You do not need a $99/month subscription to audit a website. You need about an hour, a browser, and a checklist that goes in the right order — because fixing meta descriptions on pages Google cannot even index is wasted work.

This is the audit we run on our own site. Every tool it uses is free. Work through it top to bottom: each step assumes the previous one passed.

Step 1: Confirm Google can index your site at all

Search site:yourdomain.com in Google. If the number of results is drastically lower than your page count, or zero, stop everything else and fix that first.

Then check the obvious blockers: a stray Disallow: / in robots.txt, a leftover noindex meta tag from a staging environment, or an HTTP password still protecting the site. These are the single most common causes of "my site gets no traffic" — and the fastest to rule out.

Step 2: Read the Search Console coverage report

In Google Search Console, open Indexing → Pages. This tells you exactly which pages Google indexed, which it deliberately excluded, and why. Pay attention to Discovered — currently not indexed (usually a quality or crawl-budget signal) and Crawled — currently not indexed (usually a thin-content signal).

This is first-party data from the search engine itself. No third-party audit tool can override what it tells you.

Step 3: Verify your sitemap is accurate

Open /sitemap.xml in a browser. Check that it exists, that it lists your real canonical URLs, and that it does not list redirects, 404s or noindexed pages. A sitemap full of dead URLs actively wastes crawl budget. Submit it in Search Console and confirm it parses without errors.

Step 4: Find your broken links and missing images

Dead links waste crawl budget, break user journeys, and quietly leak the link equity you spent months earning. They also accumulate on their own — a page you linked to in 2023 does not ask permission before disappearing.

Run a free broken link scan on your domain. It crawls up to 500 pages with no signup and checks every internal and external link, every image (including responsive srcset variants), every redirect chain and your SSL certificate. Fix internal 404s by correcting or redirecting them; for dead external links, either update the target or remove the link. Our guide on finding and fixing broken links covers the triage order.

Step 5: Untangle your redirect chains

Every hop in a redirect chain costs crawl budget and a little link equity. Chains build up silently over years of restructuring: /old → /older → /newest. Run your top pages through a redirect checker and flatten every chain to a single 301. While you are there, confirm you redirect consistently to one canonical host — https://www. or https://, not both.

Step 6: Check Core Web Vitals on real templates

Run PageSpeed Insights on three URLs, not one: your homepage, a category or listing page, and a deep article or product page. They use different templates and usually score differently. Prioritise the field data (real users) over the lab score — a lab score of 100 on a page nobody visits is not an achievement.

The usual culprits, in order of frequency: unoptimised hero images, render-blocking third-party scripts, and fonts loading without font-display: swap.

Step 7: Audit titles and meta descriptions at scale

In Search Console, sort your pages by impressions and look at the click-through rate column. Any page with high impressions and a CTR under 1% is a page whose title is failing to earn the click — and rewriting a title is far cheaper than earning a higher position.

Check for duplicated titles across pages, titles truncated past roughly 60 characters, and missing meta descriptions on pages that matter. This is one of the few places where an hour of writing produces a measurable traffic change within weeks.

Step 8: Review your heading structure and internal links

One <h1> per page, describing what the page is about. Headings should nest logically, not be picked for their font size. Then check internal linking: every important page should be reachable within three clicks of the homepage, and your best pages should link to each other. Orphan pages — pages nothing links to — get crawled rarely and rank poorly.

Step 9: Confirm mobile and HTTPS basics

Google indexes the mobile version of your site. Open your key pages on an actual phone, not just a resized desktop window. Check that text is legible without zooming, tap targets are not stacked on top of each other, and nothing important is hidden behind a cookie banner.

Then confirm HTTPS everywhere: a valid, unexpired certificate, no mixed-content warnings, and HTTP redirecting to HTTPS. A broken link scan reports your certificate status alongside your links, so step 4 already covered this if you ran it.

Step 10: Schedule the repeat

This is the step everyone skips, and it is the one that decides whether the audit was worth doing. A site audit describes a moment in time. Links rot, plugins update, contributors publish, external sites disappear. A site that was clean in January is not clean in June.

At minimum, put a monthly recurring reminder in your calendar to re-run steps 4, 6 and 7. If you would rather it happen without you, automated monitoring re-scans on a schedule and emails you only when something has newly broken — which is the only version of this that survives a busy quarter.

The audit in one paragraph

Confirm you are indexed. Read Search Console. Clean your sitemap. Kill your broken links and redirect chains. Check speed on real templates. Rewrite the titles that are not earning clicks. Fix your heading and internal link structure. Verify mobile and HTTPS. Then schedule it all again. Nine of those ten steps cost nothing but attention — and in our experience the broken links and the low-CTR titles are where the recoverable traffic actually hides.

Start with a free scan and work backwards from what it finds.

Free SEO Audit: A 10-Step Checklist You Can Run Today (2026)