How to check your website’s SEO health for free

You can find most of what a paid audit would find without paying anything. It takes about an hour the first time, and the tools are the same ones professionals open first. What you are buying with a paid audit is coverage and priority order — every page instead of a sample, sorted worst-first — not secret information.

Here is the free version, in the order worth doing it.

1. Google Search Console — 15 minutes, and the only one that is not optional

Search Console is Google reporting on your site directly. No other tool can tell you what Google itself has decided, which is why every other item on this list is guesswork without it.

Verify your site — usually by adding a DNS record or uploading a file your host will accept — then look at three screens:

• Pages. How many of your pages are indexed, how many are not, and the reason Google gives for each exclusion. "Excluded by noindex tag" and "Blocked by robots.txt" are the two that should alarm you.
• Performance. The actual searches people used to find you, with impressions and clicks. This is the single most useful screen for deciding what to write next: the queries where you get impressions but almost no clicks are pages whose title and description are underselling them.
• Sitemaps. Submit your sitemap here. If you do not have one, that is item 4.

Data takes a couple of days to appear after verification. Set it up now even if you do nothing else today, because it starts collecting from the moment it is connected and never backfills.

2. PageSpeed Insights — 2 minutes per page

Paste your homepage into pagespeed.web.dev. It runs Google's own Lighthouse audit on a simulated mid-range phone and gives you four scores plus a list of specific opportunities.

Two things to understand before you react to the number:

• The lab data at the top is a single simulated test. It varies between runs. Run it three times before believing any particular score.
• The field data, if shown, is from real visitors over the previous 28 days. It is far more meaningful and only appears once your site has enough traffic.

The SEO and Accessibility sections of the same report are quick wins that most people ignore because they arrived looking at the performance number.

What the mobile speed score means →

3. Your own browser — 10 minutes, and better than it sounds

Two keyboard shortcuts cover a surprising amount of ground.

View source (Ctrl+U, or Cmd+Option+U on a Mac) shows the raw HTML. Use Ctrl+F inside it and search for:

• noindex — should not appear on any page you want found
• <title> — should be present, unique, and about 30–60 characters
• name="description" — should be present and specific to that page
• rel="canonical" — should appear once, pointing at the page's own https address
• <h1 — should appear exactly once

Developer tools (F12) has a Console tab. Load a page with it open and look for red entries. Mixed content warnings and failed requests both show up here, and both are invisible otherwise.

While you are there: open your site on an actual phone, not a resized desktop window. If the text is too small to read without pinching, you are missing a viewport declaration.

4. Check the three files that live at your domain root

Type these into your browser directly. Each takes ten seconds and each can be badly wrong.

• yourdomain.com/robots.txt — look for Disallow: /, which blocks everything. More →
• yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml — should list your real pages. WordPress also uses /wp-sitemap.xml, and Yoast uses /sitemap_index.xml. More →
• http://yourdomain.com — typed without the s. It should jump to https by itself. More →

5. Crawl the whole site

Everything so far checks pages one at a time, which is fine for a homepage and useless for finding the problem on page 40. Two classes of issue only appear when something walks the entire site: pages that return errors, and titles duplicated across pages that should be distinct.

This is the part that is tedious by hand and the reason crawler tools exist. The free SEOPert audit does it for up to ten pages, which is enough to expose the pattern on a small site. Screaming Frog's free tier covers 500 URLs on a desktop application if you would rather run it yourself.

What this misses

Being straight about it: the free route above checks your homepage thoroughly and your site shallowly. On a ten-page brochure site that is close to complete coverage. On a site with a hundred service pages or a product catalogue, the problems are almost always in the long tail — the pages nobody has opened since they were created — and sampling the first ten will not find them.

It also gives you a pile of findings in no particular order. Deciding what matters is most of the work, and it is the thing least visible in a free tool's output.

Start below. The audit runs every check on this page across your site and sorts the result by how much each one actually costs you.