April 7, 2025
You could have the best, prettiest website there ever was. Insightful blog posts, useful content, relevant pages, exceptional products/services. And you could still be lingering somewhere on the last pages of the search results. That’s because you’ve probably overlooked one important thing—your technical SEO.
SEO is a multifaceted process. You have your research tools that help you understand what your target audience is searching for online and what your competitors are doing. You have your keyword tools that tell you more about the topics you’ll want to cover on your website to stay relevant. And tou have your content optimization tools that improve your readability and give you concrete guidelines to follow for success. Technical SEO tools, however, are a bit different.
They’re mainly designed to help you create a website that’s easy for search engines to crawl, understand, and store. They make your website more accessible to search engines and, in turn, more visible to your target audience.
Like any other specialized SEO tool, technical tools can have different areas of expertise. Most commonly, you’ll come across tools that specialize in site crawling, those that specialize in improving your site speed, those that help keep things mobile-friendly, and those that assist with your structured data.
Choosing the right type of tool can ensure that you prioritize SEO processes that matter the most to you and that will have the greatest impact on your SERP performance.
So, let’s get down to business and have a closer look at the best paid and free technical SEO tools that can make a difference for your website.
You have to let the search engines know what your site (and any given page) is about, what it offers to the users, and how it ensures that the entire visitor experience is positive. And that starts with technical SEO.
In a nutshell, technical SEO focuses on improving your site’s crawlability, indexability, performance, and overall user experience. It maintains your website’s health, keeping it easily accessible and making sure that there are no errors that are preventing search engine crawlers and real users from enjoying your content.
Before we start deep diving into the specific tools, it’s worth going over whether technical SEO is even important for you.
Most novices are under the impression that there isn’t much to SEO at all. You might be thinking: “Oh, I’ve just got to figure out which search terms are popular, then use them as many times as humanly possible on my website.” First of all, that’s an outdated keyword-stuffing practice. Stop that.
Second of all, there’s much more to SEO than meets the eye. For your target audience to even see that you have the right keywords that match their search intent, for example, you first have to prove to the search engines that you do.
If you have a page that has no links pointing to it from your website, a simple technical SEO audit will find it and notify you. If you have a slow loading speed, issues with your HTTPS, incomplete metadata, and poor mobile optimization, reliable SEO audit tools will help you resolve them.
While some of these technical issues won’t directly affect your website’s ranking on SERPs, many will. Your page loading speed, for instance, is a known ranking factor, so any issue with that aspect will directly impact your position. However, looking beyond that, without paying attention to your technical SEO, you risk search engines not even noticing your site, let alone ranking it higher.
To get started with technical SEO, you’ll first want to look into crawling and auditing tools. They’re the ones that can help you get your ducks in a row and assess your site’s current health and main performance metrics.
While each tool will have different capabilities, they can all perform a full technical SEO audit and keep you notified of any errors that might be causing ranking issues.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is somewhat frightening for new users who have no prior experience with the technical side of SEO. It has a bit of a crowded interface, presents a wealth of data right off the bat, and gives you a long list of metrics that might make you want to crawl up into a fetal position and cry.
However, behind that rough exterior, it’s a wonderfully useful tool to have.
It comes with a pretty generous free version that lets you crawl your site for broken links, analyze your metadata, discover duplicate pages, and generate XML sitemaps and site visualizations without much fuss.
Of course, if you can afford its paid version, that’s $259.00 per year or just over $21.58 per month, you’ll get much more out of it. You’ll unlock unlimited URL crawls, customizable crawl configurations, assessment of duplicate and near duplicate content, and custom robots.txt, among other things.
The biggest selling point of Screaming Frog SEO Spider is that it works very similarly to search engine crawlers. It goes through your entire website in a way that a typical crawler would and diverts your attention to all the main issues that might be directly or indirectly affecting your rankings.
So, if you care to overcome its objectively steep learning curve, you’ll learn to love this tool.
If Screaming Frog is a bit too overwhelming for you, Sitebulb could be a good alternative. Just as suitable for beginners as it is for professionals, it specializes in delivering visual audits, detailed crawl reports, and helpful, actionable recommendations for site improvement.
