SEO Audit: A Step-by-Step Guide With Free Tools

How to do an SEO audit with free tools: the order to work in, how to rank fixes by impact and effort, what the report should contain, and when to hire help.

Published 24 August 2026 by Web Hippo in SEO

An SEO audit is a structured review of why your website does or doesn't earn traffic from Google, ending in a prioritised list of fixes. Most business owners we speak to have already had one: a free PDF from an agency with a score out of 100 and 140 "issues", none of them ranked. Nothing got fixed, because nobody could tell which five items mattered.

This guide covers the method rather than the individual checks. You'll get the free tools to use, the order to work in, a simple impact × effort scoring system, a report template, and a clear view of when to do it yourself and when to pay for SEO audit services. For the full list of things to check, keep our technical and on-page SEO checklist open alongside this.

What an SEO Audit Is (and What It Is Not)

An audit answers three questions: can Google crawl and index the pages that matter, do those pages deserve to rank for what people search, and what is stopping them? It is a diagnosis. The output is a decision about what to fix first, with an owner and a deadline for each fix.

It is not an automated tool score. Crawlers flag everything they can measure, so a site can score 92 while a leftover noindex tag hides its best service page, or score 61 because of 300 missing image alt attributes that barely matter. A technical SEO audit is the narrower version that looks only at crawling, indexing, speed and site structure. A full audit adds content, search performance and links. If you want the background on the technical side first, read our explainer on what technical SEO covers.

Free SEO Audit Tools: What Each One Is For

You can run a thorough audit of a small or mid-sized business website without paying for software. Each tool answers a different question, so you need a few of them together.

Paid suites such as Ahrefs, Semrush or Sitebulb add competitor data and larger crawls. They are useful for big e-commerce catalogues or agency work, but for a 60-page clinic or services site the free stack above finds the same problems that matter.

How to Do an SEO Audit in Seven Steps

Order matters. There is no point rewriting a page Google can't index, and no point chasing backlinks for a site that loads in eight seconds on a phone. Work from blockers to refinements.

Step 1: Set the goal and record a baseline

Write down what the site is supposed to do: leads for a Kukatpally dental clinic, orders for a Pune D2C skincare brand, admissions enquiries for a coaching institute. Then export the last three months of clicks, impressions and top pages from Search Console, and organic conversions from GA4. Without this snapshot you can't prove later that the fixes worked.

Also list the 10 to 20 pages that make money. Every later finding gets judged by whether it touches those pages.

Step 2: Clear the blockers in Search Console

Open Search Console before any crawler. Check Manual actions and Security issues first, because either one outweighs everything else in the audit. Then open the Pages report and look at why important URLs are "not indexed", and confirm your sitemap has been read without errors. Use URL Inspection on each money page to see whether Google indexed it and which canonical it chose.

Step 3: Crawl the site

Run Screaming Frog or the Ahrefs Site Audit on the whole site. You are looking for patterns, not individual rows: a template that outputs duplicate titles on 200 product pages is one finding, not 200. Filter by status code (4xx, 5xx, redirect chains), then by indexability, then by titles and headings.

If the site is bigger than Screaming Frog's free 500-URL limit, crawl one section at a time (for example /products/ and then /blog/), or use the Ahrefs crawl credits for the full pass. A 5,000-product store usually needs a paid crawler, and that is a fair point to consider outside help.

Step 4: Test speed on each template, not just the home page

Run PageSpeed Insights on one URL from each template: home, a service or category page, a product page, a blog post. Google's PageSpeed Insights documentation explains that the "field data" section reflects real users over the previous 28 days, while the "lab data" is a single simulated load that is useful for debugging but may not match reality. Judge the site on field data; use lab data to find the cause.

Many small Indian sites have too little traffic for field data. In that case, test on a mid-range Android phone over mobile data yourself, because that is how most of your visitors arrive.

