Website SEO Check: The Complete Free Guide

A website SEO check is an automated audit that tells you what is stopping your site from ranking. Not opinions — specific, fixable problems: pages Google cannot index, images nobody compressed, meta tags that were never written. This guide covers how to run one for free, how to read the results, and how to fix what you find in the order that actually moves the needle.

What a website SEO check measures

A thorough check looks at five things. Performance — how fast your pages load and how stable they are while loading, measured with Core Web Vitals. Technical SEO — whether search engines can crawl and index your pages at all. On-page signals — title tags, meta descriptions, heading structure. Accessibility and mobile usability — whether the site works on a phone and for users with assistive technology. Structured data — the machine-readable facts that determine how you appear in rich results and AI answers.

Those five categories are not equally weighted, and they should not be. A site with a missing meta description ranks. A site Google cannot crawl does not rank at all. Any checker worth using tells you which of your problems is which.

How to run a website SEO check, step by step

1. Start with the page that matters most

Not your homepage — the page that earns you money. For most sites that is a product, pricing or service page. Homepages are usually the fastest and best-maintained page on a site, so auditing yours first gives a flattering result that is not representative of anything.

2. Read the issues, not the score

The score is a summary, and summaries lose information. Two sites can both score 68: one has a dozen cosmetic warnings, the other has anoindextag quietly excluding it from Google entirely. Scroll past the number and read the critical findings first.

3. Fix in severity order, not page order

The instinct is to work top-to-bottom through the report. Resist it. One indexability fix can be worth more than forty image optimizations, because it changes whether the page is eligible to rank at all rather than how well it competes. Do every Critical issue site-wide, then every Warning, then decide whether the Info items are worth your afternoon.

4. Re-scan and confirm

Verify the fix landed in production, not just in your editor. Build steps strip things; caches serve stale files; a CDN can keep an old asset alive for days. A second scan takes thirty seconds and catches the deploy that silently did not take.

5. Put it on a schedule

SEO health decays. Content editors publish pages with no meta description, developers ship an uncompressed hero image, a third-party script gets added to the head and pushes your load time up by 800ms. Monthly is enough for most sites; after any redesign or migration is mandatory.

The five issues almost every site has

Images shipped at full resolution

The single most common finding, and usually the largest. A 3000px photo displayed in a 600px slot wastes roughly 96% of the bytes it costs to download. Export at the size you actually display, serve WebP or AVIF, and add width and height attributes so the browser reserves the space before the image arrives.

Missing or duplicated meta descriptions

Google rewrites descriptions often enough that some people conclude they do not matter. They matter: the description is your ad copy in the search result, and it drives click-through rate on a listing you have already earned. Duplicates are the worse case, because they signal that two pages cover the same ground.

Broken internal links

Every 404 in your own navigation is a dead end for a crawler and a frustrated visitor. These accumulate invisibly — a page gets renamed, and six links elsewhere on the site keep pointing at the old URL.

No structured data

Without schema markup, a search engine has to infer what your business is, what you sell and who wrote your content from prose. With it, you state those facts unambiguously. This is now the difference between being parsed correctly by an AI answer engine and being skipped — GEO optimization leans on it heavily.

Render-blocking JavaScript

Scripts in the head stop the browser from painting anything until they finish downloading and executing. Analytics, chat widgets and font loaders are the usual culprits. Most can be deferred or loaded asynchronously without changing a line of their behaviour.

What an SEO check cannot tell you

This is the part most guides skip. A technical audit measures whether your site is capable of ranking. It cannot tell you whether anyone wants to read what is on it, whether you are targeting keywords with real search volume, or whether any other site has ever linked to you. A perfect score on a page nobody searches for ranks for nothing.

Treat the check as removing obstacles rather than creating demand. It clears the path; the content and the links are what walk down it.

How long until you see results

Indexability fixes can take effect within days of Google recrawling the page. Speed improvements show up in field data more slowly — Chrome UX Report metrics are a rolling 28-day window, so a fix deployed today is not fully reflected for about a month. Ranking changes lag both, and depend on competition. Two to six weeks is a realistic window before you can judge whether anything moved.

Run yours

You can run a free website SEO check on any URL in about thirty seconds — no signup, every issue explained in plain English with the fix. If you also want to know whether ChatGPT and Perplexity can read your site, the website GEO check covers that side.