8 Technical SEO Tools You Should Be Using Today

As an online sales and marketing expert, I know firsthand how critical technical SEO is to the success of any website. You can have the best content and products in the world, but if search engines can‘t properly crawl and index your site, you‘ll be invisible to potential customers.

Technical SEO allows you to analyze how well search engines are accessing your website so you can identify and fix any barriers to higher rankings. While it may seem complex and intimidating, the good news is there are plenty of powerful tools available to simplify and streamline the process.

In this post, I‘ll share 8 of my go-to technical SEO tools that every website owner should have in their arsenal. I‘ll explain what each tool does, how to use it, and provide real examples of the insights you can gain. By the end, you‘ll be equipped with a solid foundation for optimizing your site‘s technical health and visibility in search.

1. Google Search Console

Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) is a free service provided by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site‘s presence in Google search results. It‘s an absolute must-have for any website serious about SEO.

Here are some of the key things you can do with Search Console:

• Submit and monitor your sitemap to ensure Google is crawling the right pages
• Review your site‘s indexing and crawling status to identify errors
• See which queries are driving traffic to your site and where you rank
• Receive alerts if Google finds any manual actions or security issues on your site

One of my favorite features is the Coverage report, which shows you which pages Google has indexed and any issues that may be preventing pages from being indexed. For example, you may discover that some of your most important pages are being blocked by robots.txt or have a noindex tag.

To set up Search Console, you‘ll need to verify ownership of your site by adding a code to your homepage, uploading an HTML file, or connecting via your domain name provider. Once verified, you can start submitting sitemaps and exploring the various reports.

I recommend checking Search Console at least once a week to stay on top of your site‘s performance and address any critical issues. It‘s also a good idea to link your Search Console account with Google Analytics for even more insights.

2. Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is a powerful website crawler that lets you quickly analyze key on-page elements across your entire site. You can use it to audit everything from title tags and meta descriptions to headers, broken links, redirects, and more.

One of the biggest advantages of Screaming Frog is that it shows you exactly how search engines are seeing and interpreting your webpages. It can reveal technical issues that may not be obvious from just manually reviewing your site.

For example, you may find that certain pages have missing or duplicate title tags, which can negatively impact your rankings. Or you may discover broken internal links that are causing search engines to waste crawl budget trying to access non-existent pages.

To use Screaming Frog, simply download the program and enter your website‘s URL. The tool will crawl up to 500 pages for free, or you can purchase a license for unlimited crawling. Once the crawl is complete, you can view a wealth of data on different page elements, as well as generate customized reports to share with clients or team members.

I typically do a full Screaming Frog crawl of my most important sites on a monthly basis and before/after any major site changes. It‘s a great way to proactively catch and fix technical SEO problems before they impact my search traffic.

3. Google PageSpeed Insights

Page speed has been a ranking factor for desktop searches since 2010 and for mobile searches since 2018. It‘s also a key part of the user experience, with slower load times leading to higher bounce rates and fewer conversions. That‘s where Google PageSpeed Insights comes in.

PageSpeed Insights analyzes the content of a web page and generates suggestions to make that page faster. It provides both lab data, which is useful for debugging performance issues, and field data, which captures real-world user experience metrics.

Some of the key metrics PageSpeed Insights measures include:

• First Contentful Paint: The time from when the page starts loading to when any part of the page‘s content is rendered on the screen.
• Speed Index: How quickly the contents of a page are visibly populated.
• Time to Interactive: The amount of time it takes for the page to become fully interactive.
• Total Blocking Time: The sum of all time periods between First Contentful Paint and Time to Interactive, when task length exceeded 50ms, expressed in milliseconds.

In addition to providing these core web vitals scores, PageSpeed Insights also offers actionable recommendations for improving your page load time, such as optimizing images, minifying code, and leveraging browser caching.

To use the tool, simply enter a URL and click Analyze. You‘ll get a report with field and lab data, as well as opportunities and diagnostics. PageSpeed Insights also recently added a Core Web Vitals assessment, which shows you if your page passes or fails each of the three core metrics.

I like to run PageSpeed Insights on my most important pages (homepage, key landing pages, etc.) at least once a month. I‘ll also run it after making any major changes to page content or design. A good target is to get your pages in at least the 80-90 range for both mobile and desktop.

