If you've ever wondered whether your website is actually showing up in Google searches—or silently losing customers to competitors—you're not alone. Most business owners don't know how to audit their website SEO, and honestly, it sounds more complicated than it needs to be. The good news? You don't need a computer science degree or an expensive agency retainer to figure out what's going on. In about five minutes, using free tools, you can get a clear picture of your site's health and know exactly what to fix first.
Let's walk through it together.
What Does an SEO Audit Actually Check?
Think of an SEO audit like a quick health checkup for your website. You're looking at a handful of core areas:
- Crawlability – Can Google actually find and read your pages?
- Page speed – Is your site loading fast enough to keep visitors (and Google) happy?
- On-page SEO – Are your titles, headings, and descriptions doing their job?
- Mobile usability – Does your site work on phones?
- Broken links and errors – Are there any dead ends frustrating your visitors?
You don't need to fix everything at once. The goal of this audit is to find the biggest problems first so you can prioritize your time.
Step 1: Check If Google Can See Your Site
Before anything else, you need to confirm that search engines can actually crawl your website. This is the foundation of everything.
Use Google Search Console (Free)
Go to Google Search Console and add your website. Once verified, head to Coverage (or Pages in the newer layout) and look for any errors or excluded pages.
A healthy site should show most pages as "Valid." If you see a long list of errors, that's your first priority.
Quick Manual Check
Type this into Google's search bar:
site:yourdomain.com
If your pages show up, Google knows you exist. If nothing shows—or far fewer pages appear than you expect—there may be a crawling problem worth investigating.
Step 2: Test Your Page Speed
Page speed is a confirmed Google ranking factor, and it also directly affects whether visitors stick around or leave. A site that takes more than three seconds to load loses roughly half its visitors.
Use Google PageSpeed Insights (Free)
Head to pagespeed.web.dev, paste in your homepage URL, and run the test. You'll get a score from 0–100 for both mobile and desktop.
What to look for:
- A score of 90+ is excellent
- 50–89 needs improvement
- Below 50 is hurting you
The tool will also show you specific issues, like unoptimized images or render-blocking scripts. Common quick wins include:
- Compressing images before uploading (use Squoosh.app for free)
- Enabling caching on your server
- Removing unused plugins or scripts
If you're on WordPress, adding a caching plugin like WP Super Cache can sometimes boost your score significantly overnight.
Step 3: Review Your On-Page SEO Basics
This is where you check whether your pages are actually telling Google what they're about. Learning how to audit your website SEO means getting comfortable poking around your own pages.
Check Your Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
Right-click on any page and select View Page Source. Then use Ctrl+F (or Cmd+F on Mac) to search for:
<title>
and
<meta name="description"
Your title tag should:
- Be 50–60 characters long
- Include your main keyword naturally
- Be unique on every page
Your meta description should:
- Be 150–160 characters
- Summarize the page and include a reason to click
- Also be unique per page
Check Your H1 Tag
Every page should have exactly one H1 tag—your main headline. Search the source code for:
<h1>
If you have zero H1 tags, or multiple, that's worth fixing. The H1 should include the primary keyword for that page.
Step 4: Run a Free Crawl for Technical Errors
Manual checks are helpful, but a crawl tool will catch things you'd miss. These tools act like a search engine bot and flag broken links, duplicate content, missing tags, and more.
Try Screaming Frog SEO Spider (Free up to 500 URLs)
Download Screaming Frog and enter your domain. Even the free version will show you:
- 404 errors (broken pages)
- Missing title tags or meta descriptions
- Duplicate page titles
- Redirect chains
When you know how to audit your website SEO with a crawler, broken links become very easy to spot. A 404 error means a visitor (or Google) landed on a page that doesn't exist—bad for trust, bad for rankings.
Step 5: Check Mobile Friendliness
More than 60% of web searches happen on mobile devices. If your site is hard to use on a phone, you're losing customers and rankings.
Google's Mobile-Friendly Test (Free)
Go to search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly and enter your URL. You'll get an instant pass or fail, plus specific usability issues to fix like:
- Text too small to read
- Clickable elements too close together
- Content wider than the screen
Interpreting Your Results: What to Fix First
Once you've run through all five steps, you'll likely have a list of issues. Here's a simple priority framework:
| Priority | Issue |
|---|---|
| 🔴 Critical | Pages not indexed, crawl errors, site not mobile-friendly |
| 🟡 Important | Slow load times, missing title tags, broken links |
| 🟢 Nice to Have | Thin meta descriptions, minor speed improvements |
Start with anything red. Those are the issues actively preventing people from finding you. Then work your way down the list.
Even fixing one or two critical issues can make a measurable difference in how Google ranks your site.
You've Done the Hard Part—Now Make It Count
Knowing how to audit your website SEO is the first step. Acting on what you find is what moves the needle. The five steps above will give you a solid baseline in just a few minutes, and most of the tools are completely free.
But if you want to skip the manual digging and get a clear, prioritized report of exactly what's wrong with your site—and exactly how to fix it—Abby's got you covered.
👉 Run a free SEO scan at abbyseo.com and get your personalized remediation guide for just $8.99. You'll know exactly what to fix, in what order, without the guesswork.