It comes with a desktop and a cloud version, with the latter being more comprehensive (and more expensive).
Both versions give you insightful SEO audits that look into hundreds of potential issues that might be harming your pages. They check for duplicate content, have detailed crawl maps, and offer scheduled audits and reports. However, the cloud version tends to be more flexible and powerful. It lets you have unlimited projects and allows you to go through millions of URLs every month.
What I like the most about Sitebulb, regardless of which version you use, is that it comes with useful and unobtrusive hints that tell you in simple words what each technical SEO element is, why it’s important, and how you can improve it.
While experts won’t get much use out of that, this simple feature makes it highly beneficial for SEO beginners who are still learning the basics.
Lumar, formerly known as DeepCrawl, is an all-around website optimization platform focused on technical SEO. It’s particularly suitable for enterprise-level site auditing and lets you deep dive into your site’s overall health and performance on SERPs.
Its audits present a wealth of data on hundreds of different issues that might be affecting your pages, from broken links to site structure complications, indexability errors, and UX problems.
While this abundance of data by itself can get a bit overwhelming, you will also get helpful visualizations that simplify the representation of potential issues and allow you to easily share reports with stakeholders who have minimal SEO understanding.
What’s especially interesting is that you’ll also get an assessment that tells you whether your site is WCAG-compliant (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) and what issues you’ll want to prioritize to ensure that it is.
As you’ve likely gathered so far, Lumar isn’t a tool for beginners, nor is it a tool for SMBs on a budget. It requires some SEO expertise if you’re to use it properly. What’s more, it requires some serious resources. Though it has customizable pricing plans, don’t expect it to be cheap.
If you’re worried about your technical SEO and aren’t sure whether your site meets the criteria to appear in the search results, why not go straight to the source to audit your website? Google Search Console comes from your favorite search engine and has plenty to offer, making it suitable for everyone, from freelancers to agencies and enterprises.
While most mistake-free tools for poor-quality tools, that’s certainly not the case with GSC. Though it’s lightweight, it’s accurate, reliable, and powerful, often serving as the foundation for all the paid tools out there.
For starters, it informs you of how Google operates in the first place. It tells you how it crawls and indexes your pages, making it much easier for you to create a website that’s technically sound from the get-go.
It also offers comprehensive site audits and gives you a clear overview of all the main issues that your pages are riddled with. Whether it’s poor mobile optimization, crawl errors, coverage issues, or Core Web Vitals problems, you’ll know precisely what you’ll need to address to improve your performance.
Keep in mind, though, that GSC can be somewhat underwhelming by itself. It only covers the basics, so if you want to truly master your technical SEO and get detailed site audits, you’ll want to use it in combination with other, more robust tools.
Ahrefs is one of the more popular SEO tools, as it offers comprehensive, powerful capabilities for your entire SEO strategy. While it’s most commonly used for processes like keyword research, content optimization, and rank tracking, its site auditing tool is nothing to laugh at.
Though you can use it for free as long as you have verified site ownership, the free version isn’t nearly capable enough to make a true difference in your performance and ranking. To get the most out of it, you’ll want to use one of the paid plans, starting at $129.00 a month.
During your site audit, Ahrefs will look into no less than 170 potential page issues that are holding you back. They will all be grouped into easy-to-understand categories, so you’ll be able to tell at a glance whether you’re dealing with loading speed issues, problematic meta descriptions and title tags, sitemaps, or anything in between.
Of course, it’s not just about the overviews you’ll get. Ahrefs will also give you tailored recommendations on precisely what you should do to make the necessary fixes.
It’s expensive and potentially too much for SEO newcomers, but it could be worth it for larger businesses that need to stay on top of their rankings.
Page Speed is a confirmed ranking factor for all search engines, and it makes sense why. If your pages take too long to load, your website visitors will start turning to your competitors. Around 53% of mobile users, for instance, will abandon a site if it takes longer than three seconds for it to load.
The more users you have who are abandoning your site, the more red flags it raises for the search engines. It shows that your site might not be relevant to your visitors and that it doesn’t deliver a positive user experience. You’ll see a drop in your performance and your ranking in no time.
So, page speed and performance optimization tools are a must for your technical SEO strategy. Have a look at some of the top ones below.
