If you run a small business or nonprofit, figuring out the meaning of terms like ‘XML sitemap’ and ‘crawlability’ probably wasn’t what you had in mind when you envisioned your day-to-day tasks. Alas, if you want your website to rank well and drive organic traffic, sooner or later you’ll need to perform an audit on your SEO strategy and figure this stuff out. Fortunately, there are several technical SEO audit tools available to make the process easier than it sounds.
In this article, we’ll discuss:
- Why you need technical SEO audit tools
- Keyword analysis with technical SEO audit tools
- Performance testing with SEO audit tools
- Calculating ROI with technical SEO audit tools
- How to use Slam’s technical SEO audit tools
- Case studies to see technical SEO audit tools in action
- How to perform a technical SEO audit with Slam
There are many SEO benefits for small business websites–or any website, for that matter. Whether your site is brand new or has been online for years, it’s a good idea to ensure it meets current best practices in search engine optimization. Otherwise, you may have a hard time ranking high in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Here at Slam Media Lab, one of our primary agency objectives is to help nonprofits, small businesses, and founder-led startups stay competitive with improved search rankings and a consistent flow of organic traffic.
In addition to working directly with clients on their SEO strategy, we also offer several free and low-cost technical SEO audit tools available for download on our products page.
For DIY enthusiasts, our Technical SEO Audit Template is a great resource that integrates nicely with many of the tools we’ll discuss in this article.
And if you’d rather leave the technical stuff to the experts, you can hire our award-winning web design agency to conduct a technical SEO audit on your website and ensure everything is working as it should.
Why You Need Technical SEO Audit Tools
While SEO terms are jargon-heavy and sound very technical, the purpose of search engine optimization is remarkably straight-forward: to create a great user experience by incentivizing accessibility and best practices in design and development.
Even if the term on-page technical SEO sounds intimidating, it’s an important element of web design that will ultimately improve your site’s visibility and provide a more pleasant user experience to your visitors.
Now, let’s take a closer look at why you should perform a technical SEO audit and use tools to do it.
Why You Should Do a Technical SEO Audit
The purpose of a technical SEO audit is to identify and address issues impacting your website’s visibility and performance. This is done by assessing the site’s technical elements and infrastructure, including:
- Website speed and performance
- Mobile responsiveness
- Website structure and navigation
- Secure Socket Layer (SSL)
- XML sitemaps
- Structured data markup
- Crawling and indexing
- Core Web Vitals
Performing an audit of these technical elements will help ensure your website is structured and designed according to SEO best practices.
Regular SEO technical audits improve the overall health of your website, making it easier for search engines to ‘see’ and rank your site. This will ultimately increase your organic traffic and improve user satisfaction among visitors.
Why You Should Use Tools for Your Technical SEO Audit
It’s no secret that SEO is confusing and complicated. Even for seasoned experts, manually tracking things like site speed and URL structure are tedious, time-consuming tasks. Moreover, with so many technical elements to review, the risk of human error is very real. That’s why we recommend using technical SEO audit tools to streamline the process.
Technical SEO audit tools are more efficient, precise, and comprehensive than manual methods. They help quickly identify technical issues, crawl errors, and optimization opportunities while automating complex processes that would otherwise take up lots of time. Furthermore, they generate detailed reports, making it easier to access actionable insights and focus on strategic decision-making.
By using technical SEO audit tools to streamline your auditing process, you’ll have access to better data and more time to focus on other aspects of your business. For busy founders and managers, it’s a no-brainer!
Technical SEO Audit Tools for Keyword Analysis
In SEO, keyword analysis is the process of researching, selecting, and evaluating keywords or phrases that are relevant to your website. You can think of it as an evidence-based guessing game, in which you make informed guesses about what your target audience is searching for on the internet. Then, you tailor your content to match your audience's needs.
In this section, we’ll introduce you to three great tools for analyzing the success of your keyword strategy:
Analyzing and optimizing keywords will help improve your website’s visibility and attract relevant traffic, which will ultimately boost your overall SEO performance.
As an added bonus, these tools integrate beautifully with our Technical SEO Audit Template.
For more on choosing the right keywords, check out Slam’s guide on how to choose keywords for SEO.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a valuable technical SEO audit tool for keyword analysis. Here’s how to use it in 4 steps:
- Traffic Sources: Navigate to ‘Acquisition’ > ‘All Traffic’ > ‘Channels’ and analyze the organic search traffic. Then, review the keywords driving traffic under the ‘Organic Search’ channel.
