How to check your website's SEO for free
5 minute read Updated 29 October 2026
To check your website's SEO, do five things: connect Google Search Console, run a free site audit, test your robots.txt, sitemap and meta tags, check page speed, and repeat after every big change. Each is free, and the whole set takes an afternoon.
Check 1: connect Google Search Console
Search Console is a free service from Google. It tells you whether Google can reach and read your pages, shows indexing problems, and reports how often your site appears in search and how often people click. You have to prove you own the site to use it, so do this first even if you do nothing else today.
Check 2: run a site audit
Type your address into the box on the home page. A free audit covers up to 300 pages and needs no account. It crawls your site the way a search engine does and lists the faults it finds, with the address of each, most serious first. How to run an audit, step by step explains the options, and what the audit covers lists the checks.
Check 3: the three files every site has
Three things sit behind almost every site and are worth testing on their own. Your robots.txt, with the robots.txt tester: can Google fetch the pages you care about? Your sitemap, with the sitemap validator: does it list the right addresses and do they all work? And the title and description of an important page, with the meta tag checker. All three are free and none asks for an email first.
Check 4: page speed
Run your most important pages through Google's PageSpeed Insights, which is free. Google's guidance is for the largest content to appear within 2.5 seconds of the page starting to load. Start with the pages that earn or should earn traffic, not only the home page. You can also tick the PageSpeed option when you run an audit here, for the one address you entered.
Check 5: read the results honestly
The score in our report is a triage tool for deciding where to start. It is not a Google metric, a clean score does not mean you will rank, and a poor one does not mean you will not. A finding is a fault we could see; no finding on a page is not proof the page is fine, because an audit samples pages behind each finding and cannot see everything. Where to start when the report has a hundred findings shows how to work through one.
What a free check cannot tell you
It will not tell you where you rank for a search, who your competitors are or who links to you. Those need other data. The best SEO tools, by job compares the options, and if you want a full list of what a technical audit covers, use the technical SEO audit checklist. Unfamiliar words are in the SEO glossary.
When to check again
After any redesign, platform change, URL migration or edit to robots.txt, because that is when these faults are introduced. If you would rather not remember to, the paid plans re-crawl your site on a schedule and show what changed since the last time.
The bottom line
Connect Search Console, run a site audit, test your robots.txt, sitemap and meta tags, look at page speed, and repeat after every big change. Fixing what those checks find does not guarantee a ranking, but a page a search engine cannot reach or read cannot rank at all. Run the free audit to start.
See it on your own site
Type an address and get a real report in about a minute — up to 300 pages, no account needed.