We have audited hundreds of websites over the years, and one thing is consistently true: the most expensive audits are not always the most useful ones. We have seen $5,000 agency audits that produce 100-page PDF reports nobody reads, and we have seen free audits using the tools in this guide that lead directly to a 40 percent traffic increase within three months. The difference is not the price of the tool. The difference is whether the audit identifies the right issues and leads to action.

This guide is structured as a six-phase audit process that you can follow from start to finish. Each phase covers a different dimension of SEO, uses specific free tools, and produces findings that feed into a prioritized action plan. By the end, you will have a complete picture of your website's SEO health and a clear list of what to fix and in what order.

What a Complete Website Audit Covers

A comprehensive SEO audit evaluates six dimensions of your website's search performance. Each dimension affects your rankings differently, and understanding the relationships between them is what separates a useful audit from a data dump.

Your Free Audit Toolkit

Here are all the free tools you will use across the six phases of the audit. Each tool has a specific role, and together they provide coverage that rivals paid audit platforms costing $100 to $300 per month.

Phase 1: Technical Health Audit

Technical health is the foundation. If search engines cannot properly crawl and index your pages, no amount of on-page optimization or content quality will help. Start every audit here.

Step 1: Check Index Coverage in Google Search Console

Open Google Search Console and navigate to the Pages report (formerly Coverage). This report shows you exactly how many of your pages are indexed, how many have errors, how many are valid but have warnings, and how many are excluded from the index and why. Focus on two things: pages with errors (these need immediate attention) and pages that are excluded with the reason "Discovered - currently not indexed" or "Crawled - currently not indexed," which often indicates content quality issues or crawl budget problems.

Use the URL Inspection tool to check specific important pages. It shows you the exact date Google last crawled the page, the HTTP status code it received, whether it could access all resources, and what structured data it found. If a page was last crawled weeks or months ago, it may indicate that Google has deprioritized it, which is often a signal of thin content or poor internal linking.

Step 2: Crawl Your Site with Screaming Frog

Download Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free for up to 500 URLs) and run a full crawl of your website. Once the crawl completes, check the following tabs in order. First, the Response Codes tab: filter for 4xx errors (broken pages) and note any 3xx redirects, especially redirect chains (A redirects to B, which redirects to C). Second, the Page Titles tab: filter for missing titles, duplicate titles, and titles over 60 characters. Third, the Meta Description tab: look for missing, duplicate, or truncated descriptions. Fourth, the H1 tab: identify pages with missing H1 tags or multiple H1 tags. Fifth, the Internal tab under the Links section: sort by unique inlinks to find orphaned pages (pages with zero internal links pointing to them).

Export the findings for each tab as a CSV file. These exports become the raw data for your audit report. For sites with more than 500 pages, prioritize crawling your most important sections (homepage, key landing pages, top traffic pages) within the free limit, or consider our technical SEO services for a complete large-site crawl using professional tools.

Phase 2: On-Page SEO Audit

On-page optimization determines how well individual pages communicate their topic and relevance to search engines. This phase evaluates whether your pages are properly set up to rank for their target keywords.

Step 3: Run Your Top Pages Through the SEO Score Calculator

Open the SEO Score Calculator and test your 10 to 15 most important pages. These typically include your homepage, main service or product pages, top-traffic blog posts, and key landing pages. For each page, the tool evaluates over 50 ranking factors and provides a weighted score based on their actual impact on search performance. Record the overall score and the specific issues flagged for each page.

Pay particular attention to issues that appear across multiple pages, as these indicate systemic problems rather than one-off mistakes. Common patterns include consistently missing schema markup, internal links that all use the same generic anchor text like "click here," images without alt attributes, and heading hierarchies that skip levels (jumping from H1 to H3 without an H2).

Step 4: Validate Meta Tags with the Meta Tag Analyzer

Run the same key pages through the Meta Tag Analyzer. This provides deeper analysis of your title tags, meta descriptions, Open Graph tags, Twitter Cards, canonical tags, and robots directives. Check that every page has a unique title tag under 60 characters that includes the primary keyword near the beginning. Verify that meta descriptions are between 140 and 160 characters and include a clear value proposition. Confirm that canonical tags point to the correct URL (watch for trailing slashes, HTTP vs HTTPS, and www vs non-www mismatches).

The Meta Tag Analyzer catches issues that simpler tools miss, like conflicting canonical directives, Open Graph images that will not render properly on social media, and robots meta tags that accidentally block indexing. These are common issues on sites built with CMS platforms where default settings may not be properly configured.

Phase 3: Content Quality Audit

Content quality is the factor that determines whether your pages deserve to rank. Technical SEO and on-page optimization get you into the competition, but content quality determines where you place.

Step 5: Analyze Content with the AI Content Optimizer

Run your key content pages through the AI Content Optimizer. This tool evaluates your content against the quality signals that modern search algorithms prioritize: topical comprehensiveness (are you covering the subject thoroughly?), structural clarity (is the content organized in a scannable, logical way?), readability (is the writing accessible to your target audience?), and entity coverage (are you mentioning the key concepts, people, and places that a comprehensive article on this topic should include?).

The AI Content Optimizer is particularly valuable for identifying thin content, which is one of the most common SEO problems. Pages with fewer than 300 words of unique, useful content rarely rank well for competitive keywords. But word count alone is not the issue. A 2,000-word page that repeats the same points without adding depth is functionally thin. The AI analysis evaluates whether your content provides genuine value relative to what is already ranking for your target keywords.

