How to Do an SEO Audit of Your Website (Free Step-by-Step Guide)

An SEO audit is a health check for your website. It tells you what is stopping Google from finding, understanding and ranking your pages, and which fixes will make the biggest difference first. You do not need expensive software or an agency to do a useful one. This guide walks you through the exact process we use, in the order that matters, with free tools at every step.

Plan for about two to three hours the first time. After that, a monthly check takes far less.

What an SEO audit actually checks

A proper audit looks at five areas. Each one can quietly hold your rankings back on its own:

• Technical SEO – can Google crawl and index your pages? This covers HTTPS, redirects, robots.txt, your XML sitemap, canonical tags and broken links.
• On-page SEO – does each page clearly say what it is about? Titles, meta descriptions, headings, image alt text and internal links.
• Content – does the page genuinely answer what people search for, and does the site show who is behind it?
• Speed – how quickly the page loads and responds, measured by Google’s Core Web Vitals.
• Mobile – how the site works on a phone, which is the version Google uses for ranking.

Work through them in this order. A brilliant page that Google cannot index will never rank, so technical problems come first.

Step 1: Run an automated crawl

Start with a tool that visits your pages the way a search engine does. It saves hours of manual checking and gives you a list of affected URLs for every issue, not just a vague warning.

You can use our free SEO audit tool: enter your website and it crawls up to 50 pages, runs 55+ checks, measures speed with Google PageSpeed Insights and gives you a scored report with a priority action plan and a PDF. Whatever tool you use, make sure it shows:

• how many pages it actually crawled (and whether it hit a limit),
• the exact URLs behind each problem, and
• a priority or severity for each issue, so you know what to fix first.

Keep this report open – the next steps help you confirm and act on what it finds.

Step 2: Check that Google can index your site

Indexing problems are the most serious issues an audit can find, because they stop pages from appearing in Google at all.

Search Console’s Page indexing report

If you have not already, set up Google Search Console for your domain. Open Indexing → Pages. It lists every page Google knows about and the reason any page is not indexed, such as “Excluded by noindex tag”, “Not found (404)” or “Duplicate without user-selected canonical”. Click each reason to see the affected URLs.

robots.txt and noindex

Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt. If you see Disallow: / under User-agent: *, you are blocking search engines from the whole site. On WordPress, also check Settings → Reading and make sure “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” is unticked – it is often left on after a website goes live.

XML sitemap

Your sitemap should list only live pages you want indexed: status 200, no redirects, no noindex. Submit it in Search Console under Sitemaps and check that Google reports it as read successfully.

Step 3: Fix HTTPS, redirects and broken links

Next, make sure every visitor and crawler lands on one secure, working version of each page.

1. HTTPS: type http://yourdomain.com in a browser. It should jump to https:// straight away. If the http version still loads, Google can find two copies of your site.
2. www or non-www: pick one version and permanently (301) redirect the other to it.
3. Broken internal links: fix or remove every link that leads to a 404 or 500 error. Your audit report should tell you which page each broken link sits on.
4. Redirect chains: where an old URL redirects to another redirect, point it straight to the final page, and update internal links to the final URL.
5. Missing pages: a page that does not exist should return a real 404 status, not redirect everything to the home page. Google calls those “soft 404s”.

Step 4: Look for duplicate pages and canonical problems

Duplicate content on your own website is very common and usually accidental. The same page can load at /, /index.php and /index.html, or with tracking parameters on the end. Google then has to guess which version to rank.

For each group of duplicates your audit finds, decide the main URL. Then either 301-redirect the copies to it or add a canonical tag on each copy pointing to it. Every indexable page should also carry a self-referencing canonical tag – SEO plugins such as Rank Math and Yoast add these automatically on WordPress.

