6 sitemap tools to boost your SEO performance

If you’re here, you’re well aware of how important a sitemap is for your website’s SEO and overall structure. 

But did you know there’s more to be done than just creating a sitemap? This asset needs to be monitored over time, as well as updated and archived for future reference.

No matter if you’re just starting out with building your sitemap, or looking for ways to expand its value, we’ve got some recommendations for you. Here are 6 tools for all things sitemap!

From creation to audit: sitemap tools for every use case

To plan out website structure

Milanote

Are you just getting started with your website? Kudos to you for thinking about this sitemap from the early stages!

A sitemap is basically a list of all the pages on your website, so in creating a sitemap, website structure is key. For a more visual approach to this process, you can opt for a board tool like Milanote. 

With Milanote, you can create a board to organize the contents within your site. Start by thinking about what you want to include on your site, as well as what its visitors would like to see, and add them to the board. Some examples of this might be products, prices, information about you and the team behind your brand, and contact information.

The features of this board tool will then allow you to group and organize these ideas into content categories, pages, and add hierarchy, creating a website mapping template. It’s a great way to get started and get a good overview of all the content in your site and how it will look like.

Milanote also allows you to add text ideas and images for each category, as well as sketches of what you’d like the page to look like. In addition, you can get the whole team to submit their ideas and comments with its collaboration features.

You can try Milanote out with their free version that allows up to a 100 notes, images, or links, and decide to upgrade later if it’s the best fit for you!

Once the website planning is done, you’ll be ready to move on to designing your site and creating a sitemap.

To create a sitemap

Before reviewing these tools, if you built your site on a CMS platform like WordPress or Wix, those platforms may already have the sitemap ready for you to use. You can skip this section and go to our tools to submit your sitemap to search engines section if that’s your case!

TechnicalSEO

If you already have your website set up, and just need to create a xml sitemap to submit to search engines, TechnicalSEO is as easy as it gets. Just upload a .csv file with all the links that make up your site, click on “Create sitemap”, and download the .xml sitemap ready to go.

You don’t have the .csv file with all your links? Don’t worry! Our free sitemap generator will create it for you. 

DYNO Mapper

Sitemaps can be taken a step further. By simply providing your website’s URL, DYNO Mapper will provide a visual sitemap for you. You can just download the .xml file and continue your sitemap journey from there, or explore DYNO Mapper’s many features.

With its Google Analytics integration, this tool allows you to view data for each of the pages displayed on the visual sitemap. This means you can get an overview of the most visited pages and where they’re located!

Moreover, this sitemap has drag-and-drop and collaborative capabilities, so if you’re ever thinking about a content redesign, you can use your sitemap on DYNO Mapper as base. 

To submit your sitemap to search engines

Google Search Console

Submitting your sitemap isn’t mandatory, but it does help your website get crawled more quickly. For the most popular search engine in the world, head to Google Search Console.

Under the Sitemaps section, you’ll be able to submit your .xml file containing your entire site structure. Over time, you can come back to Search Console to check the status of your sitemap, and if there are any errors.

Google Search Console is a great tool to keep at hand for SEO purposes, as it also allows you to see popular search terms where your website shows up, as well as your performance in Discover sections.

To visualize and archive your sitemap

Stillio

The sitemap journey doesn’t end with submitting it to search engines. You need to review it periodically, in case your website structure changes, you add new content, or there’s gaps to be fixed. The files you learned how to generate above are a picture of your site at a particular moment, but you’ll need to go back and update every now and then.

But just a list of every page in your website is not enough of an archive. If you want to go back and see what your site looked like, wouldn’t visuals be more useful?

Meet Stillio: the automated screenshot service. With this online tool, you can set up captures of your entire website at the interval of your liking. This means that if you want to update your sitemap every 6 months, you can ask Stillio to screenshot every page of your website at that interval and send it directly to your inbox. In this way, you can forget about website archiving and focus on tasks that really deserve your and your business’ attention.

Remember earlier when we mentioned .csv sitemaps? Stillio has a free tool for that! Just paste your sitemap .xml file link on our sitemap generator and download it in no time.

Stillio plans start at $29 for 5 webpages. Pairing your sitemap with website visual archives will set you up for success (and not to mention keep you ready in case of litigation!).

To audit your sitemap

Semrush Site Audit

Now if you’re really serious about sitemaps – and most importantly, SEO – you’ll want to invest in a solution that helps you understand your website’s performance. But besides keywords and content topics, there’s a technical side to SEO that involves your sitemap.

With Semrush Site Audit, you can easily identify issues within your sitemap, like formatting errors, size, and orphaned pages. Paying attention to all of these is crucial to have a well-functioning sitemap, and make it easier for search engines to crawl your website.

But the features of Semrush Site Audit don’t stop there: we’re talking about a complete SEO solution here. So while you’re looking at sitemap issues, you can also find out areas of improvement and optimize SERP rankings. Its integration with Google Analytics will open up more doors to data and help you prioritize which pages to focus on first.

Final thoughts

See how sitemaps are not just a one time thing? They’re a huge part of your website, and can be optimized and used to your advantage in more ways that you first imagine.

Try out these tools and let us know how it went. If you’re interested in trying out Stillio, check out our 14-day free trial or book a demo so we can talk about ways to boost your SEO performance!