New Free Website Audit Tools for 2014

Victoria, July 28, 2014 (Newswire.com) - Jo Macdermott, Owner and Senior marketing consultant from Next Marketing says “Analysing your business websites can be daunting and is a fairly extensive process for any business owner. That is why we recommend using a free website audit tool to strengthen your websites.”

Next Marketing Agency is based in Melbourne. We are smart, clever and real.

Jo Macdermott

“At Next Marketing we undertake SEO optimisation techniques on a regular basis and therefore one of the first things we do for prospective clients is a quick analysis of their website to see how SEO friendly it is. After using many Audit tools to assist this process I have reviewed many new free tools.” Macdermott said.

Here are Jo’s recommendations for Free Website Audit Tools:

1. Mysiteauditor

“Mysiteauditor is an easy to use SEO auditor that shows how optimised your website is for your target keywords. The best part is, anyone can do it. All you need is the URL, a keyword of your choice and your audit will be emailed to you with a full review including Tags, Social Media and Total SEO scores.

When we ran our website through the audit and we received an SEO score of 59. One of the disadvantages we noted with Mysiteauditor was that while each of these areas were identified as ‘needing attention’, the audit does not provide any additional guidance as to how to fix these elements.

 Overall we found mysiteauditor fairly comprehensive as it covered the majority of SEO elements.” Macdermott said.

The basic version starts from $29/month which allows for an unlimited amount of SEO audits, archives of each audit and the ability to download, print and email the audits. There is a free 10-day trial.

2. Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool

“The Screaming Frog SEO Spider crawls sites for SEO data much like Googlebot does. It is a small desktop program that you install locally on your computer, which will spider websites SEO stats. It is particularly good for large sites with many pages where manually checking would be very labour intensive. The quick audit reviews a site from an onsite SEO perspective, including data on errors, redirects and meta robots.

One thing we love about Screaming Frog SEO Spider is that you can easily export SEO elements (URL, page title, meta description, heading, etc.) to Excel. This is a convenient process to help manage SEO recommendations. Furthermore, the tool offers audits for free for up to 500 URL’s. Screaming Frog leaves no stone unturned and generates an enormous amount of data.” Macdermott said.

A full summary of Screaming Frog audits can be found here: http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider

Search Engine Marketing: Screaming Frog

3. Up City SEO Report Card

“Up City SEO report card generates data in much the same format as mysitesuditor. Enter your contact details and the site will start analysing your website. When doing this for our website, we found that it took quite a long time and received a notification saying ‘the report just needs a little more time, we’ll send you an email as soon as it’s done’. Quite a weakness considering the other audit tools completed analyses within a matter of minutes. Website statistics that Up City provides include current rank, link building and trust metrics.

Once the report was eventually complete (20 minutes later!), we found that much of the data was inaccurate – i.e. we are almost always on the first page for the keyword  ‘marketing agency’ and the report stated that we weren’t in the top 10. Furthermore the amount of backlinks that Up City found was dramatically different to our Webmaster tools verification.

Our website received a score of 39. The areas of improvement included current rank (however it is inaccurate), link building statistics (also inaccurate), current indexing (not much information provided). With the amount of inaccuracies in this report we can’t take their recommendations very seriously.

The multiple inaccuracies of the data we found dramatically decreased the sites credibility. Overall, I would recommend using mysiteauditor over SEO report card to get just as much data.” Macdermott said.

4. Woorank

“Woorank reviewed our site in a matter of minutes. Woorank generates an unlimited amount of instant reviews that encompass all types of website data including traffic ranks and local directories statuses.

While the data was more accurate than SEO report card, we did find a few errors (i.e. Woorank only found one Facebook like). Furthermore, while some of the statistics were useful, such as the traffic rank and text/HTML ratio, we found it was a rather superficial surface analysis – providing statistics (i.e. such as ‘very slow’) without going in depth.

However a plus is that is explains SEO elements in plain English, therefore it is good for small businesses with no SEO knowledge to analyse their own site. It also includes many attributes that weren’t on any of the other audit sites we have looked at such as related websites, domain availability (e.g. .com, .net, .org, etc.) and typo availability (e.g. nwxtmarketing.com.au).

This is a good audit for beginners without much SEO knowledge to get a broad website overview.” Macdermott said.

Jo’s Final Verdict

“Out of the sites we reviewed, we would recommend mysiteaudit. It is easy enough to use for people with little or no previous SEO knowledge and it is organised in an easy to understand format.

However, for a more in-depth analysis, Screaming Frog would be the way to go. The data provides a comprehensive analysis of the website, encompassing all onsite SEO elements that could easily be missed with a manual audit.” Macdermott said

For more information contact

Jo Macdermott

Next Marketing

http://www.nextmarketing.com.au/

jo.macdermott@nextmarketing.com.au

03 8060 8544