7 Best SEO Audit Tools for Small Businesses

Semrush covers all SEO aspects — on-page, off-page, and technical — meaning it audits your website’s content and technical aspects. It checks everything from your content’s missing keywords to broken links. It also helps you research keywords you can add to your site to help it appear on Google more easily.

For instance, say you own an artisan cafe. Semrush can give you the best keywords or key phrases, like “What is artisan coffee” or “Best artisan coffee shops,” to add to your website or blogs to help them rank higher in Google search results.

Because Semrush has a free-forever plan, I find it the best website audit tool for any small business with one site. It’s free to use all its auditing tools, as long as you just have one website to manage (plans only increase if you have multiple websites). There’s a bit of a learning curve, but after spending some time exploring its tools, it should be easy enough to navigate.

SE Ranking is the best SEO audit tool for checking your website keywords. Upon onboarding, you’ll be prompted to enter up to 750 keywords you want to track on your website, and it’ll show you their search volume and average ranking positions.

From there, you can use your insights to see which keywords are helping your site rank on Google and which ones you need to trim. It’s the most detailed tool for analyzing your site’s keywords.

You can even analyze certain blog topics you want to write about, and it’ll give you a comprehensive brief of the best keywords to include in your blog to help it rank on Google, as well as your site’s biggest competitors. Overall, it has the most comprehensive keyword analysis tools, so it’s the best SEO audit software if you write blogs and want to focus specifically on growing your content’s reach online.

Similarweb isn’t so much for evaluating the technical side of your website (although it does a technical site audit on paid plans). But it’s one of the best SEO audit tools specifically for researching your audience and their interests. Its dashboard lets you see your website’s audience demographics, including age, gender, location, how long they spend on your site, and how many pages they visit.

More importantly, it also shows you their topic interests and other sites they visit, essential for publishing content that resonates with your target audience. It also lets you see your website’s total monthly visits on a graph compared to your competitors. It’s overall a handy, beginner-friendly tool for seeing your website’s performance over time and learning about your online audience.

The HubSpot Website Grader is one of my favorite website auditing software because of its convenience, even if it isn’t as comprehensive as Semrush or SE Ranking. It’s completely free, with no signup required, and it gives an overview of your site’s on-page and technical SEO performance, including its security and mobile-friendliness. And it’s one of the easiest tools — there are no complicated dashboards to navigate.

It’s for these reasons that I find HubSpot Website Grader a great option for quick site speed and performance checks. It’s ideal for those who don’t need a deep dive into a website’s keywords and technical issues but just need a quick checkup to ensure everything’s working or see what needs immediate attention. It also offers recommendations on what to do next to improve your site.

HubSpot Website Grader is 100% free as part of HubSpot’s suite of free tools.

SpyFu has some of the best SEO audit tools specifically for seeing who your website’s top competitors are and how your content can outrank theirs on Google. The dashboard shows all your top competitors for organic and paid clicks, the keywords you’re sharing, and the keywords unique to your website. Aside from your competitors, it also shows your website’s traffic over time and how many keywords it’s ranking for in Google search results.

However, SpyFu’s biggest drawback is that it doesn’t do any technical website audits, so I only recommend it as a competitor analysis tool. It doesn’t check your site’s links, website speed, or any of those technical details. Use it instead to find out who your website’s biggest competitors are and see all the content gaps you can fill to get ahead of them on Google.

Screaming Frog has the most comprehensive technical SEO audits, so it’s definitely the best technical website audit software. It’s also free for the first 500 URLs — enough for most small business websites — and runs a comprehensive check on your site’s broken links, metadata, sitemaps, and website architecture. In other words, it checks all the essential stuff of your site’s technical SEO.

The main disadvantages of Screaming Frog are that it requires installation on your computer, and the interface can be complicated to navigate. As such, the best way to use it is for regular maintenance checks on your website’s technicalities. However, it doesn’t give recommendations, so you’ll need more advanced technical SEO know-how to get the most out of it.

Your backlinks play a role in your Google ranking, and Moz’s Inbound Links tool is a handy resource that shows you all of those links in a neat list. Plus, it shows the anchor text with those links, aka the text where those links appear. It’s a helpful way to understand how your site is being used as a resource across the web.

If you publish a lot of blogs as a way to get your website discovered, Moz’s Inbound Links tool is invaluable. It’s also free for 10 keyword queries per month and is an easy way to see your top-performing posts through traffic and external links — and build your content around those top-performing posts.