Best SEO audit tools for freelancers, compared

An SEO audit tool crawls a website and lists what is wrong with it: broken links, missing titles, slow pages, duplicate content. Every freelancer needs one. The question is how much to pay, because two of the best options are free.

This is a plain comparison of the tools most solo freelancers consider, using the limits each one publishes.

Start with the free ones

Google Search Console. Not a crawler, but the most reliable source for how Google sees a site: pages not indexed, mobile problems, the queries people search. Every client site should have it connected. It tells you what Google reports, not what is wrong on every page.

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. Free for websites you verify. Its site audit scans for more than 170 technical and on-page issues, with 5,000 crawl credits per verified project each month. You can also see up to 1,000 backlinks at once. The catch: it works only on sites you can verify, so it suits your clients’ sites but not competitor research.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free version). A desktop crawler that is free up to 500 URLs. That covers most small business websites. It gives a detailed list you can sort and export, and it takes some learning.

The paid ones

Screaming Frog (licence). Removes the 500 URL cap. It is listed at $279 a year and the licence renews annually, so it is a running cost rather than a one-off. Check the current price and currency on its pricing page before you quote it to a client.

Semrush. A full suite, with site audit as one part of it. Its paid plans start with an SEO plan and rise through Starter, Pro+ and Advanced, and it has a free tier. It is wide, and most of what you pay for is outside auditing. Check its current price and limits on its pricing page.

What none of them does

Every tool above ends in a list. A crawl of an ordinary site can return hundreds of items, and the work is in sorting them: which matter, which are noise, which can be fixed in a few minutes and which need a developer. Then the fixes must be made and the client told.

A useful order is: anything stopping pages being indexed, then broken links and redirects, then titles and descriptions, then speed. The SEO audit checklist walks through it step by step.

An audit that ends in fixes

This is where Agenc differs. Your SEO specialist audits a project, ranks the findings by what is likely to matter, and prepares the fixes for the ones it can make, such as titles and descriptions. You choose whether it applies them alone or waits for your yes. The audit is the start of the work, not the end of it.

Which should you use?

• Just starting, little budget. Search Console plus Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. Both are free and cover most of what a small site needs.
• Small sites, you like detail. Add Screaming Frog’s free version.
• Many clients and large sites. A paid crawler or suite starts to make sense, once you know which limits you actually hit.
• You want the fixes made too. See pricing for Agenc, which has a free plan.