A Step-by-Step SEO Audit You Can Run Today — Using Only Free Tools

The word audit gets used loosely in SEO. Some people mean a quick crawl report. Others mean a six-week engagement with a 90-page deliverable. For this guide, an audit means a structured diagnostic pass across four layers of your site's SEO health.

• Technical health — Can search engines crawl and index your site correctly? Are there speed, mobile, or structured data issues?
• On-page signals — Are your title tags, headings, and meta descriptions doing their job? Is each page clearly targeting one topic?
• Content quality — Does your content match what searchers actually want? Are there thin pages, duplicates, or cannibalization problems?
• External authority — What does your backlink profile look like? Are you earning links from relevant, trustworthy sources?

This framework does not cover paid search, social media performance, or conversion rate optimization. Those matter, but they belong in separate audits with different tools and different success metrics.

One important expectation to set: a free audit gives you the same diagnostic categories as a paid one. The difference is time and depth. Free tools require more manual cross-referencing. A paid platform like Ahrefs or Semrush automates much of that cross-referencing and surfaces historical data you cannot get from free sources. For most sites under a few hundred pages, free tools are genuinely sufficient to identify the issues that matter most.

Before you open a single tool, document your starting point: current organic traffic (from Google Analytics), current keyword rankings for your core terms (from Search Console), and any recent changes to the site — new pages, redesigns, plugin updates, or hosting migrations. Audits without this context produce findings you cannot act on confidently.

Open Google Search Console first. Navigate to the Coverage report and look for pages marked as Errors or Excluded. Errors are pages Google tried to index and could not. Excluded pages are ones Google chose not to index — sometimes correctly, sometimes not.

Pay attention to these specific error types:

• 404 errors — pages returning not-found responses that have inbound links or search impressions
• Redirect errors — broken redirect chains that stop crawlers mid-path
• Crawled but not indexed — pages Google visited but decided were not worth indexing (often a content quality signal)
• Noindex tags on pages that should be indexed — a deployment error that happens more often than most site owners expect

Next, go to the Core Web Vitals report inside Search Console. This shows your real-world performance data segmented by mobile and desktop. Pages marked as Poor are actively disadvantaged in rankings. Pages marked as Needs Improvement are borderline.

For any page flagged in that report, open Google PageSpeed Insights and run a fresh test. The Opportunities and Diagnostics sections tell you exactly what is slowing the page down — image formats, render-blocking scripts, server response times. Screenshot these findings. You will need them when you prioritize fixes later.

Common technical issues found at this stage: uncompressed images above 200KB, third-party scripts loaded synchronously, missing mobile viewport tags, and HTTP pages not redirecting to HTTPS. In our experience working with sites of varying sizes, technical issues at this layer account for a disproportionate share of ranking problems relative to the time they take to fix.

If Search Console shows your site was recently hit with a manual action or security issue, resolve those before proceeding. Everything else in the audit is secondary until the site is clean and indexable.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free tier, up to 500 URLs) crawls your site the way a search engine does and surfaces on-page issues at scale. Download it, enter your domain, and run a full crawl. While it runs, here is what to look for when it completes.

Start with the Page Titles tab. Filter for:

• Missing titles — pages with no title tag at all
• Duplicate titles — two or more pages sharing the same title
• Titles over 60 characters — likely to be truncated in search results
• Titles under 30 characters — usually too vague to signal topic relevance

Repeat the same check in the Meta Description tab. Missing or duplicate meta descriptions do not directly affect rankings, but they affect click-through rate — and that matters.

Move to the H1 tab. Every indexable page should have exactly one H1 that reflects the primary topic. Multiple H1s on a page or missing H1s are common after CMS theme changes.

Check the Response Codes tab for 3xx redirects chained more than one level deep, and for any internal links pointing to 404 pages. Internal broken links waste crawl budget and create a poor user experience.

Export the full crawl as a CSV. In a spreadsheet, sort by page type and look for patterns — if all your blog posts have duplicate title structures or all your service pages are missing H1s, that is a systematic problem, not a one-off fix.

One thing the free tier of Screaming Frog does not show you: JavaScript-rendered content. If your site uses a JavaScript framework (React, Vue, Angular), some pages may appear empty in the crawl even though they look fine in a browser. In that case, use Google's URL Inspection tool in Search Console to verify how Googlebot actually renders individual pages.

