AI has been slowly infiltrating the world of SEO in the last few years. From easier keyword research to content generation, it has been a useful tool for all those looking to reach the top spots in the Google search results. However, AI changes more than just the way we generate content – AI SEO audit tools are also becoming more mainstream.
Technical SEO audits have become a crucial part of staying relevant online. However, more often than not, manual audits take a lot of time. Now that artificial intelligence is more easily accessible, SEO experts use it to simplify the auditing process. But what’s the hype all about? Let’s take a look at the benefits and pitfalls of technical SEO AI audits, as well as a few tools that might come in handy.
What Are the Benefits of AI in SEO Audits?
Experts who have been already using AI in their SEO audits are already aware of how much simpler everything becomes. Here are some of the perks of AI in technical SEO audits:
Mobile Usability Optimization
Nowadays, most websites are taking a mobile-first indexing approach. This is because Google uses a site’s mobile version for indexing and ranking. While optimizing for mobile would be a bit challenging manually, the process can be simplified with the help of AI tools.
These programs will check how responsive your website is, whether the design is touch-friendly, and whether the loading speed on smartphones is good. For optimal results, the tools will simulate real-life interaction, which can help reveal more potential issues so experts can fix them.
Boosting Platform Performance and Speed
It’s hard to attract visitors when your site’s speed and performance leave much to be desired. Most users click away when pages load slowly. If you want to make everything faster, you can use automated website audits to help you analyze each page’s speed. Not only that, but a detailed analysis will also tell you just what is slowing down your site, such as excessive JavaScript or oversized images.
Even better, AI will tell you what the impact would be on your rankings if you solve these issues.
Finding Broken Links
One of the things that has a big impact on your search engine ranking is backlinking. However, if your content is filled with broken links, this will lead to lower rankings and negative user experience.
While detecting broken links can be difficult and time-consuming, you can make the process quicker and simpler with an AI-driven site health check. A tool like this will explore your site and let you know what the broken links are, as well as where you can find them. If you invest in an advanced AI tool, you may even receive suggestions for alternative links for replacement.
Finding Crawl Errors
Sometimes, search engines will be unable to access specific pages on your website. These are known as crawl errors. Although they may not look like something severe, they can decrease your visibility and harm your rankings.
SEO experts use many tools to manually check for these errors. However, machine learning site crawler programs or AI-driven tools do better at finding the problems faster. This is because it takes them a few seconds to analyze large amounts of crawl data.
The Drawbacks of AI SEO Audits
Despite how useful AI can be in technical SEO audits, there are also some situations when its performance is lackluster. For this reason, experts should take an approach that combines both AI and human expertise, rather than focusing solely on artificial intelligence.
- Loss of Context
While you know your market and audience, AI doesn’t. So, while it will detect higher bounce rates, it won’t be able to tell why bounce rates matter in different ways for different pages. AI insights may thus lack context as they cannot understand your brand strategy.
- Flagging the Wrong Things as Errors
Sometimes, even if they are doing very well in terms of performance, AI tools might report your alt text, duplicate content, or meta descriptions as errors. These are known as “false positives”. If you aren’t careful and delete or change these things for no actual reason, they may harm your rankings.
- Generic Fixes
When you do an AI SEO audit software comparison, you may notice that some tools will give you very generic advice. They might tell you to change keywords or increase the word count without taking your industry into account. Acting on these suggestions without any consideration can take away from the originality of your content.
Best Tools for AI SEO Audits
Are you ready to rely on AI-powered tools for technical SEO audits? If that’s the case, here are some of the top options that you should use for detailed, accurate audits.
One of the main reasons why SEOptimer remains one of the best SEO audit and reporting tools is that it’s very simple to use, yet has some powerful features. By choosing it, you will end up with a SEO consultant. The tool will do a complete website analysis, scan your whole platform to find issues that lower your rankings, monitor your backlinks, track your keywords, and do white label reporting.
Ahrefs is not a tool to be ignored. This is because it’s one of the leaders when it comes to SEO platforms. The site will scan more than 170 technical and on-page SEO problems. It will analyze the backlinks used by competitors, check SEO metrics for several URLs at the same time, monitor keyword positions, and much more. It also has a database of 28.7 billion keywords across over 200 countries.
Screaming Frog eases technical analysis with thorough website crawling, strong visualization tools, JavaScript Rendering, XML Sitemap Generation, and much more. It especially stands out due to its crawl path report. It tells you how URLs are being discovered during a crawl, all while also letting you detect potential problems with crawls.
Final Thoughts
While AI-powered technical SEO audits can help find crawl errors, find broken links, or enhance speed and performance, there are also some audit automation pitfalls to know before using this new technology. Generic fixes, false positives, or context loss should not be ignored while using AI. If you want accurate audits, use one of the tools presented above, like Ahreft, Screaming Frog, or SEOptimer.