Google PageSpeed Insights is a simple free tool that does precisely what its name implies—measures your page loading speed, bringing your attention to any potential issues that might affect the user experience. You’ll get a health score of between 0 and 100, indicating whether you need to work a bit more on your site or not.
While you don’t have to strive for a perfect 100, it’s a good idea to hang around 90, at least. Anything below that is considered inadequate, and anything below 50 shows poor performance that you’ll definitely need to work on.
The tool uses Lighthouse to test your performance in a controlled environment, but it also collects field data that relies on real user experience. You’ll get page speed insights for both mobile and desktop, so you’ll be able to see how your site functions across devices.
In addition to general health scores, PageSpeed Insights also gives you more insightful diagnostics and recommendations on what you’ll need to do—reduce unused JavaScript, eliminate render-blocking resources, avoid large layout shifts, and the like.
It’s not the most robust solution, but it can be highly useful, especially for small businesses that need to keep an eye on their budget as they navigate the complexities of technical SEO.
GTmetrix is a step up from PageSpeed. It relies on the same underlying solution, Lighthouse, but comes with a bit more detailed insights. It offers both performance analysis and monitoring, ensuring that you stay on top of any pages that might be having loading issues.
Its user-friendly reports tell you precisely where you stand when it comes to page loading speed and site performance. You’ll get an overall grade from F to A (F being the worst and A being the best), which gives you a quick glimpse into how your site’s doing. As a rule, you don’t necessarily have to strive for perfection, but you should aim for your grade to be either B or A.
In addition to the grade, you’ll also get performance and site structure analysis, expressed in percentages. You’ll get useful waterfall charts, a historical overview of your performance, insights into your core web vitals, and actionable recommendations.
For added convenience, you can configure your audits and set up alerts that monitor your pages and keep you notified of any changes in your loading speed.
What’s especially interesting about GTmetrix is that it tests your site speed from random server locations, bypassing your cache and giving you insights into real user experiences.
Although you can test some of these features out for free, to get the most out of this tool, you’ll want to use one of the paid plans that start from $4.25 a month.
WebPageTest is a convenient free tool for assessing your page loading speed, generating waterfall charts, and analyzing your TTFB (time to first byte).
The Starter plan that doesn’t cost you a dime is more than enough for SMBs that need to keep an eye on their performance and key page metrics. It lets you run 300 tests a month from any one of 30 available locations. You’ll get to keep your test history for 13 months to assess trends and see whether your technical SEO tactics are paying off.
As needed, you can always adjust your testing environment and select which server and browser you’d like to use. You can even adjust the number of tests to run and customize your output settings.
If you’re an SEO beginner, this flexibility and the data you get from it all can be somewhat confusing. So, be sure to give yourself enough time to learn about it and adjust to the tool.
Naturally, the paid plans, which start at $180 a year or $15 a month, are more robust. They unlock additional testing locations, come with useful integrations, and offer convenient bulk testing that could be helpful if you’re running multiple websites.
However, if you don’t need to deep-dive into your performance metrics, the free version should be suitable.
To track both your page speed and your general uptime, you could rely on Pingdom tools. It offers both synthetic and real user monitoring, giving you a complete picture of your website performance 24/7.
With synthetic monitoring, you’ll be able to test your site availability from over 100 worldwide locations, ensuring that anyone can access you wherever they are. You’ll also get detailed page speed analysis, as well as transaction monitoring.
The latter can be exceptionally useful as it helps you keep an eye on any issues that might occur while new users are registering on your website, logging in, and checking out their shopping cart.
With real user monitoring, you’ll see precisely what your end-user experience is like, whichever location, browser, or device they’re coming from. You’ll be able to measure your KPIs and SLAs, and you’ll get critical historical insights that allow you to compare your performance over time.
Regardless of the specific type of monitoring you opt for, you’ll get detailed reports that will help you identify major issues that are slowing down your website.
You can test Pingdom tools for free, but you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan to continue using it. There are distinct pricing plans for synthetic and real user monitoring, and each starts at $10 a month. So, if you want both types of monitoring, you’ll need to pay at least $20 a month for the service.
Getting used to Pingdom tools can get a bit tricky, so if possible, it’s best to leave it in the hands of your in-house SEO expert.