Technical health gets your pages crawled and indexed. Content quality determines whether they rank. This step does not require a dedicated tool — it requires a systematic review process.

First, export your full list of indexed URLs from Search Console (Settings → Index → Export). Cross-reference with your Screaming Frog crawl to identify pages that exist on the site but are not indexed. For indexed pages, pull their impressions and clicks from the Performance report in Search Console.

Any page with more than 50 impressions but fewer than five clicks over a 90-day period deserves a closer look. This ratio typically signals one of three things: the page ranks but for irrelevant queries, the title and meta description do not earn clicks, or the page is competing with a stronger page on your own site for the same query.

That last scenario is keyword cannibalization. To check for it, go to Search Console's Performance report, filter by a target keyword, and see how many URLs appear in the results. If two or more of your pages are showing impressions for the same query, you have a cannibalization issue. The fix is usually consolidating the weaker page into the stronger one via a 301 redirect.

For content quality itself, review any page that Search Console marks as Crawled but not indexed. Open each one and ask honestly: does this page answer a specific question better than any other page on the web for its target topic? If the honest answer is no, you have three options — improve it, consolidate it into a stronger page, or remove it and redirect.

Thin content is not just short content. A 2,000-word page that circles around a topic without answering it is thinner than a 400-word page that answers one question precisely. Word count is a proxy, not a signal. Google's quality signals are about match between query intent and page content.

You cannot get the full picture of your backlink profile with free tools — paid platforms like Ahrefs index significantly more links. But you can identify major problems and directional trends without spending anything.

Use Google Search Console's Links report (Links → External Links) to see which pages on your site have the most inbound links and which external domains link to you most often. This report reflects what Google has actually discovered, which makes it the most authoritative free backlink source available.

Look for three things:

• Link distribution — Are links concentrated entirely on your homepage? For most multi-page sites, you want at least some links pointing to interior service or content pages.
• Referring domain diversity — A healthy profile has links from many different domains, not dozens of links from one or two sources.
• Anchor text patterns — Excessive exact-match anchor text (every link saying your exact target keyword) can be a red flag. Natural profiles have varied anchor text.

For a free supplementary check, use Ahrefs' free backlink checker (limited to the top 100 backlinks) or Moz Link Explorer (limited free searches per month). These will surface some links that Search Console may not show yet.

If you find backlinks from obviously spammy or irrelevant sites — link farms, unrelated foreign directories, scraped content sites — document them. In most cases, a disavow file is only warranted if those links are accompanied by a manual action in Search Console. Otherwise, Google generally ignores low-quality links without any intervention from you. Disavowing healthy or neutral links by mistake can hurt your rankings, so err on the side of doing nothing unless Search Console explicitly flags a problem.

At the end of steps one through four, you will have a list of issues. Without a prioritization framework, that list becomes paralyzing. Use this simple two-axis matrix to decide what to fix first.

Axis 1 — SEO Impact: How much does fixing this issue affect rankings or traffic? A noindex tag on your homepage is catastrophic. A missing meta description on a low-traffic blog post from three years ago is negligible.

Axis 2 — Implementation Effort: How long does it actually take to fix? A broken internal link takes 60 seconds. Rebuilding your site's information architecture takes weeks.

Map every finding into one of four quadrants:

• High impact, low effort — Fix these first. Examples: restoring accidentally noindexed pages, fixing broken internal links, adding missing title tags, compressing large images.
• High impact, high effort — Schedule these as a project. Examples: site speed overhauls, content consolidation, building a new internal linking structure.
• Low impact, low effort — Batch these as maintenance tasks. Examples: cleaning up duplicate meta descriptions on thin archive pages.
• Low impact, high effort — Deprioritize or defer. These are things that feel important but rarely move the needle.

In our experience working with sites of varying ages and sizes, the high-impact, low-effort quadrant almost always contains three to five fixes that can produce measurable improvement within 60 to 90 days — sometimes faster, depending on how often Google recrawls the affected pages.

Document your prioritized list with the specific URL, the issue type, the fix required, and the owner responsible for making the change. A shared spreadsheet works fine. The goal is a living document, not a PDF that gets filed and forgotten.

If your audit surfaces issues that consistently require developer access or technical expertise you do not have in-house, that is worth noting. It does not mean the DIY path is wrong — it means your next step is either learning those skills or deciding which fixes to delegate. To work through the full diagnostic with the tools built for this workflow, run your audit with our free SEO tools.