- Keyword Queries: In the ‘Acquisition’ section, go to ‘Search Console’ > ‘Queries.’ Take a look at the queries users entered to find your site.
- Conversion Tracking: Navigate to ‘Conversions’ > ‘Goals’ > ‘Overview’ and analyze keyword conversion rates.
- Query Expansion: Use the ‘Query Expansion’ feature in Google Analytics to discover related keywords that users often search along with your target keywords.
By leveraging these features in Google Analytics, you’ll gain crucial insights into your keyword strategy.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free technical SEO audit tool that makes it easier to monitor your site’s performance in search results.
Here are some GSC features you can leverage during your technical SEO audit:
- Performance Report
- Query Analysis
- Pages Report
- Average Click Positions
- Search Appearance
For keyword analysis, GSC is a great tool that provides important insights into user queries, page performance, and overall site visibility in SERPs. This information is essential for identifying optimization opportunities during a technical SEO audit.
Ahrefs
If you prefer an all-in-one technical SEO audit tool and don’t mind paying for it, Ahrefs is a great option to consider. It’s a popular toolset that is widely used for website analysis and digital marketing.
To use Ahrefs for keyword analysis during a technical SEO audit, follow these five steps:
- Keyword Explorer: Use Ahrefs' Keyword Explorer to find relevant keywords for your industry. Take a look at search volume, difficulty, and potential.
- Competitor Analysis: Identify competitor keywords by entering their domain in Ahrefs' Site Explorer. Analyze their top-performing keywords for strategic insights.
- Content Gap Analysis: Use Ahrefs' Content Gap tool to identify keywords your competitors rank for, but you don't. This reveals content opportunities.
- Rank Tracker: Monitor keyword rankings over time using Ahrefs' Rank Tracker. Identify ranking fluctuations and prioritize keywords for improvement.
- Keyword Lists: Create keyword lists within Ahrefs to organize and track targeted keywords, monitoring their performance and making data-driven decisions.
By integrating Ahrefs into your technical SEO audit, you’ll gain important insights into the success of your keyword strategy and how it compares to your competitors.
Technical SEO Audit Tools for Performance Testing
Let’s say you want to test the effectiveness of your nonprofit SEO strategy. Is your website well-structured and easy to navigate? Does it load quickly on mobile and desktop devices alike? The process of asking and answering these questions is called performance testing.
Performance testing in a technical SEO audit refers to the process of evaluating a website’s technical and functional aspects to ensure everything is performing optimally. More specifically, performance testing looks at the various elements that impact user experience and search engine rankings.
In this section, we’ll review four technical SEO audit tools used for performance testing:
These technical SEO audit tools will help make performance testing a relatively stress-free endeavor.
Google Search Console
In addition to keyword analysis, you can also use Google Search Console for performance testing during a technical SEO audit.
Here are a few aspects of performance you can evaluate with GSC:
- Core Web Vitals
- Mobile usability
- Indexing issues
- Sitemaps
- URL inspection
You can also integrate GSC with PageSpeed Insights to get additional insights into your website’s performance, including suggestions for improvement.
PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights is a web performance tool provided by Google. It helps you assess the speed and user experience of your website’s pages on both mobile and desktop devices. The tool gives you a performance score along with recommendations to improve loading speed.
Key features of PageSpeed Insights include:
- Performance score out of 100
- Field data on metrics like LCP, CLS, and FID
- Simulated lab data to identify areas for improvement
- Diagnostics on rendering time, server response, and resource optimization
This is a valuable tool for optimizing web performance and ensuring your website loads quickly while providing a great user experience.
Lighthouse
Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool designed by Google for improving the quality of web pages. It generates reports with scores and actionable recommendations to help you optimize your website for increased user satisfaction.
Key features of Lighthouse include:
- Performance Audit
- Accessibility Audit
- Progressive Web App (PWA) Audit
- SEO Audit
- Best Practices Audit
To use Lighthouse for performance testing, simply navigate to Chrome DevTools and click on ‘Run audits’ to get started.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is a popular desktop software used for website crawling and SEO analysis. It’s widely used by SEO professionals, webmasters, and digital marketers to gather data on various aspects of a website’s structure, content, and performance.
Screaming Frog primarily addresses crawling concerns. When used in combination with other tools, it’s a great resource for conducting performance testing.
Here’s how to do it in five steps:
- Crawl your website to collect data on URLs, page titles, meta descriptions, etc.
- Identify potential performance issues (large images, excessive redirects, etc.).
