How to Do an SEO Audit of Your Own Website

An SEO audit does not require paid tools to be useful. This is the same process used on this site, using only free tools — Google Search Console, GA4, and PageSpeed Insights. Set aside about two hours.

Step 1 — Check whether your pages are indexed

Start with the basics: search site:yourdomain.com in Google. Every page listed is indexed. Anything missing is not. For the full picture, open Google Search Console and go to the Pages report — it shows exactly which URLs are indexed, which are not, and why. Common exclusions include "Discovered – currently not indexed" (Google knows about it but has not crawled it yet) and "Crawled – currently not indexed" (usually a content quality signal).

Step 2 — Verify your robots.txt and sitemap

Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt. Confirm nothing important is disallowed — a stray Disallow: / left over from development will block your entire site. Then check yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml loads properly and lists every page you want indexed, and that it is submitted under Sitemaps in Search Console.

Step 3 — Test Core Web Vitals and page speed

Run your homepage and two or three key pages through PageSpeed Insights. This is the heart of technical SEO for most small sites. Focus on three metrics: largest contentful paint (how fast the main content appears), interaction to next paint (how responsive the page feels), and cumulative layout shift (how much things jump around while loading). On a typical small business site, compressing images and removing render-blocking scripts fixes most of it.

Step 4 — Review on-page elements on every page

Go page by page. Each one needs a unique title tag (roughly under sixty characters), a unique meta description, exactly one H1, and a sensible H2/H3 structure below it. This is core on-page optimization, and the most common problem is duplication — several pages sharing near-identical titles, which makes them compete against each other in search.

Step 5 — Audit your content against search intent

For each page, search its target keyword and look at what actually ranks. If the top results are all in-depth guides and your page is a short sales page, the intent does not match — and no amount of technical work will fix that. This step catches more ranking problems than most people expect.

Step 6 — Check internal linking and structured data

Related pages should link to each other, and no important page should sit more than about three clicks from the homepage. Then validate your schema markup with Google's Rich Results Test to confirm search engines can parse what your pages actually are.

Working through this honestly will surface most of what is limiting a small site. If you would rather have it done for you, that is exactly what the audit package covers.