Step 5: Review content against search performance

This is where most of the growth usually sits, and where automated tools help least. In the Search Console Performance report, look for four patterns:

Pages that lost clicks compared with the same period last year. Something changed: content, competitors or the search results page itself.
High impressions, low CTR. The page ranks but the title and snippet don't earn the click.
Queries at positions 8 to 20. These are pages Google already considers relevant. Improving them is usually faster than writing new ones.
Two pages swapping for one query. This is keyword cannibalisation: your own pages competing, so neither ranks well. Merge or differentiate them.

Step 6: Check links and competitors

Use Ahrefs Webmaster Tools to see who links to you and which pages attract those links. Look for internal pages with no links pointing at them, links to pages that now return 404 (redirect them), and anything that looks like a paid link scheme from a past vendor. Then look at the two or three competitors that outrank you on your money queries and note what their pages include that yours don't: pricing, local detail, comparison tables, reviews.

Step 7: Score, prioritise and write the report

Only now do you turn findings into a plan. The next two sections show how.

How to Prioritise SEO Audit Findings

Give every finding two scores from 1 to 3. Impact: 3 if it blocks indexing or affects money pages, 2 if it affects a section of the site, 1 if it is cosmetic. Effort: 1 if a marketer can fix it in the CMS in an hour, 2 if it needs a developer for a day or two, 3 if it needs a rebuild, new content at scale or third parties. Priority = impact × (4 − effort), which gives a score from 1 to 9.

Anything scoring 6 to 9 goes into the first sprint. Scores of 3 to 4 are the next month's work. Scores of 1 to 2 go on a backlog and are often never worth doing. Here is how that looks for an illustrative audit of a Pune D2C skincare store on Shopify:

What an SEO Audit Report Should Contain

The report is for the people who will fix things: an owner who decides, a developer, a content writer. It should be short enough to read in one sitting. We use this structure:

Section 6 is the one most reports leave out, and it is the one that builds trust. If an auditor couldn't see GA4 or crawled only 500 of your 3,000 URLs, you need to know.

Common Mistakes When Running an SEO Audit

Starting with a crawler instead of Search Console. A crawler shows what could be wrong; Search Console shows what Google actually did.
Treating the tool score as the goal. Moving from 78 to 94 means nothing if leads didn't change.
Auditing only the home page. Problems usually sit in templates: product, location or blog pages.
No baseline. Without the before numbers, nobody can tell whether the work paid off.
Auditing during a redesign and not after it. Launches are when redirects and noindex tags go wrong; our guide to redesigning without losing SEO covers the pre- and post-launch checks.
A fix list with no owners. Findings without a named person and a date stay unfixed.

DIY or Hire SEO Audit Services?

When doing it yourself is enough

If your site has under a few hundred pages, runs on a standard CMS such as WordPress or Shopify, and someone on the team is comfortable in Search Console, the seven steps above will get you most of the way. Budget two to three focused days for a first audit. Where DIY audits usually fall short is in step 7: the checks get done, but nobody is confident enough to rank the findings.

Consider paying for help when traffic has dropped sharply and you don't know why, before or after a platform migration, on large catalogues, or when your developers need a specification they can work from. In our digital marketing cost guide we put a one-off technical audit in India at roughly ₹25,000 to ₹1,00,000, depending on site size.

What a good SEO audit service in India should deliver

A written, prioritised fix list with evidence for each item, in the shape of the template above.
A walkthrough call where they explain the top findings to you and your developer.
Findings specific to your site and market, such as Hindi or Telugu pages, city pages, Google Business Profile and mobile performance on Indian networks, rather than a generic export.
A clear statement of scope and of what they could not check.
A realistic estimate of improvement and of the work involved, which is exactly what Google's own guidance on hiring an SEO says an audit should give you.

Red flags

If you would like a second pair of eyes, our SEO team runs audits in exactly this format, with a fix list your developer can act on. You can also send us your URL and we will tell you whether an audit is worth paying for at your stage.

Frequently Asked Questions

Last checked September 2026. Tool limits and prices are taken from each provider's website on that date and can change. Scores and cost ranges are Web Hippo's practitioner guidance, not guarantees.