If your website is currently run by an agency, you may feel a little in the dark as to which tools they use to ensure that your site is healthy and easily found by potential customers. Sometimes, agencies are reluctant to disclose exactly which tools their webmaster team uses on a daily basis in order to check that everything is running smoothly. This is because they want to keep your job in their client base and don’t want to risk you thinking you can run it yourself.

Running a website isn’t easy, and in most cases it really can be left managed by an agency. However, we think it is valuable information to learn for your own knowledge and benefit, so to give you a little insight into how agencies run websites on their client’s behalf, we wanted to create a short list of technical SEO tools that are used regularly. These cover everything from the deep dive crawlers and site auditing technology, all the way down to the foundation and structural basis of your website. We’ll also cover the tools that give you insights into your page speed and core vitals, as well as a way to build inspection tools into your browser via plugins. 

Review SEO performance with deep dive crawlers and site auditors

Starting with the SEO tools, you will find that most agencies use a tool called Screaming Frog SEO Spider. It is the industry standard, as you can have unlimited access to its crawling features for just $279 a year. This tool will instantly crawl a website and return a report including details of all broken links (404 pages), audits of any redirects (including to identify loops), and analysis of page titles and meta descriptions for improvements. The tool can also find duplicate content and produce an XML sitemap, too. 

Alongside Screaming Frog, Sitebulb is also used by developers as it specializes in diagnostics for JavaScript renders and provides a simple action report for clients, which groups together a wide range of technical issues into one easy-to-understand summary.

Finally, a very useful tool for SEO updates that agencies like to use is Panguin. This tool has been developed specifically to provide summaries of how Google’s algorithmic updates have impacted the website and its SEO listings, meaning your agency can adapt very quickly to any penalties that may have been rolled out by the new update.

If your business is at the high-end, we’re talking enterprise level or a multi-million dollar firm, the agency may use a tool called Botify. This cloud-based platform is possibly the best and most in-depth tool available, but operates on a page-by-page budget, i.e. the more pages you have to crawl, the more expensive it is to run. Botify provides a detailed log on how spiders crawl your site, and can also adjust how the search engines ‘spend’ their crawl budget on your site so that you get the best possible results.

Under the bonnet, agencies assess page speed and web vitals

Now that we have the basics covered with SEO performance, it’s time to look under the bonnet of the website and assess the foundations, starting with tools that assess your page speed and core web vitals.

The first of these is the foundational tool provided by the world’s most used search engine: Google PageSpeed Insights. Whilst this isn’t the most advanced tool available, it does show you how the search engine assesses your website, as page loading time can seriously affect how high up in the rankings your website is listed. Recently, Google released a Chrome User Experience Report, which reviews the overall performance and user-friendliness of a website, as well as providing historical data to compare with. 

For a more advanced review of core web vitals, agencies may also use WebPageTest, which can simulate the exact site loading speeds across a range of devices and hardware capabilities. It can also show how network throttling affects the loading speed of a website and exactly pinpoint which particular scripts or images actually slow down the rendering times. 

Google provides essential foundational tools

When assessing the foundations of a website, aside from web speed, agencies also use tools to understand how a website’s structure or indexing affects its performance and listings with search engines. 

For this, one tool sits in the bookmarks of every single webmaster in an agency: Google Search Console. This essential tool provides the most accurate and up-to-date review of any indexing issues, anomalies found during site crawling, and overall search impressions of the website. Agencies often use it to export data into a spreadsheet ahead of migrating to a new build of a website, so that they have a backup of all previous data to use as a benchmark against performance on the new platform. 

Google also has a Schema markup tool that agencies use to check how the current coding is performing against what Google and other search engines support, and if the current website runs completely without errors. The tool can either run on an excerpt of website coding or a given URL, which makes it flexible for developers to test things ahead of being run on a live site or to review a website that’s recently come into their control. 

Browser plugins give front-end access to code inspection tools

Web developers often use plugins built into their internet browser to assess the background of a website while viewing the live platform. One of these plugins is rather self-explanatory: the Web Developer Toolbar.

This handy plugin has several features that allow any webmaster to access a set of tools directly from the live website, which can review information such as link details, title attributes, and overall coding structure. The tool allows a developer to spot issues in the coding on a website, and is particularly useful to assess how menus perform (or not) and the overall user interface. One of the more advanced tools is that the plugin can actually toggle both JavaScript and CSS coding on and off, allowing a developer to truly see which features function as intended or not when viewing the website from the front-end. 

Another free plugin that gets a lot of use by web developers is the Ayima Redirect Path tool. The plugin can show the user lots of relevant information about the performance of the webpage they’re currently viewing, revealing the current redirect path of that page as well as both error and status codes that are triggered. As the tool is built into the browser, it requires no additional server to query the webpage, and runs directly on your computer. This tool is very important if your website runs a number of redirects, as the plugin can identify any accidental loops or error messages that are produced.

Using a service like BestProxy ensures you can always access the website

Something that is often forgotten about when assessing the technical tools that agencies use, however, is a proxy server. Due to the large frequency of times that a webmaster has to access website servers, it is often recommended to operate through a proxy server. This is because a hosting server can block IP addresses from accessing a website if there are too many attempts to access it within a certain time period. 

The benefits of running your access through a proxy server are numerous: you can choose where to connect to the website, you can alter your location if the IP address is temporarily blocked due to too many access requests, and you can also check the page loading speed for international locations and ensure that your site runs as fast as possible globally. Using a service like BestProxy gives you great customer support around the clock, as well as over 300 server locations to choose from, and high-speed connections to ensure your work isn’t slowed down.