How to Run a Free Technical SEO Audit

To run a technical SEO audit for free, crawl your site to list every page and its problems, check your most important pages in more detail, review Google Search Console for indexing issues, then fix the biggest problems first and crawl again to confirm. Here is the process step by step, using free tools.

If you want the full list of things to check, see the Technical SEO Audit Checklist.

Step 1: Decide what you are auditing

Write down the site address and the pages that matter most: your homepage, services or product pages, and top articles. An audit of a small business site might cover 20 to 100 pages, so you can look at all of them. Note any recent changes, such as a redesign or a move to a new platform, because those cause many technical problems.

Step 2: Crawl the site

Enter your homepage in the Page Audit Checker and choose a page limit of 25, 50, 100 or 200. The tool follows internal links from the start page and records, for each page:

• the status code
• the title and meta description, with lengths
• the canonical URL
• the H1 and H2 headings
• the number of images and how many have empty alt text
• internal and external link counts
• any structured data found

Because it discovers pages by following links, any page with no internal links pointing to it will not appear. That absence is itself a finding: it suggests an orphan page.

Step 3: Sort the results by severity

Use the summary cards to filter the table. Work in this order:

1. Errors (4xx/5xx): pages that did not load. These are the top priority.
2. Redirects: internal links that go through a redirect.
3. Canonical issues: missing canonicals, or canonicals pointing elsewhere.
4. Title and description issues: missing, duplicate, too short or too long.
5. H1 issues: pages with no H1 or more than one.
6. Images and structured data: empty alt text and missing markup.

Export the table as CSV so you can sort it in a spreadsheet and keep a record.

Step 4: Fix the pattern, not just the page

Look for issues that repeat across many pages. If 40 pages share the same title format with a missing keyword, or every page has a redirected link in the footer, one template change fixes them all. Check what is common to the affected pages before you edit them one by one.

Step 5: Check your most important pages in detail

For each key page, run the specific checks the crawl cannot do:

• Mobile Friendly Test: viewport, sideways scrolling, text size and tap targets.
• Alt Text Checker: which images are missing or have empty alt text, and whether the existing text is useful.
• HTML Validator: serious markup errors.
• Content Audit Tool: whether the page covers its target keyword properly compared with competitors.
• Schema Markup Generator: build or improve structured data. If you are new to it, read What Is Schema Markup?.

Step 6: Look at what Google sees

Set up Google Search Console if you have not, and verify your site. Then:

• Open the Pages (indexing) report to see which pages are indexed and the reasons others are not.
• Use the URL Inspection tool on your key URLs to see whether Google can crawl and index them, and to view the rendered page.
• Check that your sitemap is submitted and processed without errors.

Where the crawl says a page is fine but Search Console says it is not indexed, the answer is usually a noindex tag, a canonical pointing elsewhere, a robots.txt rule, or content Google judged not worth indexing.

Step 7: Check speed

Run your key pages through PageSpeed Insights. Look at the Core Web Vitals results, and at the specific opportunities listed, such as oversized images, render-blocking resources and layout shifts. Compress large images and consider modern formats with the Image to AVIF Converter.

Step 8: Prioritize and fix

Put each issue in a simple table:

Issue	Pages affected	Impact	Effort	Priority
Key pages returning 404	3	High	Low	Fix now
Duplicate titles from one template	40	Medium	Low	Fix soon
Missing alt text on blog images	60	Medium	Medium	Plan it
A few long titles	8	Low	Low	When time allows

The numbers above are an example. Start with high impact and low effort, then work down. Changes that block crawling or indexing always come first.

Step 9: Re-crawl and record

After you fix things, crawl again and compare. Keep the old and new CSV files so you can show what improved. Schedule a re-crawl every few months and after any major change.

Common mistakes in DIY audits

• Fixing cosmetic issues before indexing problems.
• Treating every warning as an emergency.
• Fixing pages one by one when a template change would fix them all.
• Forgetting to re-crawl after changes.
• Trusting a tool’s score instead of checking what actually matters for your pages.

What a free audit will miss

Free tools are good for the basics. They will not replace a specialist review of a large site, complex JavaScript rendering, international setups, log file analysis or a migration plan. The Page Audit Checker also reads the HTML the server sends, does not run JavaScript, and does not read robots.txt, so check those separately. For a deeper review, see our technical SEO audits.

Frequently asked questions

How long does a free technical SEO audit take?

For a small site, a few hours: the crawl is quick, and most of the time goes into reviewing and prioritizing the results.

What is the best free tool for a technical SEO audit?

There is no single tool. A crawler, Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights together cover most of what you need.

How many pages can I audit at once?

With the Page Audit Checker you can crawl up to 200 pages at a time. For larger sites, audit the most important sections first.

What should I do after the audit?

Fix the issues in priority order, re-crawl to confirm, and repeat on a regular schedule.

Do I need technical skills?

Basic ones help. You do not need to code to find the problems, but fixing them may involve your CMS, theme or a developer.