Depending on your needs, you could go for page speed and performance optimization tools that are based on Lighthouse, or you could skip the middleman and go straight for Lighthouse itself. Developed by Google, it’s a free, open-source solution with a lot to offer.
In style with most open-source tools, Lighthouse boasts quite a learning curve. If you want to get the most out of it, you’ll need to have some background in SEO, or at least you’ll need to take your time to slowly and thoroughly familiarize yourself with the tool.
Once you’ve overcome the learning curve, it’s nothing but smooth sailing. Lighthouse monitors your performance, accessibility, and other key SEO elements that can make or break your website.
During the performance audit, which you can start directly from your Chrome DevTools, it looks into the five critical page speed metrics—your first contentful paint (FCP), your largest contentful paint (LCP), total blocking time (TBT), cumulative layout shift (CLS), and speed index (SI).
Your performance score will be between 0 and 100, and as a general rule of thumb, you’ll want to hang around 90 points. Anything less means your site needs more work.
Similarly to Google PageSpeed Insights, it offers suggestions and actionable recommendations in addition to just the score, instructing you on what you can do to improve.
Some 10–15 years ago, you could’ve gotten away with a website that wasn’t all that well optimized for mobile viewing. Today? Not a chance. Approximately 63% of all internet traffic comes from mobile devices. Broadly speaking, that’s millions and millions of prospective website visitors you’re missing out on if your site is not mobile-friendly.
And if those millions don’t enjoy your website, search engines won’t enjoy your website, which means a drop in your SERP rankings.
You want your site to be compatible with absolutely any device your target audience might be using. To check whether it is, you need a suitable tool.
If simplicity is your top priority for mobile-friendliness testing, look no further than Sitechecker. Now, this is an all-around SEO issue detection tool.
It looks for any type of technical, on-page, or other error that could be harming your website and impacting your SERP rankings. However, it does come with an easy-to-use, simple mobile-friendliness checker that can prove to be valuable in a pinch.
You can test it out without even making an account—just visit its website, leave your URL, and select “Mobile friendliness of the page.” This test will only give you basic information. You’ll get your page score from 0 to 100 (0 being the worst, 100 the best), lab data on page speed, and a list of relevant warnings.
If you sign up for a free account, you’ll get a bit more than this. You’ll be able to test the mobile-friendliness of all your pages, as well as get notifications of any related issues.
It’s all useful for a quick glance at how optimized your website is.
Of course, if you want more, you’ll need to pay up. Sitechecker’s plans start at $59 a month and offer a long list of useful features. You’ll get more detailed site auditing and monitoring, rank tracking, and more. However, if mobile optimization is the only thing you’re concerned about, there’s no real reason for you to use the paid plans.
While they’re certainly less limiting, they don’t necessarily add much to your mobile-friendliness insights. At least not much that’s worth the starting price tag.
BrowserStack is one of the more comprehensive tools for testing the responsiveness of your site across both devices and browsers. Unlike many similar solutions, it uses real browsers and real devices and gives you access to about 20,000 of them.
While this might not seem like a big deal to some, it presents a great advantage. It gives you insights into the actual user experience instead of offering just an approximation from lab testing environments that might not match up with actuality.
However, if you so prefer, you can also test your site on dev environments as needed.
What’s more, depending on the plan you choose, you could also use its geolocation testing and see how your website performs in over 100 countries around the world—useful insights if you’re running a global website.
Appearances-wise, it looks a bit outdated, but don’t let that fool you. It’s user-friendly, beginner-friendly, and allows you to assess your website without issues, even if it’s your first time doing it. The only problem is that it tends to be on the slow side. Each test takes unnecessarily long.
You can sign up for a free trial to see how BrowserStack works, but you’ll eventually need to upgrade if you’re to use it. Pricing plans start from $29 a month for desktop testing and $39 a month for desktop and mobile testing.
I know what you’re thinking, and no, this isn’t Chandler Bing’s job title from the TV show “Friends.” Responsinator is a Chrome extension that lets you preview what your website looks like in some of the most common mobile screen resolutions.
