The 9 best SEO audit tools in 2025

Check the Mobile Friendliness and Page Speed section to identify actionable suggestions for optimizing performance. If you’re interested in exploring Core Web Vitals of a single page, navigate to the Page Audit section and access the Technical Audit tab. Before you choose any of these solutions, I recommend checking each orphan page with Google Analytics to see if it gets traffic. Once the crawl is complete, you’ll see orphan pages marked with grey nodes in the site structure. You just need to go through these pages and clean up unnecessary links. Prolonging existing redirects to the new site can hinder Google’s ability to reach the intended page and waste the crawl budget.

Key Elements of a Successful SEO Strategy

Firstly, you will need to access Google Search Console, which is the go-to tool for getting basic audit data and assessing your rankings from Google’s perspective. Prior to starting with an SEO audit checklist, you need to set up analytics tools. When I was leading marketing for PlushCare, a telemedicine provider that was acquired for $450M, we did some crazy things in the name of search engine optimization (SEO). Google Search Console is one of the best free SEO tools for analytics. It shows you how Google and most search engines see your site.

Or the whole website may be poorly indexed and considered spammy due to the huge number of duplicates. Essentially, orphan pages are lost pages, no longer connected to the internal linking structure of the website. To find all broken links on your website, scroll down to Broken links in the Links section of the Site Audit module. Check out the blue nodes for redirects and the red ones for broken links. And if you see any lonely grey nodes hanging around, those are your orphan pages. In the Site Audit module, explore the Indexing and crawlability section, namely Resources with 4xx status code, Resources with 5xx status code, and 404 page set up correctly.

For example, the core update in August 2018 appeared to largely affect health, fitness, and medical sites that failed to demonstrate expertise, authoritativeness, and trust (E-A-T). In fact, Barry Schwartz, a prominent blogger, dubbed it the “Medic” update. If it says anything other than “No issues detected,” read our Google penalties guide. To check for manual actions, go to the Manual actions report in Google Search Console. The fastest way to check whether you’ve been hit by an update is to plug your URL into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and see if any traffic drops align with an update. Once you’ve authorized with Google, selected your site, and clicked Import, the audit will start.

Test your site’s navigation to ensure intuitive menus and internal SEO Anomaly search bars produce accurate results. Evaluate whether CTAs are placed effectively, particularly above the fold or after key content. Avoid heavy-handed popups—test exit-intent tools to ensure prompts or discounts aren’t disruptive. Collect insights from these tests to refine your site for better usability and interaction. In its recommendations, you’ll find many things to fix, like pages blocked by robots.txt or issues with internal linking. The tools also review the quality and relevance of your backlinks and give you ideas on how to get high-quality new links.

SEO Analysis >>

Site speed has become quite a hot topic among the SEO community in recent times, especially after Google announced that mobile speed is indeed a ranking factor. As you can see from the image above, links are broken down into indexable and not indexable and you can find the same issues across both categories. However, each issue has a different predetermined importance level—depending on whether the link is indexable or not. Linking to credible sources makes your own website more credible to both visitors and search engines. This is because you show that your information is backed up with sound research.

• Next, look at the anchor text distribution of your backlinks.
• The second step is to search for your brand name on Google and review the results.
• We’ll explain the key features behind each one, how it can help you make your website more search-engine friendly, and how to get access.
• So I’d recommend filtering the sheet to only show images that are missing alt text and included in at least one post.
• As a business owner, you need to ensure your backlink profile is healthy and high-quality to achieve (and keep) high rankings in the SERPs.

The more broken links you have, the higher the likelihood that Google may treat your content as spam. The first step in our SEO audit checklist is to run an in-depth site scan to gather all website pages and resources like CSS, images, videos, JavaScript, and PDFs. This approach sets the stage for a thorough analysis of your entire site. As you know, Google regularly introduces core updates that can impact your rankings. Systematic audits and ranking checks ensure that you can quickly notice such updates and figure out your next move. GrowthBar’s intelligent algorithms weight different factors in the SERP and deliver a delightful dashboard and roadmap for improving your blog post.