Disclosure: this post was written with AI assistance.
You don't need an expensive tool to find the problems that hold back most small sites. A focused audit with free tools covers the issues that matter: can search engines reach your pages, do they understand them, and do they work well for visitors? Set aside three to four hours, open a spreadsheet, and work through these steps in order.
What you need
- Google Search Console (free) verified for your domain. Bing Webmaster Tools is also worth adding.
- PageSpeed Insights (free, web-based).
- A crawler such as Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free up to 500 URLs) or a similar tool.
- A spreadsheet with columns: Issue, URL(s), Severity (high/medium/low), Fix, Done.
Log everything in the spreadsheet as you go. The audit is only useful if it turns into a fix list.
1. Indexing: can Google see your pages?
In Search Console, open Pages under Indexing. Look at:
- Not indexed reasons. "Crawled – currently not indexed" on important pages often signals thin or duplicate content. "Excluded by noindex tag" on pages you want found is a mistake to fix immediately.
- Your sitemap under Sitemaps. Is it submitted, and does the number of discovered URLs roughly match the number of pages you care about?
Then visit yoursite.com/robots.txt. Make sure it doesn't block important sections. A stray Disallow: / left over from a staging site is a surprisingly common disaster.
Finally, search site:yoursite.com in Google for a rough sense of what's indexed. It's not exact, but big gaps are a warning.
2. Crawl the site
Run your crawler on the homepage and let it finish. Then filter for:
- Broken internal links (4xx): fix the link or redirect the old URL.
- Redirect chains: A → B → C should become A → C.
- Server errors (5xx): take these to your host or developer.
- Orphan pages: important pages with no internal links pointing to them. Link them from relevant pages.
3. Titles and meta descriptions
Export page titles and meta descriptions from the crawl. Check for:
- Missing or duplicate titles. Every page needs a unique title describing its content, with the main topic near the start. Roughly 50–60 characters avoids most truncation.
- Missing or duplicate meta descriptions. They don't directly affect rankings, but they influence whether people click. Write a plain one- or two-sentence summary for key pages.
- One clear H1 per page that matches the page's purpose.
Forget about "keyword density". Write naturally for a reader, and make sure the page clearly covers the topic someone searching would expect.
4. Duplicate and thin content
Look for pages with near-identical content: tag archives, printer versions, URL parameters, or http/https and www/non-www versions that all load. Each page should have one main version. Use redirects or a canonical tag pointing to the preferred URL.
Thin pages with a few sentences and no real purpose are better merged into a stronger page or improved. Quality matters more than quantity.
5. Speed and Core Web Vitals
In Search Console, open Core Web Vitals to see field data from real users, grouped by page type. Then test a few key templates (homepage, a typical article, a product page) in PageSpeed Insights. Focus on the three metrics:
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): main content should appear within about 2.5 seconds.
- INP (Interaction to Next Paint): the page should respond to taps and clicks quickly, under about 200 ms.
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): content shouldn't jump around while loading.
Don't chase a perfect lab score. Common, high-impact fixes are compressing and correctly sizing images, lazy-loading images below the fold, reducing third-party scripts, and using caching.
6. Mobile and HTTPS
Open your key pages on an actual phone. Is text readable without zooming? Are buttons easy to tap? Do menus work? Google primarily uses the mobile version of pages for indexing.
Check that every page loads over HTTPS, that http:// redirects to https://, and that there are no mixed-content warnings in the browser console.
7. Structured data (optional but useful)
If you have articles, products, recipes, events or FAQs, check whether your pages include structured data. Test a few URLs with Google's Rich Results Test. Fix errors, but don't add markup for content that isn't actually on the page.
8. Look at performance data
In Search Console's Performance report, sort queries by impressions over the last three months. Look for:
- Queries with many impressions but a low click-through rate: improve the title and description.
- Pages ranking in positions 8–20: often the best candidates to improve with better content and internal links.
Prioritise the fix list
Sort your spreadsheet by severity:
- High: indexing blocks, noindex mistakes, broken key pages, site-wide HTTPS problems.
- Medium: duplicate titles, redirect chains, slow templates, orphan pages.
- Low: missing descriptions on minor pages, small structured-data warnings.
Fix the highs this week. Schedule the rest.
Common mistakes
- Auditing without making a fix list.
- Obsessing over tool scores instead of real user data.
- Making many changes at once, so you can't tell what helped.
- Expecting instant results: changes can take weeks to show in search.
Summary
Check indexing, crawl for broken links and duplicates, clean up titles, test speed with real-user data, verify mobile and HTTPS, and use your performance report to find quick wins. Repeat the audit every three to six months.
If you want a starting structure instead of a blank page, I put together a small, inexpensive, AI-assisted kit on this topic: SEO audit templates. Everything above works without it. Other kits: all products.
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