It’s a simple tool that lacks many of the bells and whistles of other solutions mentioned so far. However, it’s highly useful when you’re just not sure how optimized your website is and want to give it a quick check. There are no confusing data points, overwhelming metrics, mobile optimization recommendations, and the like. All you get is a preview of your pages, and that’s it.
It’s free, simple, and easy to use.
While its lack of features might come as disappointing to some, especially big website owners, it could be just what startups and SMBs on a strict budget need. Check your page and move on. When you’re ready to take your mobile optimization to a new level, opt for a more comprehensive tool.
Technically, schema markup and structured data tools don’t directly impact your site’s ranking on SERPs. Still, they’re an important part of technical SEO because they’re designed to help you better communicate with search engines.
Schema markups and structured data are code that makes it easier for search engines to read and understand your pages. They tell search engine crawlers more about your content, providing information on your title tags, meta descriptions, images, and the works. The better your structured data is, the more likely your website is to appear in results such as featured snippets.
While it’s certainly useful to be somewhat familiar with coding and SEO if you’re to enhance your website, the best schema markup tools make it easy even for novices to get started with structured data.
Don’t worry, if you’ve never had to deal with structured data and schema markups and have no idea where to start or how to do it, Schema Markup Generator by Merkle will help you through it. Free to use, it allows you to create error-free schema markups in just a couple of minutes.
To get started, you’ll only need to know what kind of page you’re creating the markup for. The tool offers you about a dozen options to choose from–article, breadcrumb, event, FAQ page, how-to page, and the like.
Once you’ve selected your page type, all there’s left to do is fill in the blanks. For an article, for instance, you’ll want to specify the article type, add the URL, include any images you may have used, specify the headline, and include a few relevant details. The tool does all the rest.
It will automatically update the schema markup based on the information you’ve provided, and all there’s left for you to do is copy and paste it into your HTML. It gives you rich results with minimal effort.
One of the main reasons why you’ll want to add detailed schema markups and structured data to your HTML is so that you can appear in rich snippets on search engines like Google.
You must’ve come across them yourself when browsing the web—you’ll commonly see them in reviews, recipes, and the like. They’re all those extra bits of information that can be seen in the SERPs without actually clicking through on a website.
Google offers a fantastic little tool to tell you whether your site is eligible to appear in the rich snippets or not–the Google Rich Results Test.
Now, keep in mind that the tool, as its name suggests, is simply for testing your website. You’ve just got to provide your URL, and you’ll get basic information on whether you have the structured data you need to appear in these snippets. If you’re not eligible, it’s a sign that you should work on your structured data a bit more.
While not the most revolutionary tool out there, it can help point you in the right direction and show you what to do about your schema markups. It’s free and easy to use, so there’s no reason not to give it a shot.
Schema App is more robust than either of the tools mentioned so far. It’s designed mainly for larger businesses and enterprises, coming with a long list of features and capabilities that can help you stay on top of your structured data.
Considering that it’s for bigger businesses, it’s not surprising that it has somewhat of a steeper learning curve and requires some SEO expertise to use. That said, it’s still relatively easy to get accustomed to if you have some technical experience.
The good news is that it doesn’t require coding expertise—the tool handles that part of the process. It can quickly generate accurate schema markups in dozens of different languages, ensuring that your site has what it takes to rank higher in any market.
There are no predefined pricing plans, as the solution is fully customizable and scalable to meet your unique needs. Don’t expect it to be cheap, however.
Strictly speaking, backlinks are often considered part of off-page SEO. They lead from other websites to yours, helping shape your online reputation—either positively or negatively. However, they can impact your technical SEO optimization.
If you have many dead links (the dreaded 404 error), improper redirects, and other technical linking issues, it will negatively impact the user experience and your ranking. If you have a confusing internal linking structure, it will make it more difficult for search engines to crawl and index your pages. And finally, if you have an overly complex URL structure, search engines might not be able to properly identify what your pages are about.
Fortunately, there are a few convenient backlink analysis tools that can help you keep your links in check.
In addition to its site auditing, Ahrefs offers an insightful backlink analytics tool that gives you all the key details on your entire link profile. You’ll have an overview of all your dofollow, nofollow, and sponsored links, as well as those present in user-generated content such as comments or forums.