4. Google Analytics

While Google Analytics is primarily used to track site traffic and user behavior, it also offers valuable technical SEO insights. The Site Speed report, for example, shows you how quickly users are able to see and interact with content across your site.

This report allows you to view load times for individual pages and compare performance over different time periods and user segments. You can also see how page load time impacts overall sales and conversions.

Another useful feature is the Landing Pages report under Behavior > Site Content. This shows you which pages users are entering your site through and the bounce rate for each. A high bounce rate could indicate that users aren‘t finding what they‘re looking for due to thin content or technical issues like slow load time or broken elements.

To enable Site Speed reporting in Google Analytics, you‘ll need to add a small snippet of code to each web page you want to track. Once the tracking code is in place, you‘ll start seeing page timing metrics within 24 hours.

I recommend reviewing your Site Speed and Landing Pages reports at least once a month to identify and prioritize pages that need technical optimization.

5. Ahrefs Site Audit

Ahrefs is best known for its backlink analysis capabilities, but it also offers a comprehensive site auditing tool as part of its suite. An Ahrefs Site Audit crawls your entire website, identifying over 100 common SEO issues and providing actionable recommendations to fix them.

Some of the key technical SEO factors an Ahrefs audit covers include:

• Crawlability: Ensures search engines can access all the important pages on your site.
• Indexability: Checks for any pages that are blocked from indexing by robots.txt, noindex tags, etc.
• Page speed: Identifies slow-loading pages based on time to first byte and total load time.
• Internal linking: Highlights orphan pages with no internal links pointing to them.
• Redirects and broken links: Surfaces any redirect chains, loops, or broken links that may be hurting crawlability.
• On-page SEO: Checks for missing, duplicate, or poorly optimized titles, meta descriptions, headers, etc.
• HTTPS implementation: Ensures your SSL certificate is set up correctly to avoid security warnings.

One standout feature is Ahrefs‘ Data Explorer, which lets you dig deeper into issues using simple drag-and-drop filters. You can easily segment pages by things like HTTP status code, load time, word count, incoming links, and dozens of other criteria to prioritize your most important technical SEO fixes.

Ahrefs Site Audit also seamlessly integrates with its rank tracking tool, so you can see how your technical optimizations are impacting your keyword rankings over time.

If you already use Ahrefs for link building, an audit is a no-brainer. Even if you don‘t, the level of detail and insights offered make it well worth the cost, especially for larger, more complex sites. I run Ahrefs audits quarterly for my clients with established sites and monthly for those who are more aggressively pursuing link acquisition and technical updates.

6. GTmetrix

GTmetrix is an alternative (or complement) to Google PageSpeed Insights that measures how well your site loads and provides actionable recommendations to improve it. One key difference is that GTmetrix also factors in YSlow scores, whereas PageSpeed Insights is based solely on Google‘s Lighthouse metrics.

Some of the key performance metrics GTmetrix reports on include:

• PageSpeed Score: A high-level score of your page‘s technical performance based on Google‘s Lighthouse tool. Similar to what you see in PageSpeed Insights.
• YSlow Score: A report card of your page‘s adherence to Yahoo!‘s rules for high performance web pages.
• Fully Loaded Time: The point after the onload event fires and there has been no network activity for 2 seconds.
• Total Page Size: The total size of the page including all resources requested.
• Requests: The total number of requests made by the page.

In addition to these high-level scores, GTmetrix also provides a waterfall chart showing the load order and timing of each page element, as well as a video playback of your page loading so you can visualize any bottlenecks.

My favorite feature of GTmetrix is the ability to configure different testing scenarios, such as testing from a specific location/browser or simulating a slower connection speed. This allows you to see how your site performs for users in different environments.

To use GTmetrix, simply enter your page URL, choose the location and browser you want to test from, and click Analyze. You‘ll get a detailed report back with grades, raw stats, and opportunities for improvement. GTmetrix offers a limited number of free reports per month, with paid plans for more frequent and advanced analysis.

I typically use GTmetrix in tandem with PageSpeed Insights to get a more complete picture of page performance. I‘ll run tests on my core pages monthly and before/after any major front-end changes.

7. Sitebulb

Sitebulb is a desktop-based site crawler and auditing tool with a strong focus on technical SEO. Its clean, user-friendly reports make it a good option for less technical users or those needing to share results with clients or stakeholders.

