Ahrefs Chrome Extension
The full Ahrefs tool is pricey but lucky for us, they have a free Chrome Extension. The extension allows you to check for missing or incorrect H tags, meta descriptions, alt text, and title tags. This is actually one of my favorite tools to use because it really allows you to get a quick snapshot of the SEO health of a website. For example, I was doing an audit on a website recently and using the Ahrefs tool’s link tab, I was able to see that someone had hidden links to inappropriate websites on every page of their site.
Another great feature of this tool is that it allows you to easily check the robots.txt and sitemap. Sometimes I check websites randomly using this tool, to see what’s under the hood and the other day I was looking at an e-commerce site and found that they had three sitemaps; this was wasting all of their crawl budget because Search Engines were being told to crawl the same site over and over again.
Google Mobile Friendly Test
As mobile becomes more and more important it is critical that your site is optimized for mobile use; that’s why I recommend running your site through Google’s Mobile Site test. Additionally, since Google is the highest-trafficked search engine these days, and they’re the ones judging your site, it’s the best place to get information about why or why not your site is ranking on Google.
This tool will walk you through elements that need work on your site, such as text size and element spacing, and even link you to articles that will help you solve the issue.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is a great tool for, among other things, creating a sitemap; a sitemap is critical to ranking on Google because it enables your site to be crawled by Google and other search engines. Screaming Frog’s free version can also scan for broken links, errors, and redirects. Additionally, Screaming Frog will give you a list of duplicate content; reducing duplicate content is something that will help you with search engine rankings.
GTmetrix
I love GTmetrix because it breaks everything down into a grade to give you a better idea of where your site is at. For example, GTmetrix gives you an overall grade and several others based on performance and structure, for example. I also really like this tool because it gives you a visual of how your site loads and how long it takes to load. Similarly to the Google Mobile Friendly Test tool, GTmetrix will show you how to fix errors.