Before investing in a professional audit, there is a great deal you can check yourself, free of charge, in a few hours. These checks are no substitute for an expert eye, but they will often pick out the most obvious drags: the ones stopping your site from diving cleanly into the depths of Google’s results and surfacing again higher up the rankings.
Here are eight checks within anyone’s reach, with the free tool for each one. Equip yourself with a Google Search Console account and a browser, and take stock of the real state of your search visibility.
1. Check that Google is indexing your site
Everything starts with indexing. If Google does not know your pages, no amount of optimization will help. Type site:yourdomain.com into Google search: you will see roughly how many of your pages are indexed. Compare that figure with the real number of pages on your site. A wide gap signals a problem.
Search Console, in its indexing report, gives a far more precise view: pages indexed, pages excluded and the reasons for the exclusions. It is the starting point of any serious diagnosis.
2. Check your title tags and meta descriptions
Every page that matters needs a unique, descriptive title tag and a meta description worth clicking. These are what appear in the search results and they often decide the click. Run through your main pages and check that the tags are there, that they are not duplicated from one page to the next, and that they carry your keywords naturally.
Generic titles along the lines of “Home” or “Untitled page” are an immediate red flag. Put those right first, because the return on the effort is considerable.
3. Test your loading speed
A slow site discourages visitors and holds your rankings back. Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool analyzes any page and returns a score, along with concrete recommendations. Concentrate on the lines with the most impact: oversized images, needless scripts, no caching.
To read the scores without picking the wrong fight, our guide to page speed and SEO explains what Google actually measures.
Speed is a ranking factor, but a conversion factor too. Every second gained holds on to visitors who would otherwise give up before they ever saw what you offer.
4. Look at the mobile experience
Most searches now happen on a phone, and Google indexes sites from their mobile version first. Open your site on a handset and move around it the way a customer would: is the text readable, are the buttons big enough, do the images fit properly? Google’s mobile-friendly test rounds off what you have checked by hand.
A site that does not give a smooth mobile experience loses positions and customers at the same time, and its owner, sitting at a desktop, does not always notice.
5. Find the broken links
Broken links, internal and external alike, damage the experience and the impression that your site is properly looked after. A 404 frustrates the visitor and wastes Google’s crawl budget. Free online tools will walk your site and list the dead links. Search Console also flags the pages Google tried to crawl and could not find.
Put these errors right with a redirect or an updated link. It is simple work whose effect is felt quickly.
6. Check robots.txt and your sitemap
Two technical files deserve a look. The robots.txt file tells the engines what they may crawl: a misconfiguration can block your whole site by mistake. The sitemap, for its part, lists your pages to make them easier to discover. Check that your sitemap exists, that it is up to date and that it has been properly submitted in Search Console.
7. Hunt down thin content
Google rewards pages that genuinely answer a search intent. Pick out the pages with poor content, duplicated content or nothing added. A handful of solid pages is worth more than a crowd of empty ones that dilute your authority.
8. Track your positions in Search Console
Finally, the Search Console performance report is a free gold mine. It reveals which queries you appear on, your average position and your click-through rate. The queries where you sit at the bottom of page one or the top of page two are your best opportunities: a small push can be enough to gain places that count.
When to go deeper with an SEO professional
These eight checks give you a solid first diagnosis. A professional audit goes further: competitor analysis, editorial strategy, link building, advanced technical architecture. If your market is competitive, or if these checks turn up problems that run deep, an expert eye becomes an investment that pays. At Aloha Pixel we take businesses in Pau, in south west France, and across the Pyrenees-Atlantiques through that stage, always starting from what is already there.
Once these checks are done, what comes next takes regularity. That is what our ongoing SEO work in Pau is for.
Also worth reading: Our SEO method, step by step
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