2 Important tools to help you identify SEO issues

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

It is important to regularly check your site’s SEO to make sure that search engines are able to crawl it flawlessly. You may start with site crawling to identify and assess any issue. You may use a software tool to quickly crawl your website because it will be labor-extensive to check every page manually. One of the site crawler tools you may use is Screaming Frog SEO Spider.

^{(Figure 1: The interface of Screaming Frog SEO Spider. Just enter the URL and the tool extracts SEO-related data and automatically generates reports for all web pages crawled.)}

Some SEO reports generated are:

1. Response codes – status code of each web page is identified, including errors that need to be fixed like redirects (3xx), broken links (4xx), and server errors (5xx). Pages with errors have to be fixed because it can create a bad user experience and ultimately lead to lower rankings.
2. URL – determine if there are URLs with Non-ASCII characters, underscores, upper cases, or duplicates.
3. Page titles and Metadata – with this report, you can easily analyze all page titles and meta descriptions and identify those that are missing, duplicate, short, or too long. This also helps you evaluate if you need to change the content or not.
4. Images – determine images with large file size and do not have ALT texts.

Another tool that you may also use is the Google Search Console. Google Search Console (GSC) is a free set of tools developed by Google to track a website’s organic search ranking and performance. The dashboard has reports on website-related information like speed, mobile usability, internal linking, referring links from other websites, and even security issues.

^{(Figure 2: Google Search Console dashboard. The reports can be seen on the left side of the dashboard.)}

If you already use this tool, regularly check for errors and manual actions to make sure that your site is always eligible to appear and rank in search results. You may read more information in our blog What is Google Search Console?. If you don’t use this tool yet, and you need help in setting up Google Search Console or using its different tools and features, your project manager is ready to help. If you want, we can also do the SEO audit of your site and present a report of issues that may be found.