SEO Monitoring Tools

Know When Things Break

SEO disasters often happen silently. A robots.txt change, a noindex tag, a server error. Monitoring catches problems before they cost you rankings.

FOR SEO-SPECIFIC MONITORING

Little Warden

USE IT

SEO-specific monitoring. Track robots.txt, sitemaps, SSL, redirects, meta tags. Alerts when critical SEO elements change. Built by SEOs for SEO problems. Affordable and focused on what matters.

littlewarden.com → From $29/mo

SEO-Specific Monitoring

Little Warden

USE IT

Monitor robots.txt, sitemap health, SSL certs, domain expiry, redirects. Alerts when things change or break. Simple, focused, affordable. Essential for agency work—catch problems before clients notice.

littlewarden.com | From $29/mo

ContentKing

SITUATIONAL

Real-time SEO monitoring. Continuous crawling with instant change alerts. Tracks titles, metas, canonicals, status codes. Enterprise pricing but comprehensive. Now part of Conductor. Good for large sites with frequent changes.

contentkingapp.com | Enterprise pricing

Seer Indexability Tool

USE IT

Free Google Sheets tool from Seer Interactive. Check indexability status for lists of URLs. Checks noindex, canonical, robots.txt blocks. Simple but useful for spot checks.

Uptime Monitoring

If your site is down, you're not ranking. Simple as that.

Uptime Robot

USE IT

Free uptime monitoring for up to 50 monitors. 5-minute checks, email/Slack alerts. Checks HTTP, keyword presence, SSL. The default choice for basic uptime monitoring.

uptimerobot.com | Free tier + Pro

Better Uptime

SITUATIONAL

Modern uptime monitoring with incident management. Nice status pages. 30-second checks on paid plans. Good if you need public status pages or incident management workflows.

betteruptime.com | Free tier + paid

Pingdom

SITUATIONAL

Enterprise uptime monitoring. Real user monitoring (RUM), transaction monitoring. More features than Uptime Robot but significantly more expensive. Use if you need advanced features.

pingdom.com | From $15/mo

Visual & Content Change Detection

Visualping

SITUATIONAL

Visual website change monitoring. Screenshots and diff comparison. Useful for monitoring competitor pages, SERP changes, or critical pages. Good for non-technical change tracking.

visualping.io | Free tier + paid

Distill.io

SITUATIONAL

Monitor web pages for content changes. Browser extension or cloud monitors. Select specific elements to track. Good for watching competitor prices, job postings, or specific page sections.

distill.io | Free tier + paid

What to Monitor

1.
robots.txt

A single line can deindex your entire site

2.
Critical page status codes

Homepage, top landing pages returning 200

3.
SSL certificate expiry

Expired SSL = immediate Chrome warnings

4.
Domain expiry

Don't lose your domain (it happens)

5.
Sitemap accessibility

Make sure Google can reach your sitemap

Monitoring Philosophy

Most SEO disasters are preventable with basic monitoring. The problem is that issues often go unnoticed until weeks later when traffic drops.

Set up monitoring once, get alerts when things change. The cost of monitoring tools is nothing compared to the cost of discovering a problem 30 days late.

Start with the basics: uptime + robots.txt + SSL. Add more as needed.

Related Resources