The Best Technical SEO Tools
Technical SEO tools can help you crawl, scrape and audit websites, diagnosing problems such as duplicate content, bad redirects, 404 errors, page speed, mobile friendliness and much more.
Updated: September 2023
Technical SEO is the foundation of all successful SEO campaigns.
Without a clear understanding of how search engine crawlers are interacting with your website, and what potential issues you may have that could hinder them crawling and indexing your content, your SEO efforts will always be hampered.
Luckily there are a lot of technical SEO tools out there that can crawl your website and identify any technical errors or areas for improvement.
Read our fully independent reviews below to find the right technical SEO tool for your needs.
Best Technical SEO Tools
Our favourite: Screaming Frog SEO Spider 
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider crawls your website and gathers key data about the onsite SEO health of the site, giving you all the information you need to make informed decisions and build effective SEO strategies.
Why SEOs need Technical SEO tools
A lot of SEO tools could be seen as a luxury, mostly helping to simplify or speed up processes that SEOs do on a day-to-day basis. That is not the case with technical SEO tools, which are more of a necessity.
These tools can help SEOs see exactly how search engines crawl, interpret and index their websites, flagging up problems and potential issues in easy-to-use and intuitive interfaces.
It’s simply not possible to manually crawl a website with thousands of pages, so technical SEO crawling and auditing tools are essential.
As well as identifying problems, these tools can also provide actionable recommendations. Whether it's fixing a misconfigured robots.txt file or issues with duplicate content, page speed or structured data, technical SEO tools can identify it and tell you how to fix it.
What to consider when choosing a Technical SEO tool
The right technical SEO tool can be a game-changer for your website's performance, so it’s crucial that you do your research and pick the right one.
Here’s a few key factors to bear in mind when choosing a technical SEO tools:
- Crawl depth and level of analysis: Not all tools are created equal. Some offer a surface-level scan, while others dive deep into technical SEO issues. Determine how much data you need and choose a tool that matches those requirements.
- Usability/UI: A tool with a steep learning curve might not be the best choice, especially for beginners. Opt for tools that offer a clean, intuitive interface which makes the analysis and implementation process smoother.
- Integration: A lot of technical SEO tools can integrate with other platforms like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, or CMS systems like WordPress. This allows for a more holistic view of your website's performance.
- Reporting: Data is only as good as your ability to interpret it. Tools that provide clear, visual reports can help you quickly identify issues and trends, making decision-making more efficien
- Scalability: If you're working with a large or growing website, or managing multiple sites, you'll want a tool that can handle the volume without compromising on speed or accuracy.
- Price: While it's tempting to go for the most feature-rich tool, it's essential to balance functionality with budget. Many tools offer tiered pricing, so assess what features you truly need and choose accordingly.
- Customer support: A responsive support team and an active community can be invaluable, especially when you encounter challenges or need guidance on specific issues.
Best Technical SEO Tools
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
- Free desktop website crawler
- Crawl up to 500 URLs for free (or get the paid version for unlimited URLs)
- Powerful and flexible crawler providing actionable insights for both small and large websites
Google Search Console
- Free tool to help you optimise your website for Google
- Provides detailed crawl, index, and serving information about your pages, directly from the Google index
- Also provides full Core Web Vitals diagnostics and suggestions
Ahrefs
- One of the most popular SEO tools on the market
- Full suite of competitor research tools – analysing keywords and pages as well as backlinks
- Complete set of tools to grow your search traffic, research your competitors and monitor your niche
Google PageSpeed Insights
- Free tool to analyse page download speed for any URL
- Provides detailed download speed score for mobile and desktop users
- Full breakdown of page speed issues such as large images, unused JavaScript and CSS, server issues and much more
Google Mobile-Friendly Test
- Free tool to identify any issues your page has for mobile devices
- Test any URL for any user experience issues for mobile users
- Only allows for one URL to be tested at a time
GTmetrix
- Free website performance testing and monitoring platform
- See how your site performs, identify why it's slow and discover optimisation opportunities to improve page speed
- Paid plans provide access to more tests and features
Semrush
- Fantastic access to competitor keywords
- See what keywords your competitors are ranking for
- Also includes Paid Search competitor keyword data
Google’s Rich Results Testing Tool
- Free tool to test your pages for structured data issues
- See what rich results could be generated by your pages in Google's search results
- Full documentation to help you fix structured data issues on your page
Lumar (formerly DeepCrawl)
- 'Website intelligence' platform
- Comprehensive technical SEO & website health analytics
- Hundreds of built-in reports & endless opportunities for custom extractions
Oncrawl
- Data-driven SEO crawler and log analyser
- Provides daily SEO reports and audits
- Improve crawlability and create effective SEO strategies
URL Profiler
- Extract and analyse bulk data from your website
- Carry out content audits, link analysis, social data and more
- Custom configuration for the ultimate flexibility
Little Warden
- Monitor your site, and clients' sites, and receive notifications if anything changes
- Little Warden looks out for over 30 changes e.g. SSL validity, title tag changes, 404 pages and other server response codes
- Comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee
Sitebulb
- Comprehensive desktop-based website crawlers
- Delivers actionable insights and data visualisations
- Detailed, unique and insightful reports for all areas of website optimisation
WebPageTest
- Test your user’s real experience with global locations, modern devices, and the latest browser versions
- Correlate your user’s visual experience to the technical measurements of your site
- Free plan allows for up to 300 tests per month
Botify
- Platform crawls and renders your entire website to provide the most comprehensive data map in the industry
- Optimisation tools tell you exactly what to focus on to improve your organic search performance
- Automation tools help action some of the recommendations automatically
Siteliner
- Free crawling tool to help find duplicate content, broken links and other technical SEO issues
- Very quick and easy to use - great to get a snapshot of your website
- Free version is limited to monthly scans of a website up to 250 pages
On The Map SEO Browser
- Free SEO browser and GoogleBot simulator
- Helps you to view your website exactly how Google sees it
- Discover crawling and indexing issues, page load speed problems and more.
SEOmator
- Website crawler providing in-depth technical SEO analysis
- Also offers extensive on-page SEO testing and optimisation tools
- Includes a suite of free tools to get you started
Responsinator
- Free tool to see how your web pages look on different devices
- Get a visual representation of how a URL renders in landscape and portrait mode on mobile devices and tablets
- Can be modified to only show the devices and screens you want to test
About the Author
Luke Glassford is an SEO expert with over 15 years’ experience.
During his time working in SEO, Luke has set-up an SEO agency, worked as an in-house SEO for a major national company and managed his own successful SEO consultancy - using a lot of different SEO tools along the way!