Find what stops your site from ranking.

You do not need a paid tool to see where you stand. Three free sources cover most of it:

1. 1Run a free SEO site checker that crawls more than one page, like the one above. Duplicate titles, broken internal links and redirect chains only show up when pages are compared with each other.
2. 2Open Google Search Console, Google’s free tool for site owners, to see which pages are indexed and which queries bring clicks.
3. 3Test your main templates in Google’s PageSpeed Insights for mobile speed and Core Web Vitals.

Then work through the checklist below in order. Each item says what to look for and why it matters.

Nothing else matters if your pages are not in the index. Start here:

• Status codes: important pages return 200. Pages returning 404, 410 or 5xx drop out of search, and so do the links pointing to them.
• Noindex tags: only on pages you really want out of search, such as the cart, account pages or internal search results. A noindex left over from a staging site is one of the most common reasons for a sudden traffic loss.
• Canonical tags: each page points to itself or to the preferred version, never to a broken or redirected URL.
• robots.txt: it does not block sections you want indexed, and it lists your sitemap.
• XML sitemaps: they exist, have no format errors and list only indexable pages that return 200.

Internal links are how search engines discover your pages and how they judge which ones matter most. Check for:

• Broken internal links, and broken links to other sites.
• Redirect chains (A to B to C) and loops. Link straight to the final URL.
• Internal links that point to redirects instead of the final page.
• Orphan pages that no other page links to, and important pages more than three or four clicks from the home page.
• HTTP URLs on an HTTPS site, and HTTP versions that do not redirect to HTTPS.

The title and meta description are what people see in the search results, so they decide whether you get the click. Every indexable page needs a unique title of roughly 30 to 60 characters that says what the page is about, a description that makes someone want to click, and one clear H1.

Watch for duplicates: when a hundred product pages share the same title, Google struggles to tell them apart and may show only one. Thin pages with a few lines of text, near-duplicate pages and pages that say “not found” while returning a 200 status (soft 404s) belong on the list too.

Google indexes the mobile version of your site, and measures its speed with Core Web Vitals on real visitors. In an audit, look at server response time, page weight, oversized images, images without width and height, and missing viewport tags. For the real-user picture over time, use a dedicated page speed monitor.

Security basics count too: every page on HTTPS, no mixed content (HTTP images or scripts on HTTPS pages), and the usual security headers.

Structured data (schema.org JSON-LD) helps search engines understand products, articles, reviews and businesses, and makes pages eligible for rich results. Check that it is valid and has the required properties. If your site has several languages, check hreflang: valid codes, return links and an x-default.

A newer item on the list: AI search. Make sure your robots.txt does not block AI crawlers you want to be read by, and consider an llms.txt file that points AI tools to your most useful pages. To see how often assistants actually recommend you, look at AI visibility.

A free SEO audit will almost always find something. Do not try to reach 100. Work in this order:

1. 1Errors that keep important pages out of the index: 4xx and 5xx pages, wrong noindex tags and canonicals, blocked sections.
2. 2Broken internal links and redirect chains on pages that get traffic.
3. 3Missing and duplicate titles and descriptions on your main templates.
4. 4Speed problems on the templates that carry the most visitors.
5. 5Everything else: alt texts, markup warnings and small content issues.

Then run the audit again to check the fixes. Problems come back with every redesign, plugin update and content import, so audit monthly, or weekly on a store.

The free audit covers the first 100 pages and shows the three most important problems. A free account keeps the full report for one site and lets you re-run it every month. The full Site Audit crawls up to 5,000 pages at a time, ranks every issue by the traffic at risk using your Search Console clicks and tracked rankings, re-crawls on a schedule and shows what changed. Local businesses can add their map rankings too, see Aseoma for local businesses, and every plan is on the pricing page.