Step 6: Identify Content Gaps with Search Console

Return to Google Search Console and open the Performance report. Filter by pages, then look at each page's query data. When a page receives impressions for queries it does not explicitly target, that is a content gap opportunity. For example, if your page about "home office setup" receives impressions for "best desk for remote work" but you never mention desk recommendations, adding that section could capture additional traffic without creating a new page.

Also look for pages with high impressions but low click-through rates. This pattern often means your page ranks well enough to appear in search results but your title tag and meta description are not compelling enough to earn the click. Improving these snippets is one of the highest-ROI SEO activities because you capture more traffic from ranking positions you already hold.

Phase 4: Performance and Speed Audit

Page speed affects both rankings and user experience. Google uses Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal, and users abandon pages that take more than 3 seconds to load. This phase uses multiple tools to build a complete picture of your performance.

Step 7: Test Core Web Vitals

Run your top pages through the Core Web Vitals Calculator. This tool evaluates all three Core Web Vitals using real Chrome User Experience Report data. The thresholds that matter: Largest Contentful Paint should be under 2.5 seconds (good) or at least under 4.0 seconds (needs improvement). Interaction to Next Paint should be under 200 milliseconds (good) or under 500ms (needs improvement). Cumulative Layout Shift should be under 0.1 (good) or under 0.25 (needs improvement). Pages that fail any metric in the "poor" range are actively penalized in rankings.

Step 8: Get Detailed Performance Diagnostics

Run Google PageSpeed Insights on pages that failed or scored poorly in the Core Web Vitals check. PageSpeed Insights provides specific, actionable recommendations: eliminate render-blocking CSS or JavaScript, compress images, implement lazy loading, reduce server response time, and minimize main-thread work. Each recommendation includes an estimated time savings, so you can prioritize fixes by impact. Supplement this with the Page Speed Analyzer for additional loading metrics and analysis.

Run Google Lighthouse from Chrome DevTools on the same pages. The Lighthouse accessibility audit catches issues that affect both user experience and SEO, such as missing alt text on images, low color contrast, and missing form labels. The best practices audit catches security issues like mixed content (HTTP resources loaded on HTTPS pages) and deprecated API usage. Document all failures and warnings.

Phase 5: AI Search Readiness Audit

This is the audit phase that did not exist two years ago. With Google AI Overviews appearing for over 30 percent of searches and growing, evaluating how well your content performs in AI-generated responses is now an essential part of any thorough audit. Most audit frameworks skip this entirely, which means they miss one of the fastest-growing sources of organic visibility.

Step 9: Run the AIO Readiness Checker

The AIO Readiness Checker evaluates your content against the criteria that AI systems use when selecting sources for generated responses. It analyzes whether your content answers questions directly and concisely, whether you provide clear factual statements that AI can cite, whether your E-E-A-T signals (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) are strong enough for AI systems to consider you reliable, and whether your schema markup helps AI systems understand your content structure.

Run this tool on your highest-traffic content pages and your key money pages. The results will show you which pages are already well-positioned for AI citation and which need restructuring. Common issues include burying key answers deep in content instead of leading with them, using ambiguous language that AI systems struggle to extract clear facts from, and lacking the structured data that helps AI understand your content hierarchy. For comprehensive AI optimization, consider our AIO optimization services.

Phase 6: Building Your Prioritized Action Plan

The most important part of any audit is not the findings. It is the action plan. A 50-item list of issues is useless if you do not know which five to fix first. Prioritize based on two factors: potential impact on rankings/traffic and ease of implementation.

Create a spreadsheet with four columns: the issue, the affected pages, the priority level, and the status (not started, in progress, complete). This becomes your working document for the next quarter. Schedule time weekly to work through the list, starting with Priority 1 items. After completing each fix, re-test the affected pages using the same free tools to confirm the issue is resolved.

If the audit reveals more issues than you can handle internally, consider our SEO audit services, which include a professional audit using all 25 free tools plus expert prioritization and implementation guidance. Our free SEO audit gives you a starting point to see what a professional analysis reveals before committing to a full engagement.

Free Audits vs Paid Audits: Honest Comparison

Free tools produce the same quality of raw data as paid tools. Google Search Console's data is literally from Google. The Core Web Vitals Calculator uses the same CrUX dataset as Google PageSpeed Insights. Screaming Frog's free crawler uses the same engine as the paid version. The data quality is not the differentiator.

The differentiators are scale and expertise. Paid tools like Ahrefs and Semrush can crawl millions of pages and provide competitive data across thousands of domains, which free tools cannot. This matters for enterprise sites and agencies but not for most small to medium businesses. Professional audit services add expert interpretation that no tool, free or paid, can replicate. A tool tells you that your LCP is 3.8 seconds. An expert tells you that the cause is an unoptimized hero image loaded from a CDN with high latency in your primary market region, and that replacing it with a locally hosted WebP image will resolve the issue.

For most websites under 500 pages, the free audit process described in this guide provides the same findings that a $500 to $2,000 paid audit would produce. The time investment is higher because you are running multiple tools manually rather than using an integrated platform, but the output is comparable. For larger sites or businesses that lack internal SEO expertise, professional SEO audit services provide the expert layer that makes findings actionable.

Frequently Asked Questions