Free SEO site audit: 20 checks you can do in an hour

Indexing and crawling

1. Search site:yourdomain.com on Google. Compare the count with your real number of pages.
2. Open Search Console, Pages report. Read the reasons under "Why pages aren't indexed".
3. Check robots.txt. Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt and make sure it does not disallow everything.
4. Check your sitemap. It should list every important page and be submitted in Search Console.
5. Test one address. http, https, www and non-www should all redirect to a single version.

Speed and mobile

1. Run PageSpeed Insights on your home page and one inner page. Note Largest Contentful Paint.
2. Open the site on a phone. Tap every button in the menu. Fill the form.
3. Look at image sizes. Anything over a few hundred kilobytes should be compressed.

On-page

1. Titles. Each page needs a unique title with its main keyword, under about 60 characters.
2. Meta descriptions. Unique, and written to earn the click.
3. One H1 per page that says what the page is about.
4. URLs. Short, readable, hyphenated.
5. Internal links. Every important page should be reachable within three clicks and linked from related pages.
6. Alt text on meaningful images.

Content

1. Thin pages. Pages with a few lines of text rarely rank. Expand, merge or remove them.
2. Duplicate pages. City or service pages that differ only by one word should be rewritten or combined.
3. Answers. Does each service page state price, process and area served near the top?

Authority and local

1. Links. In Search Console, open Links and see which sites link to you. Fewer than ten linking sites means link building is a priority.
2. Google Business Profile. Verified, correct category, recent photos and reviews.
3. Schema. Run a page through Google's Rich Results Test.

What to fix first

Fix in this order: indexing, redirects and broken pages, titles, speed, then content and links. Do not start with link building on a site Google cannot crawl properly.

Free tools worth knowing

Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, PageSpeed Insights, the Rich Results Test, Microsoft Clarity, and the free tier of a desktop crawler for sites under 500 pages.

When to get help

If the Pages report shows large numbers of excluded pages, if traffic dropped suddenly, or after a redesign, a full technical SEO audit is worth it. We will also take a free first look at your site on a call.