How to Check a Website's SEO in 10 Minutes
To check a website's SEO, start with whether search engines can reach and index it (robots.txt, sitemap, noindex, canonical), then check on-page basics (title, meta description, one H1, mobile viewport), then performance and broken links. A free SEO checker runs all of these in about ten seconds.
Most SEO advice starts with keywords and content. That's the right long-term focus, but it's wasted if search engines can't reach your pages, or if every page shares the same title. Technical problems are boring, they're invisible from a browser, and they quietly cap everything else you do.
Here's the order I'd check any site in, and what to do about each finding.
1. Can search engines reach it at all?
This is first because nothing else matters if the answer is no.
robots.txt — open yoursite.com/robots.txt. If you see Disallow: / under User-agent: *, your entire site is asking search engines to stay out. This happens constantly on sites that launched from a staging server.
noindex — view the page source and search for noindex. In WordPress, Settings → Reading → "Discourage search engines" adds it to every page and is the single most common cause of "my new site isn't on Google."
Sitemap — yoursite.com/sitemap.xml should return XML, not a 404. If it's somewhere else, robots.txt should have a Sitemap: line pointing to it. (Full guide to fixing a missing sitemap.)
Canonical tag — each page should declare its own URL as canonical. A canonical pointing at the wrong page tells Google to index that one instead.
www vs non-www, HTTP vs HTTPS — all four variants of your homepage should end up on one canonical version, each in a single redirect.
2. Security and serving
HTTPS — Google has used it as a ranking signal since 2014, and Chrome labels plain HTTP pages "Not secure." Let's Encrypt makes the certificate free.
http:// redirects to https:// — having a certificate isn't enough; the insecure version needs to forward to the secure one.
Mixed content — on an HTTPS page, any image, script or stylesheet still loading over http:// gets blocked or warned about by browsers.
Security headers — Strict-Transport-Security, X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff and X-Frame-Options. Not ranking factors, but they're free and they protect visitors.
3. On-page basics
Title tag — unique per page, roughly 50–60 characters, key words first. (Why it's pixels, not characters.)
Meta description — 120–160 characters, written as a pitch. (Full guide.)
Exactly one H1 — describing what the page is about. Zero H1s and five H1s are both worth fixing.
Mobile viewport tag — without <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">, phones render a shrunken desktop layout. Google indexes mobile-first, so this is not optional.
Language attribute — <html lang="en">. Helps Google serve the right version to the right people.
Image alt text — descriptive alt on meaningful images, empty alt="" on decorative ones.
Open Graph tags — og:title, og:description, og:image. Not SEO, but they decide whether a shared link looks like a card or a bare URL.
4. Speed
Time to first byte — Google recommends under 600 ms. Slow TTFB usually means cheap hosting, no caching, or a database query problem. A CDN fixes most of it.
HTML size — a single document over 300 KB is heavy. Usually it's inline styles, inline scripts, or a page builder emitting thousands of empty divs.
Compression — gzip or Brotli should be on. It's a server toggle and typically cuts transfer size by 70%.
5. Links
Broken internal links — 404s waste crawl budget and frustrate visitors. Check the links on your main pages, not just the pages themselves.
Redirect chains — one redirect is fine; two or more in a row costs speed and leaks link equity. (How to find and fix them.)
Right redirect type — a 302 used for a permanent move keeps your rankings stuck on the old URL. (301 vs 302.)
Anchor text — the words you link with tell Google what the target page is about. Too many exact-keyword anchors looks manipulative. (What a natural ratio looks like.)
6. Domain setup
Registration and expiry — an expiring domain is an outage waiting to happen. Turn on auto-renew.
SPF and DMARC — if the domain sends email, these records stop it being spoofed and keep your mail out of spam folders.
Doing all of this in ten seconds
Every check above is visible from outside the site, which means a tool can run them for you. Paste any URL into the SEO Checker and you get all of them at once: a score out of 100, each check marked pass, warning or fail, and a one-line fix for anything that isn't passing. No signup, and it works on competitors' sites too.
Use the tool for the sweep, then use this article for the "why" when something comes back red.
What a technical audit won't tell you
Worth being clear about the limits. A technical audit checks whether your site is able to rank. It doesn't tell you whether your content deserves to, and it can't see your backlinks, which are still one of the strongest ranking factors. For those you need content work and a backlink index like Ahrefs, Semrush or Moz.
Fix the technical layer once, keep it fixed, then spend your time on the parts that actually differentiate you.
Frequently asked questions
How do I check if my website is SEO friendly?
Check that search engines can crawl and index it, that each page has a unique title and description, that it loads over HTTPS and quickly, and that no internal links are broken. A free site checker covers all of this in one pass.
What is a good SEO score?
Scores differ between tools, so treat them as a relative signal. What matters is whether the individual checks pass, especially indexability, HTTPS and title tags.
How often should I audit my site?
After any significant change, and quarterly otherwise. Technical problems usually arrive with a migration, a redesign or a plugin update.
Can I check a competitor's site?
Yes. Everything in a technical audit is visible from the outside, so you can run the same checks on any public site.
Try it on your site
Free, no signup. Takes about ten seconds.