You hire someone to “improve your SEO.” They charge you 500 euros a month. Three months go by and traffic hasn’t gone up. They tell you “SEO takes time.” Six months pass. Nothing. You realize they never explained what problems your website had or what they were actually fixing.
This happens more often than you’d think. And it’s prevented with something simple: knowing how to do a basic SEO audit before hiring anyone. You don’t need to be an expert. You don’t need paid tools. You just need 30 minutes and the free tools makes available to you.
In this article, we’ll show you how to diagnose your website’s SEO problems yourself, using free SEO tools anyone can use. If you want a professional review afterward, great. But at least you’ll know what to ask and how to evaluate what they’re proposing.
What Is an SEO Audit and Why You Need One
An SEO audit is a complete diagnosis of your website’s health in the eyes of search engines. It reviews the technical side (can access it?), content (is it relevant?), authority (do other sites trust you?), and user experience (does it load fast? does it work on mobile?).
It’s not a generic checklist. It’s a prioritized analysis: not all problems are equal. An indexing error on your main services page is critical. The same error on a two-year-old post nobody visits is irrelevant.
If your website has been online for more than 6 months and has never had a website audit, it almost certainly has problems you can’t see. Some of them could be costing you clients every single day.
Andres, the owner of an online language school, had been investing in content for a year. “We were publishing two articles a week. Good content, well written. But organic traffic was stuck at 200 visits a month.” When we reviewed his website with the tools we’re about to show you here, we found that 60% of his pages were excluded from ’s index due to a canonical tag issue. Sixty articles couldn’t see. We fixed it in one afternoon and traffic doubled in 6 weeks.
If you want to understand technical SEO in depth and how it works, we have a complete technical SEO guide that covers every pillar.
Step 1: Google Search Console (First and Most Important)
If you’re only going to use one tool, make it this one. Google Search Console is ’s free tool that tells you exactly how the search engine sees your website. It’s the first thing we open in any website SEO analysis we do.
What to review in Search Console:
- Coverage/Indexing: How many pages does have indexed? Are there excluded pages that should be indexed? Are there crawl errors?
- Performance: What keywords are you appearing for? How many clicks are you getting? What’s your average position?
- Page experience: Are you passing Core Web Vitals? Is your site mobile-friendly?
- Sitemaps: Do you have a sitemap submitted and processed without errors?
- URL inspection: You can verify whether a specific page is indexed and whether it has problems
Warning signs you should investigate:
- Pages “excluded” with reasons like “Crawled, currently not indexed” or “Page with redirect”
- Fewer indexed pages than your site has published
- 404 errors on pages that should exist
- Core Web Vitals in red or orange
- High impressions with low clicks (your title and description aren’t convincing)
If you don’t have Search Console set up, do it now. It’s free and takes 10 minutes. Without it, you’re doing SEO blind.
Step 2: PageSpeed Insights (Speed and Core Web Vitals)
PageSpeed Insights is another free tool that analyzes any page’s performance. You just need to enter the URL.
What it tells you:
- Performance score (0-100): Above 90 is excellent. Below 50 is a serious problem.
- Real Core Web Vitals (field data): LCP, INP, CLS with real user data
- Diagnostics: What’s slowing your site down (unoptimized images, render-blocking JavaScript, missing cache)
- Opportunities: How much you can improve and how
What to look for in an audit:
- LCP above 2.5 seconds (your site loads slowly)
- CLS above 0.1 (your content “jumps” while loading)
- Mobile score below 50 (problematic)
- Images without modern formats (WebP/AVIF)
- Third-party JavaScript blocking the load
Patricia, the owner of an online eco-friendly products store, had a PageSpeed score of 23 on mobile. “I couldn’t understand why my Google Ads cost per click was so high.” It turns out penalizes poor user experience in Ads too. After optimizing images and removing 4 WordPress plugins she wasn’t using, the score went up to 78. Her cost per click dropped 22%.
Step 3: Manual Inspection of Key Elements
Automated tools are useful, but some things you need to verify manually. Open your website and check:
Meta tags (title and description)
Right-click on any page, select “View source,” and look for the <title> and <meta name="description"> tags. Verify:
- That each page has a unique title (not the same across all pages)
- That the title includes the main keyword and is between 50-60 characters
- That the meta description is between 150-160 characters and is persuasive
- That no pages are missing titles or have generic titles like “Home” or “Page 1”
Heading structure
Look for the H1, H2, H3 tags in the source code. Each page should have a single H1 (the title), and the other headings should follow a logical hierarchy. If you have 3 H1s on a page, or if you jump from H1 to H3 without an H2, that’s a structural problem.
HTTPS and SSL certificate
Your website must load over HTTPS (green padlock in the browser). If it still uses HTTP, you have a security issue that actively penalizes.
Mobile-friendly
Open your website on a phone. Does it look good? Can you tap the buttons? Can you read the text without zooming? Over 60% of traffic comes from mobile. If your site doesn’t work well on a phone, you’re losing more than half of your potential clients.
