A full professional SEO audit involves crawling every page of a site — but a lightweight, free version covering the fundamentals takes under an hour and catches most of the common issues.
1. Check how Google actually sees your titles and descriptions
Search your own site with site:yourdomain.com in Google and look at what's actually showing in the snippet. If it looks generic or truncated, regenerate it with a free meta tag generator and update the page.
2. Confirm your robots.txt isn't blocking anything important
Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt directly in a browser and read through the disallow rules line by line. It's a surprisingly common mistake to accidentally block an entire section (or the whole site, during development) and forget to remove the rule at launch. Compare it against a fresh reference from a free robots.txt generator if anything looks off.
3. Review your URL structure
Look through your site's URLs for anything long, with query strings, or containing unnecessary stop words. You can't always change these safely after the fact (see the note on redirects below), but a free slug generator is useful for getting new pages right from day one.
4. Spot-check your content for keyword stuffing
Run your highest-traffic pages through a free keyword density checker — older content, written before you knew better, is often where over-optimization from a few years ago still lingers.
5. Check Search Console for the issues you can't see manually
Crawl errors, mobile usability issues and manual actions only show up in Google Search Console — no client-side tool can replicate this, since it's Google reporting on its own crawl of your site.
The bottom line
This covers the fast, free parts of an audit. A full technical audit (broken links across thousands of pages, page-speed at scale, duplicate content detection) genuinely needs a crawler tool once your site grows past a size you can review by hand.
Try it yourself
Put this into practice with our SEO Tools.