SEO Site Audits Made Easy With Microsoft’s SEO Toolkit

Written By: Adam Dince

One of the most important steps of a successful organic search marketing strategy is removing technical obstacles that may be preventing search engine spiders from accessing your content.  Lord knows that manually conducting thorough technical SEO audits can take significant amounts of time and not yield desired results if a major issue is missed.

Today, I would like to introduce you to a free tool, yes I said “free,” that will help end your SEO auditing woes.  In my opinion, Microsoft’s Free Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit 1.0 is best in class and it doesn’t cost a dime.  See my screenshots below to see how easy it is to use.

Test URL:  http://www.barackobama.com

Step 1:  Enter a project name and URL.  Then it’s off to the races

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Step 2:  The SEO Toolkit does all of the work

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Step 3:  Look at that! Done in no time at all

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Step 4:  The results.  Microsoft’s SEO Toolkit segments technical obstacles into relevant buckets/categories

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Step 5:  Download CSV file and mine the results for action items

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While Microsoft’s SEO Toolkit doesn’t provide the bells and whistles that some of its competitors do, a solid SEO should be able to leverage this data with ease.  Furthermore, with a little Excel finesse, simple dashboards can be created to visualize the findings.

As a reminder, this tool is only as good as the tacticians that use it.  Remember, once this data is collected, it’s important to validate the findings (as you would with any tool), prioritize and provide strategic recommendations to remediate the issues discovered.

If you’ve got case studies that you’ve put together using Microsoft’s SEO Toolkit, I’d love to hear from you.

Thank you for reading and please feel free to share if you found this article helpful.