What Does an SEO Audit Check?

An SEO audit checks six things: your meta tags, your headings, your page speed, whether the site works on a phone, whether it's secure, and whether the content gives Google enough to work with. A good one also checks whether Google can index you at all, and whether AI assistants like ChatGPT can read you. That's roughly 30 checks, and this post explains every one in plain language.

When an agency says they'll "audit your website," it sounds like a mysterious, expensive process. It isn't. An audit is a checklist, a structured look at the things Google cares about when it decides whether to show your site to customers.

Our free SEO scorecard runs those checks on your homepage in about 30 seconds. We'll start with the core 20, cover the deeper technical and AI-search checks most free tools skip, then explain how to read the result without panicking. No jargon. Promise.

What's wrong with most free SEO checkers?

A lot of free tools follow the same script. They show you a low number, list a pile of errors, and use the alarm to push you toward a paid plan or a sales call. Three things are wrong with that.

The score is a vanity number. A single figure out of 100 with no explanation isn't insight, it's a mood, and two sites can score identically while having completely different real problems. There are no plain-English fixes: "missing H1," "no canonical," "render-blocking resources" tell you nothing about what to change or why it matters to your business. And the whole experience is engineered to make you feel unqualified to fix anything yourself, so you hand over money or your phone number.

A good audit treats you like a smart business owner who's just never had this explained simply. It shows its work, ranks the problems by impact, and gives you a place to start.

Meta tags: what Google shows people about you

These four checks decide how your business looks inside Google search results, before anyone even visits your site.

1. Title tag. This is the blue headline people see in Google. If it's missing, Google makes one up. If it's too long, Google chops it off mid-sentence. Either way you look unprofessional in the exact moment a customer is deciding whether to click you or your competitor. We check that it exists and runs between 30 and 60 characters.

2. Meta description. The grey text under the blue headline. Most business owners don't know this: if you don't write one, Google writes its own description of your site, and it's usually bad. It might pull your cookie notice, your menu items, or a random sentence from your footer. We check that yours exists and runs 70 to 160 characters.

3. Social sharing tags (Open Graph). When someone shares your site on WhatsApp, the preview card comes from these tags. In India, where most business sharing happens on WhatsApp, a missing preview means your link looks like spam. We check for all three.

4. Canonical tag. A small label that tells Google "this is the official version of this page." Without it, Google can get confused by duplicate versions of your pages and split your ranking power between them.

Headings: the structure of your page

5. H1 heading. Every page should have exactly one main heading, like a newspaper headline. Zero H1s and Google has to guess what your page is about. Multiple H1s and you're shouting several headlines at once.

6. Heading order. Headings should go H1, then H2, then H3, like a well-organised document. Skipping levels confuses both Google and screen readers.

7. H1 length. A main heading that's too short ("Welcome!") tells Google nothing. We check it's between 20 and 70 characters, long enough to say what you actually do.

Performance: because slow sites lose customers

8. Load time. If your homepage takes more than 3 seconds to respond, visitors on slower mobile connections, which is a lot of India, start giving up. We flag anything over 3 seconds, and anything over 5 as critical.

9. Page size. A homepage over 500KB of raw HTML is carrying extra weight that slows every visit down.

10. Image count. More than 30 images on one page usually means the page is doing too much, and every one of them is a download your customer's phone has to make.

11. Render-blocking scripts. Some code forces the browser to stop and wait before showing anything. It's the difference between a shop with the lights on and one where customers wait outside while you find the keys.

Mobile: where your customers actually are

12. Viewport tag. One line of code that tells phones "this site knows how to resize itself." Without it your site appears as a tiny desktop page that customers have to pinch and zoom. Google ranks mobile-unfriendly sites lower, and this single missing line is often the cause.

13. Fixed-width elements. Elements hard-coded wider than a phone screen force sideways scrolling. Nobody scrolls sideways, they just leave.

