How to Run a Free SEO Audit
A free SEO audit should crawl your live site and tell you exactly which pages cannot be indexed, which lack the on-page signals to rank, and how your authority compares to the sites beating you. If it asks for your email before showing you anything, it is a lead form, not an audit.
What should a free SEO audit actually check?
Indexability of every crawled page, crawlability of the site as a whole, on-page signals like titles and headings, structured data, performance, and an authority estimate compared against the competitors ranking above you.
- Indexability
- Status codes, noindex directives, robots.txt blocks and canonical conflicts. Binary faults - each one removes a page from search entirely.
- Crawlability
- Sitemap accuracy, internal link depth, orphan pages, server response time. Determines how much of your site is ever seen.
- On-page
- Unique titles and descriptions, one H1, heading hierarchy, alt text, and whether pages have enough substance to answer their query.
- Structured data
- Whether the markup exists, validates, and honestly describes the page.
- Authority
- Referring domains and an authority estimate, only meaningful next to the numbers of the sites currently outranking you.
How do you tell a real audit from a lead form?
A real audit shows you the findings before asking for anything, names the specific URLs affected, and explains what each finding costs you. A lead form shows a score, a progress bar and a contact field.
The specific test is evidence. 'Your site has 14 issues' is not an audit finding - it is a number designed to worry you. 'https://example.com/pricing carries a noindex directive' is a finding, because you can go and check it, and you know exactly what to do about it.
The second test is whether the score is explained. Any tool can produce a number out of 100. Few will tell you what went into it, which means few can be checked - and a score you cannot reproduce is a score you cannot act on.
How do you run one yourself?
Crawl the site, list every page that cannot be indexed, check the on-page signals of the pages that can, then compare your referring domains against the sites ranking above you for your main queries.
The last step is the one most self-audits skip, and it is the one that turns a fix list into a strategy. A perfect technical score on a site with twelve referring domains competing against sites with four hundred tells you where the actual constraint is.
- 1Fetch your robots.txt and confirm it does not block anything important, and that it points at a sitemap URL that actually resolves.
- 2Fetch your sitemap and confirm every URL in it returns 200 and is not noindexed.
- 3Crawl the site and record, for every page: status, canonical, robots meta, title, description, H1 count and word count.
- 4List every page failing an indexability check. Fix or delete each one before doing anything else.
- 5Check for duplicate titles and descriptions across templates - the most common on-page fault at scale.
- 6Run a field-data performance check on the mobile version of your most important page.
- 7Search your primary query, look at who ranks in the top five, and compare their referring domains to yours.
Frequently asked questions
Is a free SEO audit as good as a paid one?
For technical findings, usually yes - the checks are deterministic and reproducible. Paid tools mainly buy you scale, historical tracking and licensed backlink data.
How many pages should an audit crawl?
Enough to be representative. Faults are almost always template-level, so a sample covering each template type finds nearly everything a full crawl would.
What score should I aim for?
Zero critical and zero high-severity findings. The composite score is a summary; the severity breakdown is what you act on.