A full technical SEO audit from an agency will typically take 10–20 hours and cost £2,000–£5,000. But you can identify your most significant issues in 30 minutes using free tools. Here's the exact process we use for initial assessments.
What you'll need (all free)
- Google Search Console (GSC) — free, must have access to your verified property
- Google PageSpeed Insights — pagespeed.web.dev
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider — free up to 500 URLs
- Ahrefs Webmaster Tools — free version covers basic audit
- SERP research — just a browser in incognito mode
Section 1: Google Search Console (10 minutes)
If you don't have GSC set up and verified, stop everything and do this first. It's the most valuable free SEO tool that exists.
Check Coverage
Go to Index → Pages. You're looking for: pages that are 'excluded' that shouldn't be, errors (pages that tried to index but failed), and a total indexed count that makes sense for your site.
Check Core Web Vitals
Go to Experience → Core Web Vitals. Any pages in 'Poor' status need urgent attention — Google uses these as ranking signals. The most common issue is Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) being too slow.
Check Search Performance
Go to Performance → Search Results. Sort by Impressions. Find pages with high impressions but low click-through rate (CTR) — these are quick wins. Your title tags and meta descriptions on these pages aren't compelling enough. Rewrite them.
Section 2: Site speed (5 minutes)
Run your homepage and your most important landing page through PageSpeed Insights. You want a score above 80 on mobile. If you're below 60, the issues shown in the report are likely suppressing your rankings across the entire site.
The most common causes of slow scores: unoptimised images (convert to WebP, compress), no lazy loading, render-blocking JavaScript, and no caching configuration.
Section 3: On-page fundamentals (10 minutes)
Open Screaming Frog and crawl your site. With the free version (500 URLs), you can audit most small-to-medium sites completely.
- Filter by 'Missing' title tag — every page should have a unique, descriptive title under 60 characters
- Filter by 'Duplicate' title tags — two pages with the same title is a ranking signal conflict
- Filter by 'Missing' H1 — every page should have exactly one H1 tag
- Check for 404 errors — broken internal links waste crawl budget and create bad UX
- Check redirect chains — A → B → C should be collapsed to A → C
Section 4: Quick competitive check (5 minutes)
Open a browser in incognito mode. Search for your 3 most important keywords. Who appears above you? Go to their homepage. What do they do better? Common answers: more content depth, more reviews showing in results (schema markup), stronger domain authority (backlinks).
What to do with your findings
Prioritise by impact × effort. A page-speed issue affecting all 200 pages of your site is a higher priority than a missing meta description on one product page. Technical fixes (speed, crawl errors, redirect chains) typically have the fastest impact on rankings because they affect the entire site simultaneously.
Ran your audit and found issues you're not sure how to fix? Our team offers a free 30-minute audit review call — we'll look at what you found and tell you exactly what to prioritise.
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