Recently an Internet user asked me what tool I was using to carry out my audit, probably believing that I only had to make one click to produce a nice report that was easily billable: Error!
Like many of my colleagues, I subscribe to powerful analyzers that are very expensive on a monthly basis.
An SEO analysis can be done with free (or trial) tools when it comes to identifying “the biggest”, but be aware that even if you are paid, no tool covers all the parameters of web optimization and that it is a combination of these tools that allows you to build a serious and usable audit.
Moreover, if the tools provide a cold (we would say objective) analysis, the results are based on criteria that are specific to the tool itself, and which are:
- sometimes imperfect,
- often incomplete
- And it even happens that some return false results.
I will only give you the best.
Most of the time these online software are mainly offered to sell their services, they are not teasers. We must not be fooled.
Here are some tools that will allow an owner to get an idea of the SEO health of his web portal criterion by criterion, they are all free. Some are very well known and will not surprise enlightened amateurs of our discipline, but, dig a little, the others could pleasantly surprise you.
They are not efficient enough to consider them as professional tools, used by SEO experts who have much better analysis capabilities in terms of the number of sites and configurations.
1. Pingdom: Display Speed Analysis
Site Speed Analysis
Here is a crawler whose free version will suffice for an entrepreneur bitten by web referencing.
If Google delivers its tool that gives an index and not a speed expressed in units of time ( testmysite.withgoogle.com)
I much prefer Pingdom, because it works all the time.
We will weigh our results since the tests are carried out on servers located in New York and other distant places, but we will take the recommendations seriously. accurate and very useful.
I much prefer Pingdom, because it works all the time.
We will weigh its results since the tests are carried out on servers located in New York, San Jose… and other distant places, but we will take seriously the recommendations given, precise and very useful.
Pingdom: https://tools.pingdom.com/
2. Screaming frog
It’s a very powerful crawler that is presented as a software to download, the free version is limited to 500 URLs — enough for many sites —.
The crawl is achieved in a few seconds, it
- reports redirects and broken links,
- highlights metadata,
- reviews the robots.txt,
- audits the hreflang,
- shows duplicate pages
- Generates a map.xml site ready for Google Search Console
The handling is not the most user-friendly and the reports are delivered on austere spreadsheets, on the other hand the crawl is among the best there is.
https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/
3. Google search console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools)
I should have started with him. It is the mandatory tool, which is all too absent from many SME and independent sites.
Create your access via your Google account, paste the validation code provided in your <head> and wait a month for it to completely crawl your site.
Then, monitor THE HEALTH of your site thanks to tools that give real advice, you will notice that it gives pride of place to microdata. (Hey, would it matter?)
- Structured data with validation and errors
- Enriched map present or not
- Data tagging
- Tags mit description en duplicate
- Duplicate title tags
- AMP version present, validated or not
- Mobile ergonomics
- Indexing
- Blocked pages
- A module to remove URLs
- Exploration errors
- Pages not found
- Enough to submit your sitemap.xml
He is not perfect, he sometimes mentions errors while his own verification tools do not find them. Indeed, beyond the analysis rendered, verification tools are made available…
If your score was 100% clean at GSC, that would already be good for your site…
4. Backlink watch, a basic link explorer
For a general and uncluttered view of the links pointing to a site, simply enter the URL of a site in the only field on the home page, then let it run.
You get a very clean list of links, which only picks up URLs that point to the site. It’s better than nothing, you can spy on your competitors and get inspired… Especially if you copy and paste the list into an Excel table to sort them out.
The page offers other tools that redirect you to the very professional Semrush, which is not free (My favorite in the Swiss Army knife category of SEO).
The BacklinkWatch site also offers the purchase of links at a low price (15 under the link yes $0.15 promising DAs of 40 and more), which you should not do under any circumstances, I warned you. (Haven’t you heard of Penguin?)
http://www.backlinkwatch.com/index.php
5. Search for duplicate content
There are many reasons to be wary of theft or copying content to the web
- Your web agency has delivered your brand new site to you cheaply, but would the content come from Wikipedia or competitors?
- You hired a $5 web writer and he delivered to you in a flash, suspicious.
- You may have been robbed of the texts for which you paid a lot of money.
- Your site has taken a penalty and you are looking for the origin, could it be a Panda move?
There is duplicate content and there is similar content, i.e. with a high copy rate. This is what happens very often when the “editor” has only reformulated an existing text by modifying it here and there,
- Vocabulary
- Gender
- or the order of sentences.
This similarity rate is well evaluated by Google and this type of text, if it escapes Panda, is not valued in the SERP
Here is a duplicate content checker tool that also gives you the similarity rate with URLs that look like it.