An audit with Sitebulb will check for over 400 potential SEO issues across key areas like:

• Indexation and crawlability
• Links and redirects
• Page resources (JavaScript, CSS, etc.)
• Titles and meta descriptions
• Headings and content
• Images and page speed
• Structured data

The tool also offers several helpful visualizations, such as a crawl tree showing the click depth of all indexed pages and an indexability graph highlighting any pages blocked by robots.txt, canonical tags, etc. I find these particularly useful for identifying orphaned or deep pages that may be hard for search engines to reach.

Another standout feature of Sitebulb is its content and internal linking analysis. The tool uses natural language processing to extract common topics and phrases from your pages, which can help inform your site architecture and keyword targeting. It also shows you the most commonly internally linked pages on your site so you can ensure your important pages are getting enough link equity.

While not as comprehensive as Screaming Frog or DeepCrawl, Sitebulb offers a nice balance of power and simplicity. The fact that it lives on your desktop rather than the cloud can also be an advantage if you work with sensitive client data and prefer not to share it with third-party servers.

I like to run a Sitebulb audit after any major site migrations or restructuring to ensure nothing got lost in the shuffle. It‘s also a good tool to reach for whenever you need to put together a quick yet professional audit report for a client or boss.

8. Robots.txt & Sitemap Testing Tools

Your robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which pages on your site they can and can‘t access. Any mistakes in your robots.txt can have catastrophic consequences for your organic search traffic, which is why it‘s so important to regularly audit and validate it.

Similarly, submitting an accurate, up-to-date XML sitemap to search engines helps them find and index your most important pages faster. A sitemap with missing, duplicate, or disallowed URLs can undermine your crawl efficiency and indexing.

That‘s where robots.txt and sitemap testing tools come in. Google offers a robots.txt Tester right in Search Console that allows you to check if a specific URL is blocked by robots.txt. It also provides a Sitemap Report showing the status of any sitemaps you‘ve submitted.

For more advanced robots.txt analysis outside of Google, I recommend Merkle‘s free robots.txt Analyzer. Just paste in the contents of your robots.txt file and the tool will identify any invalid syntax, unreachable rules, or potentially dangerous wildcard exclusions.

To validate an XML sitemap, you can use the free Sitemap Validator from Screaming Frog. This checks your sitemap against the official sitemap protocol and highlights any errors like invalid timestamps, incorrect URL formats, or URLs blocked by robots.txt.

Ideally, you should audit your robots.txt file and XML sitemap(s) any time you make substantial changes to your site structure or launch new sections. At a minimum, I recommend checking them quarterly to ensure they‘re still accurate and optimized.

The Bottom Line

Technical SEO is a complex, ever-evolving discipline that can make or break your site‘s organic search performance. While it may seem daunting at first, investing the time to regularly audit and optimize your technical foundation is one of the highest-ROI activities you can do as an online marketer.

The eight tools covered in this post are a great starting point for assessing your site‘s technical health and identifying opportunities for improvement. Of course, there are many more tools and tactics you can leverage as you get more comfortable with technical SEO.

Some key things to keep in mind:

• Prioritize the issues that are likely to have the greatest impact on your site‘s crawlability, indexability, and user experience. Screaming Frog and Ahrefs can help surface these.
• Regularly monitor your site‘s speed and Core Web Vitals using tools like PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix. Aim for load times under 2 seconds and Lighthouse scores of 80+.
• Pay close attention to your Coverage and Landing Pages reports in Google Search Console and Analytics to identify any pages that are under-performing or not being indexed.
• Don‘t forget about your robots.txt and XML sitemaps! These are often overlooked but play a critical role in your technical SEO.
• When in doubt, refer to Google‘s official documentation and webmaster guidelines. The search giant is usually pretty transparent about its technical expectations and recommendations.

By making technical audits a regular part of your SEO process and leveraging the tools in this guide, you‘ll be well on your way to a healthier, more visible website. SEO today requires a balance of great content, authoritative links, AND a solid technical foundation. Neglect the latter and you‘ll be fighting an uphill battle to rank no matter how good your content and links are.

So what are you waiting for? Pick a tool, run an audit, and start fixing those technical SEO issues holding your site back! Your search engine rankings (and bottom line) will thank you.