Step 4: Free SEO Tools That Complement the Basics
Beyond ’s tools, there are several free SEO tools that help you dig deeper:
- Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (free): Complete technical audit, similar to paid tools but free for your own site
- Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs): Crawls your site the way does and detects technical errors, broken links, redirects, duplicate meta tags
- Rich Results Test (): Verifies whether your structured data is correct
- Mobile-Friendly Test (): Checks whether your site passes the mobile usability test
- GTmetrix: Alternative performance analysis to PageSpeed with additional metrics
For a quick website SEO analysis with Screaming Frog, enter your URL and wait for the crawl to finish. Check the “Response Codes” tab to find 404 errors, the “Page Titles” tab to spot duplicates, and “Meta Description” to see which pages have it empty. In 10 minutes you’ll have a complete map of your site’s technical issues.
With these tools you can run a fairly comprehensive online SEO audit and free SEO audit without spending a euro. It won’t be as deep as a professional audit, but it will give you a clear picture of the main problems.
Step 5: The 10 Most Common SEO Problems (and How to Detect Them)
After auditing small and medium business websites for years, these are the errors we find most frequently:
- Pages not indexed for no apparent reason: Search Console > Indexing. If you see many excluded pages, investigate why.
- Slow loading speed: PageSpeed < 50 on mobile. Almost always caused by heavy images or too many plugins.
- No XML sitemap: doesn’t have a map of your site. Create one and submit it from Search Console.
- Duplicate titles and descriptions: Screaming Frog detects this immediately. Every page needs unique meta tags.
- No HTTPS: Security issue + penalty. Free SSL certificate with Let’s Encrypt.
- robots.txt blocking important content: Check in Google’s documentation on crawling and indexing that you’re not blocking pages you want indexed.
- Duplicate content without canonical tags: Two URLs showing the same content. doesn’t know which one to choose.
- No structured data: You’re missing out on rich snippets in (stars, FAQs, breadcrumbs).
- 404 errors on internal pages: Internal links pointing to pages that no longer exist. Screaming Frog finds them all.
- Non-responsive website on mobile: uses mobile-first indexing. If your site doesn’t work on mobile, you won’t rank.
How Much Does a Professional SEO Audit Cost
If after running your own diagnostic you want a deeper review, here’s what it typically costs. The price of an SEO audit varies by depth:
- Basic audit (technical only): 150-300 euros
- Complete audit (technical + content + authority + action plan): 300-1,000 euros
- Enterprise audit (large sites, multiple languages): 1,000-5,000 euros
The price of an SEO audit should include a report with detected issues, prioritized by impact, and an action plan with concrete steps. If someone sells you an “audit” that’s a generic 3-page PDF, it’s not an audit.
At LetBrand we do complete SEO audits for 200 euros. They include technical, content, and authority reviews, with a prioritized report and action plan. You can see the details on our pricing page.
If you’re thinking about investing in a new website and want SEO built in from day one, take a look at our guide on how much a website costs. A well-built site from the start needs fewer audits later.
How to Know If Your SEO Is Working (and When to Worry)
After fixing the problems, how do you know things are going well? In the age of AI, SEO has changed. We recommend reading our article on how SEO works with artificial intelligence to understand the current rules.
Signs things are going well:
- Impressions in Search Console growing month over month
- Average positions dropping (closer to page one)
- Organic traffic growing in Analytics
- More pages indexed without errors
- Core Web Vitals in green
Warning signs:
- Organic traffic dropping with no changes to your site (possible algorithm issue)
- Pages getting de-indexed for no reason
- Core Web Vitals getting worse
- Positions rising (moving away from page 1)
- Fewer impressions month over month
Elena, co-founder of an online training platform, checked Search Console every Monday. “The metric I care about most is the impressions trend. If it drops two weeks in a row, I investigate. That’s how we caught a canonical issue before it became a disaster.”
Your Website Deserves a Look Under the Hood
Let’s recap what you can do today, for free:
- Search Console tells you how sees your site: indexing, errors, performance
- PageSpeed Insights tells you whether your site is fast or if it’s losing clients due to slowness
- Manual inspection of meta tags, headings, HTTPS, and mobile-friendliness
- Free tools like Ahrefs Webmaster Tools and Screaming Frog round out the diagnostic
- The 10 most common problems can be detected with these tools in under an hour
If you’re building a digital product from scratch, make sure SEO is integrated from the beginning. Our guide on building a SaaS from scratch explains how to do it step by step, including the technical side that affects rankings.
An SEO audit isn’t a luxury. It’s basic maintenance. Just like you take your car to the mechanic once a year, your website needs someone to look under the hood at least every 6 months.
The good news: now you know how to run a first diagnostic yourself. The bad news: if you find problems you can’t fix, you need help.
Want a real professional diagnostic? Our 200-euro SEO audit covers everything we’ve explained here and more: complete technical analysis, content review, authority profile, and a prioritized action plan. Book yours now.