Security: table stakes for trust

14. HTTPS. The padlock in the browser. Without it, Chrome literally labels your site "Not secure" next to your business name. Google also uses it as a ranking signal. There's no good reason to be on http in 2026.

15. Mixed content. A secure page loading insecure images or scripts breaks the padlock. It's like locking the front door but leaving a window open.

Content: what you're actually saying

16. Word count. A homepage with fewer than 300 words gives Google almost nothing to rank you for. You don't need an essay. A few hundred words saying who you are, what you sell and where is enough.

17. Image alt text. Short descriptions attached to images. They're how Google sees your photos, and how your products can appear in Google Images. Under 80% coverage gets flagged.

18. Internal links. Links from your homepage to your own pages: services, products, contact. Fewer than five suggests your pages are islands Google can't move between.

19. Structured data. A machine-readable label that tells Google "we're a restaurant in Kochi, open till 11pm, rated 4.5 stars." It's how businesses get those rich results with stars and prices. Most small Indian business sites don't have it, which makes it an easy win.

20. Robots.txt. A small file that tells Google what it's allowed to look at. A missing or broken one can quietly block Google from your whole site, like a "closed" sign you forgot to flip.

Can Google actually find and index you?

The first 20 cover the basics every audit should. These next ones catch the quieter problems that keep otherwise-good sites invisible, the kind most free tools never look for.

Is this page even allowed on Google? The single most common "why am I invisible?" cause is a noindex setting, one hidden instruction telling Google not to show the page at all. No other fix matters until it's removed, so we flag it as critical wherever we find it, in the page or in the response headers.

Are you accidentally blocking every search engine? A single Disallow: / line in your robots.txt tells Google, Bing and everyone else to ignore your entire site. It's usually a staging setting left switched on by mistake, and it's catastrophic, so we check for it explicitly.

Redirect chains. One redirect is normal, whether that's http to https or adding "www". But a chain, where your page bounces through two or more redirects before it loads, slows every visit, wastes Google's crawl budget and weakens the ranking signal reaching the final page.

JavaScript-only content. If your page shows almost nothing until JavaScript runs, some search crawlers struggle to see your real content. We flag it so you know your words might be invisible to the very thing meant to read them.

Sitemap. A simple list of your pages that helps Google discover and index them faster. Most builders generate one automatically, and we check yours actually exists.

Favicon. The little icon in the browser tab and next to your site in some search results. A small thing, but its absence is a sign of a half-finished setup.

Will ChatGPT and Perplexity recommend you?

This is the part almost no free audit checks yet. More and more customers ask ChatGPT or Perplexity for "the best [business] near me" instead of scrolling Google. Whether an AI recommends you comes down to a handful of signals, and we check them.

Can AI assistants even read your site? ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google's AI use their own crawlers: GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended and others. If your robots.txt blocks them, you simply can't be cited when a customer asks an AI for a business like yours. We check each one.

llms.txt. A new, simple file telling AI assistants what your business does and which pages matter most. It's optional today, which makes it an easy edge while most sites don't have one.

Question-style headings. AI answers and Google's "People Also Ask" boxes pull from pages that ask and directly answer real questions. We check whether any of your headings are phrased the way customers actually search.

Who wrote this? Google and AI assistants both favour content with a credible, named author. We look for a byline or author markup, because a page that says who stands behind it is more trusted and more quotable.

Is it current? A visible published or last-updated date is the simplest freshness signal. Undated pages look stale to both Google and AI, even when they aren't.

FAQ structured data. If your page has questions and answers but no FAQ markup, you're leaving rich results on the table, and missing the easiest way for ChatGPT and Perplexity to quote you directly.

Breadcrumb structured data. On deeper pages this tells Google and AI assistants exactly where the page fits in your site, and earns the tidy breadcrumb trail you see in some search results.

What does each issue actually cost you?

The reason a vanity score is useless is that it flattens everything into one number. In reality the issues differ wildly in how much business they cost you.

