With more and more websites being launched every second, it’s becoming increasingly important to make your website stand out from the rest. Even niches which once only had minimal competition are now becoming overcrowded spaces where many different websites are battling for first page space in Google.

The best way to have a good chance of appearing above other websites is to make your site as ‘Google-friendly’ as possible, which can be done through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Whilst SEO can seem daunting and a bit of a taboo, this is mainly down to the low-quality ‘SEO agencies’ based overseas, which give the industry a bad reputation. In fact, once you have a basic understanding of SEO, everything becomes much clearer and there are many tools out there that can help identify SEO issues on your website for you, so that you can resolve them yourself with a little guidance.

If your website has many pages, it can be hard to find which issues need addressing. As mentioned above, there are a number of tools out there that can help you understand which areas of your website have SEO issues which need resolving. Here are a few tools that can help you identify any problems on your site.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

One of the most well-known tools in the SEO industry, Screaming Frog is used by not just small website owners, but also large organisations across the world.

To run a site ‘crawl’, you simply start the software (which is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux), enter the main URL of the website, then hit Start. The speed at which the software runs mainly depends on the amount of RAM in your computer, and also your Internet connection speed.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

A free version is available which has some limitations (the main one being that you’re unable to save the crawl files), with the full version being available for a yearly licence of £99.

Moz Analytics

If you’re planning on doing long-term SEO work, or if you have 1000’s of pages, Moz Analytics is another option.

Working in a different way to Screaming Frog, Moz instead ‘crawls’ your website on a weekly basis, then produces reports which can be accessed through the online interface.

MozAnalytics_Screen

If you’re a beginner to SEO, Moz breaks down any issues on your site into High Priority, Medium Priority, and Low Priority, so you know which issues to work on first. Within each of these three priority levels, you can then see the number of issues with each individual SEO parameter (i.e. Duplicate Page Titles).

MozAnalytics_List_Screen

Don’t worry if you don’t understand what any of these mean, since Moz is helpful and gives you guidance on the optimum length etc.

These errors can then be exported to Excel, so you can work through them.

With plans starting out at $99/month, this software is more aimed at companies which have more than one website to manage the SEO of, or for larger SEO agencies.