- You can paste your text or
- paste your URL,
In the 2nd case, the tool will read and take into account the content of the side bar and the footer, and may find a similar proportion of content between your own pages… Not to mention that this content can be very dilutive for some articles
If the first results appear on a red background, it is because the content is not original enough.
https://www.positeo.com/check-duplicate-content/
6. Semantic Analysis and Keyword Density
You’ve probably read a lot of SEO tips on keyword density, and many urban legends still survive on the subject. No comment!
In the category of great, little-known and free tools, here is a text analyzer that checks the keyword density of your texts, but weights its results according to the emphasis applied on the vocabulary.
As a result, your text, after analysis, displays repetition percentages not based on the number of times they are present, but also according to the HTML code that surrounds them.
Logical, haven’t you been told that keywords placed in <H1> weigh more than lost in a paragraph…
I use Alyse.info consistently for fine checks. It is a unique semantic analyzer, very old and which has evolved well. Admittedly, its interface is a bit rough, but its algorithm has no equivalent.
Be careful, the “optimization” tab is not up to date with the 2018 SEO practices, it does not know that the meta description has increased to 230 characters.
It also has an image analysis module that I don’t know.
7. Positioning Tools
Serposcope
One of the few free positioning check tools! At this price, it lacks a quality that can be circumvented with a little patience. Searches are carried out on IP. It’s your IP that makes the request to Google at the risk of burning it if you abuse it. The solutions involve the use of proxis (subscribe to a paid service, it’s useful for many other uses) or fetch your reports in slow mode (the tool then makes a request every 10 seconds [configurable a little faster].
If you start the job at night, that’s perfectly acceptable. Another grey point, the tool does not offer the export of reports… You have to cheat with a screenshot.
It is clear that the tool will only be suitable for individual use for a site that is not too addicted to its positions and for which a test every two or four weeks will be suitable, which between us, is quite sufficient.
8. Analysis of the lexical fields of a page
This French tool received the “Connected Universe Prize and the Carbuncle Gold Medal” at the 2017 Lépine competition. Truly innovative, I don’t know of an equivalent to this monster that is essential to anyone who claims to do SEO writing.
Presented as an “editorial support tool that accelerates the content writing process”, it is a powerful semantic field analyzer.
From a page or a URL, it indicates the vocabulary related to the keyword you have designated for it and points to expressions that should not be in prose because they are off-topic.
All you have to do is sort through and take the ones you can integrate to enrich your writing.
The tool is ultra-French and some suggestions are irrelevant to Quebecers [we are talking about social security, employment center and other purely French terms, acronyms or administrations]. Your judgment and sorting of relevance is therefore still necessary.
The handling is childish, the interface very nice, very intuitive, the free version does not allow you to retrieve the import.
The free analysis is less practical than the paid version, which is still within reach [1 euro for the analysis of a text or a URL].
Only the reports are shitty, instead of giving you a classifiable CVS, the import gives you the sequence of words in bulk that is almost unusable. The tool only stores your analytics for one month. Here again I tend to resort to the screenshot… Too bad.
But this tool is constantly evolving, and it will probably end up offering clean and actionable reports.
9. Performance report, query analysis.
The new Google search console interface
You have validated your site on search console., that’s fine. It is likely that you have received a link in the last few days to see “the new interface, the new version”.
Keep this link, a great tool is already integrated which, by filtering, reveals the queries [and especially their variants] that display your site in the results, even if no click has been made.
Sleek interface, very user-friendly, it borders on the toy. A good use of this information should encourage you to enrich your texts in the right direction.
Go to this address while logged in to your https://search.google.com/search-console account and choose which of your sites you want to visit in the top field.
Access to this link is not yet easy [it is absent from the current version]. It seems that Google doesn’t want maximum traffic to begin with.
Take advantage of it now
10. Microformat Generator
A large number of website owners royally ignore the notions of:
- microformat,
- microdata,
- Hcard and Vcard
- Data tagging
Depending on the technology of your site (for some like Genesis this data is present on the fundamentals) for other CMS it’s a desert
Here are three microformat/microdata generators that will help you code and implement them correctly in your own way.
- For the hcard: http://microformats.org/code/hcard/creator
- For; the data in Json (preferred by the engines) and the references schema.org: https://webcode.tools/microdata-generator
For peace of mind, check the taxonomy with Google’s tools
https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool
11 SEMscoop
https://semscoop.com is a ready-to-use turnkey SERP analytics and analysis tool for digital marketers, bloggers, and small businesses who want to take their queries to the top of the SERP.
It helps to spot real opportunities for less competitive queries (without falling into the long tail) and create complementary intelligent content. It brings metrics such as PA, DA. The free formula of the tool allows .
- 5 keyword searches per day
- 10 keyword analyses per day
- 50 keyword results with “metrics” per day
Référencement-PME prends en charge les stratégies marketing des entreprises et PME dans la région de Montréal, pour sa plus grande fierté, depuis plus de 15 ans