Ahrefs being Ahrefs, it will also give you precise insights into all the linking sites’ important metrics—their domain authority rating, estimated organic traffic that comes from them, page authority, anchor text details, etc.
What’s more important, however, is that this tool lets you identify all your broken links and 404 pages, allowing you to properly redirect them or rebuild them for a better user experience.
You can use Ahrefs Backlink Checker for free, but for full flexibility, you’ll need to upgrade to a premium membership that starts at $129 a month.
Majestic SEO is one of the top tools for assessing the trust flow and citation flow for your inbound links, as well as for conducting comprehensive link analysis. Trust flow indicates the quality of the links that lead back to your website, while the citation flow gives you insights into their quantity.
You’ll also get insights into your visibility flow that helps you find desirable links, topical trust flow that shows you the overall topical relevancy of the page, as well as your overall flow metrics that show how impactful your content is.
If all of this sounds confusing, don’t worry. What it basically means is that you’ll get a lot of valuable, actionable data that, at the end of the day, helps you better understand your link profile.
Although Majestic SEO is generally best suited for improving your off-page SEO, it can also help you uncover some broken links to improve your website performance on SERPs.
You can register your account for free, but you’ll need to sign up for one of its paid plans to benefit from this tool. Plans start at $49.99 a month, making Majestic ill-suited for startups and businesses on a strict budget.
As a comprehensive site auditing tool, Screaming Frog offers a powerful set of features for virtually all your technical SEO needs, including a convenient link checker. Even with the free version, you’ll get a capable tool that can easily identify and fix your redirect chains and loops that are bugging you, your visitors, and your search engine crawlers.
If you’re using the free version, you’ll be able to crawl through up to 500 pages a month. Unless you have more pages than this, there’s no reason to upgrade to premium. You’ll get access to all the necessary data that helps you improve site performance and user experience.
Within a few clicks, you can check for all redirect errors (301, 302, etc.) and assess their status, finding out whether the errors are permanent or temporary.
Depending on your needs, you can either crawl your entire website to check your links or you could upload a custom URL list. I recommend using the latter option if you have a larger website and want to check specific pages only—that way, you wouldn’t have to upgrade to the premium version and could still get the most out of this tool.
Arguably, the most essential aspect of your technical SEO is your site security. It impacts both how search engines and how users perceive you. It’s a critical ranking signal and can have a massive impact on your SERP position.
Primarily, that’s because search engines consider site security to be one of the key ranking factors and will almost always place a secure website higher than a similar unsecure one. After all, no search engine wants to send its users to potentially risky locations.
Secondly, it’s because users tend to steer clear of unsecured websites, leading to higher bounce rates that indicate a poor user experience—another thing search engines always take into account.
Now, some users will manually check your SSL certificate and look for the “S” in your HTTP(S). However, most will simply trust their browsers. Browsers like Chrome, for instance, will flag sites that use HTTP instead of HTTPS as “Not Secure” and immediately notify their users, which will usually be very effective in deterring them from a site.
So, you’ll definitely want to have a reliable SSL certificate checker when trying to optimize your website and improve its SERP performance.
SSL Checker is a free and simple tool that looks into the status of your SSL certificate and gives you a brief overview of your site’s security. In a nutshell, it’s designed to simply check whether your SSL certificate is installed and whether it’s working as it should.
All you have to do to run it is simply visit its website, put in your URL, and start the check. Within seconds, you’ll get a short report that contains all the essentials—warnings and critical errors, SSL certificate expiry date, and supported and enabled protocols.
If you want more than just an SSL check, you might want to give Sucuri SiteCheck a try. It’s useful to businesses of all sizes as it assesses your SSL status and looks into critical issues such as the presence of malware or potential site vulnerabilities.
What’s more, it can even remove existing malware for you and ensure your site remains good and safe for you and your website visitors.
Another great benefit of it is that it offers additional site security features, giving you access to a powerful firewall that can protect you against hacking attempts and a performance booster that can improve your site speed.
All in all, it’s a useful tool to have.
If you’re just interested in a quick security check, the free version is a good place to start. For the more advanced features, you’ll need to sign up for one of its paid plans that start at $229 a year.
