet it’s incredibly powerful. Unlike many other tools, however, you need to download it and run audits from software installed on your PC, which might be a drawback for some users.

SEO PowerSuite Website Auditor

Despite that, I highly recommend giving it a chance—you’ll likely be impressed by its capabilities!

SEO PowerSuite is an all-in-one solution comprising four toolkits: Website Auditor, Rank Tracker, SEO SpyGlass, and LinkAssistant. The Website Auditor crawls your site, examining every URL, image, video, and more, just like a search engine spider would. It identifies issues that could be hindering your ability to rank, such as indexation problems, broken links, slow site speed, and usability concerns, providing clear guidance on how to fix them.

The tool also includes an on-page SEO component that evaluates how well-optimized the content on each individual page is, focusing on factors like content length, meta tags, title tags, headings, and link anchors. Similar to Surfer, it calculates an SEO score for each page and suggests relevant terms and keywords to improve topic relevance, along with a built-in content editor for making adjustments.

Another feature I appreciate is the ability to schedule regular site audits, allowing the software to automatically run crawls and generate reports based on your timeline. You can even send white-label reports directly to your clients, making it ideal for SEO tools for small businesses.

Key Features

  • Site audit: Crawl your entire website like search engines do, identifying problems and opportunities for improvement.
  • Technical SEO factors: Discover technical SEO issues that negatively impact scores, such as oversized pages, broken links, server errors, and broken images.
  • Onsite SEO factors: Audit your content to enhance onsite SEO by fixing issues like long titles, empty meta descriptions, and duplicate content.
  • Visualization: Visualize your site architecture with a map illustrating how your website pages interlink.
  • Other features: Access additional SEO tools for rank tracking, competitor analysis, link building, SEO report generation, content optimization, and more.

Pros and Cons

  • Pros:
    • Excellent value for money
    • Generous free version (crawl up to 500 pages)
    • Detailed and comprehensive site audits
    • Provides on-page and backlink auditing
    • Feature-rich toolkit
  • Cons:
    • Requires download (not browser-based)
    • The user interface isn’t as streamlined as web-based tools
    • No monthly billing option (requires a one-year, two-year, or three-year license)

Pricing

A free plan is available, while paid plans start at $299/year, with savings of up to 34% when opting for a three-year plan.

SEO PowerSuite is regarded as one of the best SEO tools for 2024, particularly for small businesses and bloggers looking for affordable, easy-to-use SEO tools. Its comprehensive auditing capabilities make it one of the top SEO audit tools and a valuable resource in your SEO toolkit.

5 – Semrush

Semrush is one of the most expensive SEO audit tools on this list, but it offers excellent value with over 40 online marketing tools included. This comprehensive suite features a full site audit, backlink audit, and on-page SEO checker, making it one of the best SEO tools for 2024.

Semrush Site Audit

As you would expect from a premium, enterprise-grade solution, Semrush’s audit reports are more detailed than most, providing a clear overview of essential metrics such as your overall site health, crawlability, internal linking errors, and warnings. You can easily click on different sections of the report for in-depth explanations, including descriptions of each identified error and guidance on how to resolve them.

The backlink audit feature is particularly impressive, utilizing the largest backlink database in the world to uncover links that other tools might miss— and it does so quickly.

One of my favorite aspects of Semrush is its ability to compare past audits side-by-side, allowing you to track resolutions and metrics over time. This feature makes it easy to measure your SEO progress and demonstrate results to your clients, reinforcing its position among the best SEO audit tools for 2024.

Key Features

  • Site Audit: Conduct a comprehensive site audit to receive a report detailing your site health, errors/warnings/notices, crawl ability, internal linking, site performance, and more.
  • Log File Analyzer: Analyze your log files to understand how search engines interact with your site, including insights into your most crawled pages and any errors encountered during crawls.
  • On-Page SEO Checker: Review all the content on your site’s pages and receive suggestions for optimization based on competitive analysis.
  • Backlink Audit: Get detailed insights into each of your backlinks, including a list of referral domains and important metrics like toxicity score and anchor distribution.
  • Other Features: Access 40+ additional tools for digital marketing, including keyword research, link building, competitor analysis, content marketing, social media management, and more.