Step 5: Review on-page SEO page by page

Now check that each important page clearly tells Google and searchers what it offers. Sort your pages by importance – home page, main service or product pages, then location pages and blog posts – and check:

Element	What good looks like
Title tag	Unique, about 50–60 characters, main topic first, brand at the end
Meta description	Unique, roughly 120–155 characters, states the benefit and invites a click
H1 heading	One clear H1 that matches what the page is about
Subheadings	H2 and H3 headings in order, breaking the page into sections
Images	Descriptive alt text on meaningful images, sensible file sizes
Internal links	Links to and from related pages using descriptive anchor text

Duplicate titles and descriptions across many pages are a sign of templates that need fixing once, not page-by-page edits. In WordPress SEO plugins, check the title templates for categories, tags and products.

Step 6: Measure speed and Core Web Vitals

Run your home page and one key service or product page through PageSpeed Insights. Look at the mobile results first. The three Core Web Vitals are:

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) – how long the main content takes to appear. Good is under 2.5 seconds.
• INP (Interaction to Next Paint) – how quickly the page responds when someone taps or clicks. Good is under 200 milliseconds.
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) – how much the layout jumps while loading. Good is under 0.1.

If the report shows a “Discover what your real users are experiencing” section, that is real visitor data from Chrome and it matters most. The lab score below it is a simulation that varies a little between runs. The most common fixes are compressing and resizing images, page caching, reducing heavy plugins or page-builder sections, and delaying third-party scripts such as chat widgets.

Step 7: Check the mobile experience

Open your website on your own phone and use it like a customer would. Can you read text without zooming? Are buttons big enough to tap? Does anything jump around while loading? Does the menu work? Technically, every page needs a responsive viewport tag, and pinch-to-zoom should not be disabled – blocking zoom is an accessibility failure that many audits flag.

Step 8: Review content and trust signals

Automated tools can measure word count, duplicates and readability, but this step needs your judgement. For each important page, ask:

• Does it answer what someone searching for this would want to know – services, prices or price guidance, process, locations, FAQs?
• Is it clear who runs the business? Google’s quality guidelines put weight on experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust (E-E-A-T).
• Are there easy-to-find contact details, an About page, real reviews or case studies, and a privacy policy?

Thin pages are not a problem because of word count itself. They are a problem when they leave the searcher’s question unanswered. Expand the pages that should bring enquiries, and merge or noindex pages that do not need to rank.

Step 9: Prioritise and make a plan

An audit is only useful if it turns into action. Sort every issue into four groups and give each an owner:

1. This week: anything blocking indexing, broken links, HTTPS and redirect problems, and duplicate pages.
2. This month: missing or duplicate titles and descriptions, canonical tags, slow server response.
3. Next two months: Core Web Vitals improvements, heading structure, image optimisation, internal linking.
4. Ongoing: expanding thin pages, adding trust signals, publishing helpful content.

Some fixes belong to your developer (redirects, speed, templates), some to a content writer (titles, descriptions, page copy) and some to you as the owner (About page, reviews, contact details). Our audit report labels each issue with a priority, effort and who usually fixes it, and builds this 90-day roadmap for you. If you want a broader checklist to work through with a developer, see our technical SEO checklist for business websites.

Step 10: Re-audit and track progress

After each round of fixes, run the audit again and compare. You should see issues disappear and scores rise within days, because the audit measures your site directly. Rankings and traffic take longer: Google needs to recrawl the pages, and competition still matters. Track clicks and impressions in Search Console’s Performance report over the following weeks.

A sensible rhythm for most small business websites is a quick automated audit every month and a deeper review every quarter, plus an extra audit after any redesign, migration or sudden traffic drop.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Fixing low-impact warnings first. Image alt text matters, but not as much as a site-wide indexing problem.
• Chasing a perfect score. A score is a guide. The goal is more of the right visitors and enquiries, not 100/100.
• Changing URLs without redirects. Every changed URL needs a 301 redirect from the old address.
• Testing only the home page. Problems often hide in templates for service pages, blog posts or products.
• Auditing once and forgetting. Plugins, theme updates and new content introduce new issues over time.

When to get expert help

You can fix many on-page issues yourself in an afternoon. Redirects, duplicate content, speed and migrations are easier to get wrong, and mistakes there can cost rankings. If your audit shows critical technical issues, or you would rather spend your time running the business, our team can do it for you – see how our SEO process works.

Frequently asked questions