If you’ve transferred from HTTP to HTTPS and gotten your SSL, but you’re still struggling with your site not being fully secure, you’ll want to give WhyNoPadlock a try. It’s the go-to tool for identifying the precise elements on your page that are giving you a headache.
Whether it’s expired or invalid SSL certificates, insecure calls to images, or anything in between, this tool can quickly identify the issue and help you get back in your website visitors’ and search engines’ good graces.
With the free version, you’ll get a brief assessment of your site security. If you want to test your site(s) in bulk, set up scheduled scans, or keep your scan history, you’ll need to buy credits whose price goes between $0.04 and $0.10 per credit.
Log file analysis sounds like a boring task you’d give to your bookkeeper. But, boring or not, and whoever’s task it is, it’s a crucial aspect of technical SEO.
It involves going over the records of all the requests made to your site’s servers. These records contain a whole bunch of useful data, from the request types made to the IP addresses, user agents, URL paths, and everything in between.
While going over all this data could be exhausting, it could also be highly helpful. The information you collect with your log file analysis can help you understand how search engine bots crawl through your website and how they interact with it.
You’ll be able to identify pages that might have some issues and errors that are impacting your crawlability and indexing. You’ll be able to find orphan URLs, recognize your most popular pages, and find out which of your important pages aren’t being crawled as much as you’d like them to.
If you try to approach these tasks manually, you’ll quickly find out how easy it is to waste your time. Instead, you’ll want to use log file analysis tools.
Screaming Frog has a little bit of everything for technical SEO, including a powerful log file analyzer that can help you get through vast amounts of data with relative ease.
It’s the go-to option for analyzing search engine bots’ crawl behaviors, allowing you to identify crawled pages, find out how frequently your pages are crawled, and gain insights into your orphan pages.
To make your analysis easier, it also offers the option to combine and compare data by importing additional URLs.
If you’re using the free version, you’ll be limited to analyzing up to 1k log events. If you’re using the paid version, there’s no limit.
Though Screaming Frog is popular and powerful, it’s mainly used by SMBs that don’t have all that big websites. If you have a large-scale site and need an enterprise-level solution, you could opt for Splunk instead.
A renowned data platform, it offers detailed log file analysis that helps you keep an eye on all your pages and their reports without a fuss.
Not only does it look into your system, user behavior, and crawler activity, but it also relies on automation and predictive analytics to detect existing and potential future problems that could affect the user experience and your site performance down the line.
You can sign up for a 14-day free trial to test the tool out. If you like what you see, you’ll have to get a paid account with custom pricing.
Another enterprise-level solution, Botify Log Analyzer, is an insightful tool that will tell you precisely how your individual pages perform. It’s an all-around analytics solution that helps you build up a data-driven SEO strategy. It looks into things like your first-party data, competitor data, and organic traffic.
When it comes to its log file analysis, it gives you all the info you need to better understand how search engines interact and communicate with your pages. You’ll get daily analyses, but you can also schedule routine crawls for more comprehensive insights.
It offers crawl budget optimization and AI bot tracking, ensuring you get accurate, real-time information whenever you need it.
If you’re interested, you can schedule a demo or sign up for one of its custom plans.
Not only is SEO as a whole a multi-faceted process with many nuances but so is its technical subsection. For the best effect, you’ll have to complete a long list of different processes—audit your site, improve your page speed, optimize everything for mobile viewing, and keep an eye on your structured data.
Now, if you’re dealing with a specific problem, such as page loading speed, for example, it could be in your best interest to get a dedicated page speed tool and see what’s going on.
However, if you want to take charge of your entire technical SEO and work on as many different things as possible, you’d be best off using an all-in-one technical SEO suite.
SEMrush is one of the better-known SEO tools. It’s feature-packed and convenient, coming with great capabilities that help you with all the big and small tasks of SEO. Whether it’s keyword research, rank tracking, link building, or anything in between, you’ll have a suitable feature to help you out.
Its site audit tool is highly useful for your technical SEO tactics as it gives you detailed insights into your site’s performance. You’ll get health scores with detailed explanations, crawlability scores, security, and HTTPS scores.
All these data points can help you prioritize important tasks that will ultimately bring your site’s position on SERPs up.