Pros and Cons

  • Pros:
    • Extremely powerful and feature-rich
    • Provides more detailed reports than most tools
    • Best-in-class backlink auditing capabilities
    • Extensive backlink and keyword databases
  • Cons:
    • Higher starting price than many other SEO audit tools
    • Some features may be unnecessary for certain users, leading to a bloated experience

Pricing

Plans start at $129.95/month, with savings of up to 17% available with annual billing. You can also get started with a free trial.

Overall, Semrush stands out as one of the top SEO software for 2024, making it a valuable asset for small businesses and bloggers looking for affordable SEO tools and advanced capabilities. Its extensive features, including the best keyword research tools and best SEO tracking tools, position it as a leading choice in the competitive SEO landscape.

6 – JetOctopus

JetOctopus is an enterprise-level solution designed for those serious about technical SEO audits. It offers log file analysis and deeper technical insights than most tools but may not be suitable for beginners due to its high starting price.

JetOctopus Homepage

jetoctopus vs seranking crawler thoroughly scans your site to identify technical issues that could be hindering your SEO, such as page duplicates, 404 errors, and low-speed pages. Additionally, the logs analyzer examines your site’s live logs stream and bot visits, providing a clearer picture of how search engines interact with your site.

The platform also features a backlinks module that audits your site’s link profile, along with a Google Search Console (GSC) console that tracks impressions, clicks, and other keyword insights.

JetOctopus truly shines when it comes to scanning large websites. Its crawler is faster than any other tool I’ve tested, and even its lowest-priced plan tier allows for crawling 500,000 pages and analyzing 2 million log lines, making it more than sufficient for even the largest sites.

Key Features

  • SEO Crawler: Utilize the crawler to audit your entire site, pinpointing issues that might negatively affect your SEO, including 404 errors, low page speed, orphan pages, and duplicate pages.
  • Logs Analyzer: Gain insights into how search engine bots crawl your site by analyzing the live logs stream.
  • Google Search Console Integration: Seamlessly integrate with GSC to access valuable insights on impressions, clicks, and keywords.
  • Backlinks Auditing: Receive a comprehensive list of your site’s referring backlinks and domains, complete with analysis.

Pros and Cons

  • Pros:
    • Ideal for enterprise-level SEO needs
    • Efficiently audits large sites quickly
    • High usage allowances, starting with a minimum of 500,000 page checks
    • Provides detailed log file analysis
  • Cons:
    • Very high starting price
    • Not well-suited for beginners

Pricing

Plans start at around $366/month when billed quarterly, with savings of $1,080 available for annual payments. There’s no free trial, but you can book a demo with JetOctopus.

In conclusion, JetOctopus is one of the top SEO software for 2024, making it an excellent choice for businesses seeking advanced SEO tools and the best SEO audit tools for 2024. While it may not cater to beginners, its capabilities make it a powerful asset for enterprises and seasoned professionals looking to optimize their SEO efforts.

7 – Nightwatch

Nightwatch is primarily known as a powerful keyword rank tracker, but its built-in Site Audit tool is equally impressive.

Nightwatch Site Audit

The Site Audit feature offers insights similar to other top SEO audit tools, providing a comprehensive list of issues, detailed descriptions, and clear instructions to help you resolve them. You’ll also receive an overall site health score along with insights into crawlability, site speed, and more.

One standout feature of Nightwatch is its ability to segment audit findings by URL, a functionality not commonly found in many other auditing tools. Additionally, you can view a summary of all previous audits to compare past results and track your improvements over time.

Of course, Nightwatch’s best feature is its rank-tracking tool. It complements the site audit tool perfectly, allowing you to monitor how the changes you make impact your ranking positions closely.

However, one downside is that Nightwatch’s pricing is based on the number of keywords you want to track rather than the number of pages you want to audit. If the rank tracker isn’t a priority for you, this may lead to paying for features you don’t need.

Key Features

  • Site Audit: Analyze, fix, and optimize your website’s technical and SEO performance using the Site Audit tool.
  • Site Health: Receive an overall score reflecting your site’s health based on the audit results.
  • Audit Comparison: Analyze and compare historical audits to evaluate your progress and identify areas for improvement.
  • Automated Reports: Create and export white-label reports quickly and easily to share with your clients.
  • Rank Tracker: Monitor your local SERP rankings for target keywords and receive notifications about any changes.

