What's the Easiest Way to Audit My Website for SEO?

The easiest audit is free

Start in Google Search Console. It is free, it is Google's own record of your site, and 20 minutes in it finds the problems that matter most. In order:

1. Manual Actions and Security Issues. Two seconds. A penalty here changes everything else.
2. Pages report. How many pages are indexed, and the top reasons pages were left out.
3. Sitemaps report. Every sitemap listed, marked Success, and read recently.
4. Performance report. Compare the last 28 days against the previous period.
5. The four-number check. Compare indexed pages against pages that get impressions.

We wrote the full walkthrough, with what a problem looks like in each report, in how to know if your website has SEO problems. If you have never audited your site before, do that check first and come back. For many sites, it is the whole answer.

The three ways to audit, easiest first

Every SEO audit is one of three paths. They differ in cost, time, and how much of the work is done for you.

Path 1: the 20-minute Search Console check

The five steps above. Free, fast, and enough to find a penalty, an indexing problem, or a traffic drop. Its limit is depth: it tells you that pages are not indexed, but not which broken template caused it.

Path 2: free tools, one check at a time

When the basic check points at a specific problem, a free single-purpose tool confirms it:

• A page not indexed? The page indexability checker reads its robots directives, canonical, and status code.
• Sitemap problems? The sitemap validator checks the file itself.
• Titles and descriptions? The meta tag checker reads what a page actually serves.
• Dead links? The broken link checker finds them on any page.

This path is free and precise. It is also slow at scale: checking 200 pages one tool at a time is an afternoon, and you still have to decide which fix matters most.

Path 3: an automated audit tool

A crawler visits every page the way Google does and runs every check in one pass. The good ones do two more things: they connect the crawl to your real search data, and they rank the fixes so you know where to start. That ranking is the real product. Most audits fail in the follow-through, not the finding.

What a full audit covers

A full audit sounds heavy, but it is six areas, each answering one question:

If you want to work through those areas by hand, our technical SEO audit checklist covers each one step by step, and the longer guide to performing a technical SEO audit explains the why behind each check. Both are free.

The easiest full audit

CrawlRaven was built to make path 3 the easy one. Setup is three steps, and none of them need code:

1. Connect Google Search Console with one sign-in. GA4 is optional and adds engagement data.
2. Let the crawl run. The 200-point audit checks every page: indexing, on-page, speed, links, structured data.
3. Read one ranked plan. Every issue is scored by its likely impact on rankings, joined with what your pages actually earn in search.

Once connected, you can also run the audit as a conversation. The MCP server lets an AI assistant read your data, so the report becomes a question you ask:

What should I work on this week for [your site]? Show the highest-impact opportunities and explain the evidence behind the top three.

Turn the top five opportunities for [your site] into a checklist I can hand to a developer, with the affected pages listed for each.

What you can skip on a first audit

Half of what makes audits feel hard is checking things that do not matter yet. On a first pass, it is fine to skip:

• Chasing a perfect speed score. Check that no template is rated Poor and move on. The lab score out of 100 is not a ranking input.
• Backlink deep-dives. Unless you see a manual action, your link profile is rarely the first problem to fix.
• Rewriting every title tag. Fix titles on the pages that already get impressions. The rest can wait until they do.
• Anything on pages with no search traffic and no target keyword. An issue on a page nobody was ever meant to find is not an issue yet.

The pattern in all four: fix things in proportion to the traffic at stake. An audit is not a to-do list to finish. It is a ranking of what to do next.

Do it yourself, buy a tool, or hire someone?

Pick by what you are short of:

• Short of money: do the 20-minute check monthly and use free tools when it points at something. This costs nothing and catches the big problems.
• Short of time: use an automated tool. It runs the checks and the ranking for you, and pricing for CrawlRaven is a one-time licence on the pricing page.
• Short of people to fix things: hire help. An agency audit costs more because it includes interpretation and fixes. Our breakdown of SEO audit costs shows what each option runs.

How often to audit

Monthly for the 20-minute check. A full audit quarterly, plus once within a week of any migration, redesign, or CMS change, because that is when things break silently. If you are starting a brand-new site, the basic SEO checklist is the better first step: audit tools find problems, and a new site does not have any yet.