Similarly to SEMrush, Ahrefs doesn’t have just one area of expertise. It delivers all-encompassing services that cover all the bases of technical, on-page, off-page, and local SEO, among other things. So, you can use it to uncover keyword opportunities just as easily as you can use it to improve your link profile, for instance.
This tool especially stands out for its detailed site audits, insightful backlink analytics, and comprehensive keyword tracking capabilities.
The best part is that many of these features (with some limitations) are available for free. As always, for more advanced capabilities and more useful data, you’ll want to upgrade to premium plans.
Last but not least, you have access to Moz Pro, which can make your technical SEO easier than it appears at first glance. In line with its competitors, it gives you a little bit of everything—keyword research, content optimization, rank tracking, and brand authority check.
It also gives you access to full-scale technical and on-page analysis that provides you with a wealth of information on your performance. Crawl and audit your site, check for issues, solve errors, and adjust your broken redirects with relative ease.
User-friendly and flexible, it’s a good tool to check out. Its pricing starts at $49 a month, but you’ll get much more use out of it if you go for the more expensive plans.
So far, we’ve gone through about 30-odd technical SEO tools, and that’s nothing more than just scratching the surface of everything that’s out there. You have hundreds of tools at your disposal, each one of them doing something pretty much the same as the next one.
How do you choose? How do you know which one will be best for you and your website without going through months and months of trial and error?
While I wholeheartedly recommend testing out at least a few different tools before settling on one, there are a few ways you can narrow down your list of viable options. Here are some factors you should keep in mind when making your decision:
Perhaps the most important thing you’ll want to consider is whether you should go for free or premium tools. That depends entirely on what you want to achieve with your technical SEO strategy.
Startups and small businesses will generally benefit the most from free solutions. They can present a good introduction to technical SEO, giving you access only to the most essential data that lets you shape your strategies.
While their capabilities are typically limited, they’re effective enough when you’re just getting started. They won’t overwhelm you with information and unnecessary features you won’t even use.
If you have an established website and are running an agency or an enterprise, you’ll likely need a premium option. Paid tools tend to have much more detailed insights, broader capabilities, and more advanced features. They can help you manage thousands of pages at once and keep you notified of any changes in your performance.
Though it can be complex, technical SEO is a crucial part of your broader SEO strategy. If you don’t get your technical SEO right, you won’t be able to even appear in SERPs, let alone top them. Search engines won’t be able to crawl, index, and store your pages, meaning that regardless of the quality of the content you have on them, you won’t be able to reach your target audience.
So, when you’re getting started, make sure that you have the right tools that help you master your technical SEO.
At first, you might want to use a mix of free and paid tools to see what works best for you. Free solutions can give you the broad strokes of your website performance, while paid ones can help you pinpoint exactly what’s dragging your pages down. Once you’ve identified what your site needs, it’s easy to choose a technical SEO tool that can help you climb the SERPs.
However, if you’re tired of comparing and contrasting disappointingly limited free tools and unaffordable premium alternatives, there’s a better option you could check out.
Rankioz is an all-in-one SEO tool suite designed to ensure your flawless performance without burning a hole in your wallet. Sign up and begin auditing and optimizing your site today.
There are many powerful tools for full audits, with some of the standout ones including Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, and Ahrefs Site Audit. They all offer detailed insights and can flag potential issues your site is facing.
Depending on the tool you choose, free technical SEO solutions can be highly effective. Google, for instance, offers a variety of highly beneficial free tools that can help you gain a better understanding of your site performance and offer actionable insights to help you improve.
As a rule, you should perform a full technical SEO audit at least once a year. However, depending on your site, how often you add new pages, and how competitive your industry is, anywhere from once a few months to once a week could be adequate.
This depends on the tool you choose. Some solutions, like Moz Pro, for instance, BrowserStack, and SiteBulb, are generally considered to be beginner-friendly. Other tools, like Screaming Frog, require some technical expertise to use.
A crawling tool is designed to analyze virtually every aspect of your page, determining how accessible it is and whether there are any errors that are preventing search engines from crawling, indexing, and storing it. Speed test tools simply check how quickly your page loads.
Some will look into time to first byte (TTFB), while others will look into how quickly various different elements load, from TTFB to the first contentful paint and cumulative layout shift.
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