Key Takeaways for you
| – Technical SEO is essential to monitor your website performance and identify the issues before they harm your website. – It involves collecting data, fixing coding errors, monitoring keyword rankings, and tracking KPIs. – Some of the Best Technical SEO tools involves Google Search Console, Google Analytics, WP Rocket, Screaming frog SEO spider, Google’s Schema.org structured data testing tools, Barracuda Panguin, Website grader, Ahrefs Site Audit, SEMrush and Moz Pro. |
Technical SEO for your website is like taking your car for its regular service.
You check its performance to see that everything is working as it should and essentially to identify problems before they turn into significant issues.
This applies to your website maintenance too.
Whether it is analysing your own websites to monitor performance and improve its rankings, or to develop link building strategies by inspecting what your competitors are doing, you need tools to get the required input and clarity.
SEO normally calls for on-page and off-page optimization and people usually shy away from technical SEO, because it sounds “technical” and are not sufficiently informed about its necessity.
Why is Technical SEO important?
Performing technical SEO is to monitor your website performance and identify issues before they cause any harm to your website. You can gain an insight on the inner workings of your website as well as reverse engineer your competitor’s website to understand their SEO strategies.
You can use this information to revamp and optimise your SEO strategy.
Technical SEO involves
- Collecting data to identify opportunities for improvement.
- Broken link building
- Fixing coding errors
- Monitoring Keyword ranking and optimization
- Gauging SEO progress
- Tracking KPIs
It can be a daunting task to identify and choose what is essential for you out of the gamut of tools available out there.
I have picked out some of the tried and tested tools you can use for different purposes for your website. They are not all task specific, but can perform a range of different functions. You can use one or more of them to achieve best results for your website and see what works for you.
10 Best Technical SEO tools for Agencies and Webmasters
Technical SEO tools help you make SEO easier by identifying and helping you fix issues that are hindering search engines from crawling and indexing your web pages. It is important to note that there are several free and paid tools available, but I am listing out select tools that are widely used and efficient.
Google Search Console
This is the first go-to tool you need in your toolkit.
Google offers the Google Search Console especially designed for webmasters and offers a myriad of user-friendly features to help monitor the performance of websites on the SERPs and troubleshoot the appearance of the website.
It helps you find and fix technical errors on the website, submit sitemaps, check the core web vitals, and use the URL inspection tool to identify and fix issues with the indexed version of the specific web pages.
Over the years, it has undergone a lot of updates and improvements to suit the needs of webmasters, becoming the best reporting tool out there.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a popular powerful tool in the SEO world and is available for free. It provides a whole range of data which you can use for different aspects of marketing.
It helps track traffic sources, number of site visits, location demographics etc. This information can be used to tweak content strategy and figure out what works and what does not.
The current version of Google Analytics is going to be replaced by GA-4 from July 1, 2023. Make sure you are setting it up for your website.
WP Rocket
Speaking of speed, you need this premium plugin for WordPress to accelerate website loading time, improve PageSpeed score and optimise Core Web Vitals,
Unfortunately it is only available at a premium price and you cannot use it for free.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
As the name suggests, it is a spider (not a screaming frog) that mimics Google’s crawlers. You can crawl any URL and get an insight on how the Googlebots perceive your webpage.
You can use it to perform a comprehensive site audit and collect data regarding duplicate pages, page titles, headers, and meta descriptions that are missing, too long or short, large images, images without alt texts, insecure pages, and slow performing pages. All this and more for free!
Google’s Schema.org Structured Data testing tool
I know I am pointing to Google a lot! But as Google intends to meet user queries in the best possible way, the tools offered by Google would be designed to serve the same purpose, which is why you should be using them more.
The Structured Data Testing tool by Google helps you mark out the elements you want to tell Google relating to the content on your web pages and Google will mark up the same for you in the SERPs.
Barracuda Panguin
This is the best tool you can use to check if a Google algorithm update has hit your site or if your website has been penalised. If there is a sudden drop in your rankins or incoming traffic, you can verify your page with this tool and fix issues.
The Barracuda Panguin tool can be used for free and can be linked up with Google Analytics to give further insights about your page. The tool offers a wide range of features including
- Mobile searches
- Link optimization on your website
- Insights to local SEO
- Paid and organic search visibility
Website Grader by Hubspot
It is a free tool where you enter your domain and get a complete report card for the domain’s performance. The report card shows you different site metrics including performance, SEO, mobile and security.
Apart from showing the performance stats, the tool also offers you simple steps to improve your website if your scores are low in any particular area.
Website Grader is a must have technical SEO tool if you are looking to level up your site performance.
Ahrefs Site Audit tool
This is the best tool for website content auditing. It is a cloud-based tool with all the necessary resources required for auditing.
The tool can identify over a 100 technical and on-page SEO issues that are affecting your site rankings in SERPs. The results are displayed in classified categories with aggregating reports with easy to understand charts so you can improve your SEO strategy.
You can use the tool for analysing the content quality of your website, find and remove duplicate content, and optimise your pages.
Ahrefs Backlink Checker
It is a renowned tool that provides you accurate backlink analysis including those of your competitors.
The tool can be used to
- Track backlinks of your competitor websites.
- Identify sites that are linking to your competitors, but not to your site.
- Discover links that are pointing to your website and lowering SEO
- Discover new high quality link building opportunities
- Identify and get rid of spam links.
WebPage Test
This is another free performance evaluation website which uses real browsers and user connection speeds to run free website speed tests across various locations around the globe.
The tools helps you monitor your website in excruciating details and provides you information on
- The time taken to load a page,
- Size of the web page
- The number of requests sent by your web pages
- The time taken to execute these requests.
This information is then used to break down detailed critical data about your website performance to notify you of any slow elements, errors and third party elements that are taking load times with heavy file size.
Conclusion
These are some of the technical SEO tools you need handy in your pockets. They cover most of the essential tasks for technical SEO. It is not an exhaustive list. But it will do!
I hope you can make the most of them for your SEO strategy.
Have you used any other tools?
Let me know in the comments.