- Take identified URLs and analyze them using PageSpeed Insights
- Check for redirect chains or loops
- Verify that canonical tags are correctly implemented
While Screaming Frog doesn’t directly provide performance metrics, integrating it with dedicated performance testing software turns it into a powerful technical SEO audit tool.
Technical SEO Audit Tools for Calculating ROI
Imagine, for a moment, that you’ve invested a significant amount of time and resources into developing a small business local SEO strategy for your website. At some point, you’ll need to determine whether your efforts have paid off. This is where calculating ROI comes into the technical SEO audit process.
In this section, we’ll take a look at three technical SEO audit tools you can use to measure SEO:
Calculating your ROI is essential for ensuring your SEO strategy aligns with your objectives. At the end of the day, SEO is a strategic investment. You need to know whether it’s paying off!
Hubspot
Hubspot is an all-in-one platform for marketing, sales, and customer service. It offers an extensive array of tools and features designed to streamline marketing efforts, among other things.
To leverage Hubspot’s SEO-focused features when calculating ROI, follow these steps:
- Set up HubSpot Analytics
- Integrate Google Analytics with Hubspot
- Navigate to ‘Reports’ and set up custom reports to track organic traffic
- Use the attribution reporting feature to see how different channels impact conversions
- Utilize the CRM to track leads and customers acquired through organic search
You can also use features like Sales Hub to see whether your sales data aligns with your SEO efforts.
Google Optimize
Google Optimize is a website optimization and testing platform. As part of the Google Marketing Platform, it offers businesses and website owners the following features:
- A/B testing
- Multivariate testing
- Personalization
- Experimentation
In addition, Google Optimize integrates nicely with Google Analytics, providing in-depth insights into user behavior and streamlining data-driven decision-making.
SEO ROI Calculator by Slam
As award-winning specialists in Webflow SEO, we spend a lot of time helping our clients calculate their ROI. Our SEO ROI Calculator is just one of many in-house tools we’ve developed to streamline the process.
Our calculator lets you easily track your optimization efforts and determine whether they’re paying off by evaluating the following SEO metrics:
- Total monthly keyword volume (TMKV)
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Conversions
- Average order value (AOV)
- Net revenue
- Lifetime value (LTV)
Oh, and did we mention it’s free to use?
Case Studies to See Technical SEO Audit Tools in Action
Looking for technical SEO audit case studies? We’ve got it covered!
It’s been our honor to help several nonprofits and small businesses crush their digital marketing goals. Check out these two nonprofit website optimization projects from our portfolio!
Elemental Excelerator
Source: elementalexcelerator.com
As a climate-focused nonprofit investing in sustainable technologies, Elemental Excelerator needed to reach as many people as possible with its urgent mission.
We performed an extensive technical SEO audit of this organization’s website and issued a series of recommendations for improving the on-page elements of their technical SEO. We also carried out extensive keyword research and compiled a list of blog posts to target for restructuring.
Once the recommended changes were implemented, we updated the sitemap on Google Search Console to ensure reindexing.
Ukraine Rises
To help Ukraine Rises raise awareness for its work helping Ukrainian citizens reclaim their lives and nation, we performed a technical SEO audit of the org’s website.
Our audit led to several actionable recommendations, including:
- Image compression
- Site structure
- Heading hierarchy
- Metadata
Once we’d acted on the suggested improvements, we put together an SEO-optimized content strategy designed to ensure the organization’s pages would keep ranking in the future.
How to Perform a Technical SEO Audit with Slam
If you’re running into issues with your SEO audit or don’t know where to begin, check out our Technical SEO Audit Template. It integrates seamlessly with the technical SEO audit tools discussed in this article.
Our SEO audit template is just one of the many in-house agency tools we’ve created to help organizations of all sizes streamline their technical and administrative processes. Here are a few more worth checking out:
- Website Launch Checklist
- Airtable Content Calendar
- Keyword Research Template
- Go-to-Market Strategy Template
And for those interested in getting into the digital marketing game, the How to Start an Agency masterclass taught by our founder and CEO Silvia Li Sam has everything you need to launch your own agency.
The technical SEO audit tools we’ve covered in this article are pretty great, but at the end of the day they don’t change the fact that SEO is inherently complicated. If you need some help auditing and improving your SEO strategy, Slam Media Lab offers small business SEO packages for exactly this scenario.
We provide the following award-winning services to businesses, nonprofits, and anyone with a website (or anyone who needs one):
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Webflow Design & Development
- Content Writing & Strategy
- Brand Strategy & Identity
Contact us today to schedule a free consultation with one of our experts.
