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Guides 5 Sep 2026 5 min read by Kalum

A free SEO audit checklist you can run in one afternoon

Paid audits hand you 600 issues sorted by a severity score somebody else invented. This one has 24 checks, in the order that actually affects traffic, and every tool it uses is free.

An SEO audit is only useful if it ends in a short list of things you will actually do. Most of them end in a 40-page PDF, which is why most of them change nothing.

Here is the version that fits in an afternoon. Everything below uses Search Console, your browser, and PageSpeed Insights — all free. Work top to bottom; the order is roughly the order of impact.

Before anything: can Google see the site?

Open Search Console → Pages (under Indexing). Two numbers matter: how many pages are indexed, and how many are not, with the reason.

If the indexed count is far below your actual page count, stop the audit and fix that. Nothing else you do matters while Google cannot see the pages. The usual culprits appear in the "Why pages aren't indexed" table: Excluded by 'noindex' tag, Blocked by robots.txt, Duplicate without user-selected canonical, Crawled — currently not indexed.

That last one is the tricky one. It usually means the page was seen and judged not worth including — thin, duplicated or pointless. That is a content problem, not a technical one.

Indexing — 5 checks

  1. robots.txt is not blocking anything important. Visit yoursite.com/robots.txt and read every Disallow line. Leftovers from a redesign live here for years.
  2. Your sitemap is submitted and clean. Search Console → Sitemaps. It should list your real sitemap, show "Success", and the discovered-URL count should roughly match your page count. If a sitemap you do not recognise is listed, treat that as a possible hack — a spam sitemap in robots.txt is one of the most common leftovers of a compromised site.
  3. No accidental noindex. View source on a few key pages and search for noindex. Check a category page and a paginated page too, not just posts.
  4. Canonicals are self-referencing. Each page should point at itself, unless you deliberately meant otherwise.
  5. One version of the site. http://, https://, www and non-www should all redirect to one canonical version with a 301. Type all four and watch where you land.

On-page — 7 checks

Do these on your top 20 pages by impressions, not on all 300.

  1. Every page has a unique title containing the query it targets, near the front. Duplicated titles across a site are a signal nobody bothered.
  2. Titles are 50–60 characters. Longer gets cut in the results page, and the cut usually lands on your differentiator.
  3. Every page has a meta description that answers the search rather than describing the article. Google rewrites these often, but a good one still wins more clicks than a missing one.
  4. Exactly one H1, and it says what the page is about.
  5. Headings form an outline. H2s for sections, H3s underneath them, no jumping from H2 to H4 for styling reasons.
  6. The answer is in the first 100 words. Check this on every page targeting a question.
  7. Images have real alt text describing the image. Not the keyword, repeated eleven times.

Content — 5 checks

  1. No two pages target the same query. Search Console → filter by your top queries → Pages tab. If several URLs show for one query, merge them.
  2. Nothing is visibly stale. Old years in titles, prices that changed, screenshots of redesigned interfaces, references to tools that shut down.
  3. Thin pages are dealt with. Anything under about 500 words that is not a deliberate tool page or a genuinely short answer: expand, merge or delete.
  4. Each page shows first-hand proof. One screenshot you took, one number you measured, one example you actually ran. This is the difference between a page that holds a ranking and one that gets replaced.
  5. An author exists. A real name, a real bio, a real reason they know the subject — on the page, not just in the theme footer.
  1. No orphan pages. Every page should be reachable from at least one other page through a normal link in the content, not just from the sitemap.
  2. Click depth of three or less. Anything more than three clicks from the home page gets crawled less and ranks worse.
  3. Internal links use descriptive anchors. "Read more" and "click here" tell Google nothing. Use the target's topic as the anchor.
  4. No broken links. Both internal and outbound. A page full of dead links reads as abandoned.

Speed and mobile — 3 checks

  1. Run PageSpeed Insights on mobile for your home page and two article pages. Ignore the score; read the Core Web Vitals and the top three opportunities. Largest Contentful Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift are the ones worth work.
  2. Check the biggest image on your slowest page. On most small sites, one uncompressed hero image is the whole problem.
  3. Open the site on an actual phone. Tap the menu, scroll an article, try the search. Emulators miss things real thumbs find in seconds.

A note on speed: it is a real ranking factor and a much bigger conversion factor, but it is rarely the reason a page sits at position 12 instead of 4. Fix the obvious disasters, then go back to content. Nobody ever out-ranked a better page by shaving 200 ms.

What to fix first

You will finish with more than you can do in a week. Sort it like this:

  1. Anything stopping indexing. Blocks the entire site's potential.
  2. Anything on a page that already gets impressions. The traffic is right there.
  3. Snippet fixes on pages ranking well with poor click-through. Minutes of work, immediate return.
  4. Cannibalisation. Cheap, and it unblocks everything else on that topic.
  5. Content gaps on striking-distance pages. The main event.
  6. Everything else. Honestly — everything else can wait, and some of it can wait forever.

Then write down what you changed and the date. In a month, export Search Console again and look at those pages specifically. That is how an audit turns into knowledge about your own site instead of a PDF in a folder.

K
Kalum · Builder of Fix My SERP

I run a content site, got tired of paying four subscriptions to find out what to write, and built this instead. Everything here is tested on my own traffic first.

Want this done for you?

Fix My SERP does everything in this guide automatically — finds the pages, ranks them by what you would gain, and gives you the list in order. Free, and it runs on your own hosting.

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