Pros and Cons

  • Pros:
    • Reliable and powerful site auditing capabilities
    • Ability to segment audit findings by URL
    • Effective keyword rank tracker that integrates well with the site audit
  • Cons:
    • The pricing structure is based on tracked keywords, not pages crawled
    • Limited features compared to some other tools

Pricing

Plans start at $39/month, with savings of up to 20% available with yearly billing. You can also try Nightwatch risk-free with a 14-day trial.

In summary, Nightwatch is one of the best SEO tools for 2024 and a great choice for those looking for affordable SEO tools that offer comprehensive site auditing features. It’s also a valuable resource for SEO tools for small businesses 2024 and best SEO tracking tools 2024, making it an essential tool for bloggers and digital marketers alike.

8 – Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is a powerful website crawler and log analyzer that provides detailed technical SEO audits. It’s a popular choice among SEO professionals, but like JetOctopus, it may not be the best fit for beginners.

Screaming Frog Overview

Screaming Frog is a desktop-based tool, meaning you’ll need to download the software to your computer to use it. It offers a free version that allows you to crawl up to 500 URLs, which is more generous than many other free SEO tools 2024 and could be sufficient for smaller websites. For larger needs, you can always opt for a paid upgrade.

This tool runs all the essential checks to identify issues like broken links, faulty redirects, indexation problems, duplicate pages, and poorly optimized titles and meta descriptions.

The results are presented in a detailed spreadsheet format, which can be easily exported to applications like Google Sheets or Excel. While some users might find the spreadsheet layout intimidating compared to the sleek visual reports provided by other best SEO audit tools 2024, others appreciate its ability to handle extensive data analysis.

Key Features

  • SEO Spider: Crawl and audit your site to extract valuable SEO data, helping you find, fix, and optimize issues that may be hindering your performance.
  • Log File Analyzer: Identify the URLs that Googlebot and other search engine bots are crawling, and their frequency, and gather data on large and slow pages.
  • Scheduled Audits: Set up crawls to run at your preferred intervals and automatically export the results to any location.
  • XML Sitemaps: Generate XML and image sitemaps to aid search engines in understanding and indexing your site more effectively.

Pros and Cons

  • Pros:
    • Fast and efficient site audits
    • Powerful website crawling and log analysis capabilities
    • Suitable for large sites
    • Generous free plan available
  • Cons:
    • Desktop-based (not accessible via a browser)
    • Results are displayed in spreadsheets rather than visual reports
    • It may not be ideal for beginners

Pricing

A free version is available, while the paid version starts at $259 per year for a one-site license.

In conclusion, Screaming Frog stands out as one of the best SEO tools for 2024 and is particularly valuable for those seeking advanced SEO tools 2024 and affordable SEO tools 2024. It’s an excellent choice for bloggers and small businesses looking to leverage the best keyword research tools 2024 and the best SEO tracking tools 2024.

9 – Serpstat

Serpstat is a robust and flexible SEO auditing tool that delivers highly detailed reports. While I find its user interface less appealing than some other options, its functionality is undeniably strong.

Serpstat Website Audit

Serpstat offers two distinct SEO audit tools: Site Audit and Page Audit.

  • Site Audit performs a comprehensive crawl of your entire website to identify on-site SEO issues. You receive a detailed description of each identified issue, along with prioritized instructions for fixing them. Additionally, you’ll find graphs and data visualizations to illustrate the audit results and your Domain Optimization score, which measures overall site optimization—similar to what other tools refer to as “site health.”
  • Page Audit focuses on individual pages to evaluate their optimization. It assesses on-page signals such as meta tags, heading optimization, page speed, Hreflang and lang attributes, external link optimization, image optimization, and more. These insights are comparable to those provided by other on-page auditing tools like Surfer. However, unlike Surfer, Serpstat does not include a built-in content editor for making changes directly.

Beyond its auditing capabilities, Serpstat is equipped with powerful keyword research tools, a competitor analysis tool, and more.

Key Features

  • Site Audit: Crawl all your site’s pages to identify and resolve issues that could be impacting performance.
  • Page Audit: Analyze individual pages and receive recommendations for on-page SEO improvements.
  • Keyword Research: Discover, analyze, and cluster keywords for your SEO campaigns, making it one of the best keyword research tools 2024.
  • AI Content Generation: Create SEO articles and meta tags using the power of generative AI.
  • Competitor Analysis: Audit your competitors’ websites to gain insights into their SEO strategies.

Pros and Cons

  • Pros:
    • Comprehensive website audits
    • Page-by-page audit functionality
    • Detailed reporting capabilities
    • Fairly affordable pricing
  • Cons:
    • Lacks a built-in content editor
    • The user interface could use improvement

Pricing

Plans start at $59/month, and you can save two months when you choose annual billing. A free trial is available to help you get started.

In summary, Serpstat stands out as one of the best SEO tools for 2024, offering powerful features for SEO audits and keyword research, making it an excellent choice for small businesses, bloggers, and anyone looking for affordable SEO tools 2024. It’s also part of the top SEO software for 2024 lineup, ideal for those seeking advanced SEO tools 2024 and best SEO tracking tools 2024.

10 – Google Search Console

Google Search Console is one of the best free SEO tools 2024 available, created by Google to assist website owners and SEO professionals in identifying and resolving issues that could negatively impact their search presence.

Google Search Console Homepage

One significant drawback of Google Search Console is that you need permission to access the properties (i.e., websites) you audit. This means you cannot use it to audit competitors, unlike some other tools we’ve discussed.

While it won’t provide specific guidance on how to optimize the actual content of your pages to achieve better rankings—such as analyzing on-page signals like title tags, keyword placement, meta descriptions, and internal links—it excels at identifying important technical issues. It checks for factors related to security, crawlability, indexing, mobile usability, and manual penalties. These elements are crucial for ranking well on Google, making it an essential part of your SEO toolkit.

Be sure to leverage Search Console’s coverage report to verify that all the pages you want to rank are correctly indexed in Google’s database. If they aren’t indexed, they won’t show up in the SERPs.

Additionally, the Page Experience, Core Web Vitals, and Mobile Usability auditing tools are extremely valuable. They inform you if Google identifies any issues affecting user experience on your website, such as page speed or mobile responsiveness, both of which are significant ranking factors.

Key Features

  • URL Inspection: Inspect any URL on your site to audit it and receive detailed crawl, index, and serving information directly from Google.
  • Performance Report: Monitor your website’s performance in Google search results and discover which keywords are driving traffic.
  • Indexing Insights: Understand how Google discovers and indexes your pages, and identify coverage issues that may hinder your rankings.
  • Mobile Usability Audit: Ensure your site is optimized for mobile by finding and fixing issues like small text, closely spaced clickable elements, and content that exceeds screen width.
  • Core Web Vitals: Audit your site’s Core Web Vitals, which measure user experience regarding loading time, interactivity, and visual stability.
  • Experience Reports: Access reports on page experience, Core Web Vitals, and mobile usability.

Pros and Cons

  • Pros:
    • Completely free SEO audit tool
    • Reliable indexing and crawlability data directly from Google
    • Useful Core Web Vitals reports
    • Provides valuable keyword ranking and traffic insights
  • Cons:
    • Requires permission for auditing websites (not suitable for competitor analysis)
    • Lacks on-page SEO auditing or suggestions
    • Does not offer as comprehensive site audit reports as other tools

Pricing

Google Search Console is entirely free to use, making it one of the most affordable SEO tools 2024 available. It deserves a spot among the top SEO software for 2024 and is an excellent choice for small businesses and bloggers looking for easy-to-use SEO tools 2024. Whether you’re in search of the best SEO audit tools 2024, best keyword research tools 2024, or best SEO tracking tools 2024, Google Search Console is a must-have resource in your SEO arsenal.

Conclusion

These are my top picks for the best SEO tools 2024 available this year. Your ideal choice will depend on the specific audits you wish to conduct—whether they involve technical SEO, on-page SEO, or backlink audits—as well as the features you require, such as automated audits and reports, log file analysis, or content editing capabilities. Additionally, consider your budget when making your selection.

While you’re here, don’t miss our roundup of content optimization tools that can help prepare your website content for search engines, giving it the best chance of ranking well. You may also want to explore our collection of SEO reporting tools and check out the latest search engine optimization statistics for valuable insights.

By leveraging these top SEO software for 2024, you can enhance your website’s performance, making it easier to attract organic traffic and achieve your digital marketing goals.

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