Take the most common one, a missing or weak meta description. When you don't write the snippet that appears under your link, Google grabs a random sentence from your page, and a dull, off-topic snippet means fewer people click, which means fewer customers even when you're ranking. We did the math in what a missing meta description costs your business.

At the more serious end, if your robots file or a stray setting is blocking search engines entirely, you're not ranking at all. There's no snippet to fix and no traffic to lose, because you're invisible. That's the difference between a slow leak and a closed tap, and it's why why your site isn't on Google is worth reading the moment an audit flags a crawlability problem.

So don't react to the number of issues. React to what each one does to your ability to get found and clicked.

What should you fix first?

A good audit sorts findings into three buckets, and that sort is the most useful thing on the page.

Critical means something is actively breaking your visibility: no title tag, no HTTPS, the page blocking crawlers, no mobile viewport. Fix these today. They're usually small, specific changes with outsized impact. Warning covers real problems that drag on performance without blacking you out, like a weak meta description, missing social-share tags, thin content or images without alt text. Work through these next. Info is nice-to-haves and polish: a slightly-too-long headline, a skipped heading level, fewer internal links than ideal. Genuinely fine to leave for later, or ignore entirely if you're time-poor.

If you only ever act on the criticals and the top few warnings, you'll have captured the large majority of the value. The info items are where over-anxious tools love to pad their "27 issues found" count.

How should you read the letter grade?

Many audits, including ours, pair the number with a letter grade because a grade is easier to feel than a percentage. Three honest things to keep in mind.

A low grade is not a verdict on your business. Plenty of excellent, profitable businesses sit at a C because nobody ever told them their title tags were blank, and the grade measures setup rather than worth. The grade is also a starting point rather than a scoreboard: chasing a perfect A+ usually means polishing info-level items that don't move revenue, when the real goal is clearing the criticals and warnings. And the plain-language summary matters more than the number. Our scorecard includes an AI-written summary explaining your result the way a person would, biggest problem first, one thing that's already working, one concrete next step. Treat it as guidance to sanity-check rather than gospel, since it's generated by a model and can occasionally miss a nuance.

A grade exists to orient you in ten seconds. Once it has, go work the issue list.

Why does a full-site crawl matter?

Here's the honest limit of any quick free checker, ours included: it audits one page, usually your homepage. That's perfect for a fast read on how your site is set up, and your homepage is often representative, but it's a snapshot rather than the whole picture.

Your real problems are frequently on the pages you forget about: the product page with no title, the old blog post blocking crawlers, the service page that never got a meta description. Catching those needs a full-site crawl that walks every page, which is what RankAgent's dashboard does once you add a site. The free tier crawls up to five pages so you can see how it works, with higher limits on paid plans. It then surfaces a "first 3 fixes" card so you're not staring at a list of fifty things, and offers AI "Fix This" suggestions that draft the actual change for each issue.

So use a free single-page audit to get oriented and find the obvious wins. Move to a full crawl when you're serious about cleaning up the whole site rather than just the front door.

Where to start

If you've never run one, start with the free single-page audit. It takes about a minute and explains every finding in plain language, with no acronyms and no locked report. Run your free SEO audit, read the summary, fix the criticals first, and ignore the info-level noise. That alone puts you ahead of most sites in your space.

When you're ready to go past the homepage, RankAgent's dashboard crawls the whole site, drafts the fixes and tracks your progress, at a fraction of what an agency charges. There's no rush though. The free scorecard is genuinely useful on its own and it's the right first step.

A free SEO audit should leave you clearer, not more anxious. The good ones show their work, rank the problems by what they actually cost you, and tell you the one thing to do next. Everything else is a sales pitch dressed up as a score.

Frequently asked questions

Is this really free? What's the catch?

Free, no signup, no credit card. We're building a bigger product, an SEO agency in your pocket, and the free scorecard is how we earn your trust first.

Does the audit cover my whole website?

The free scorecard audits your homepage, which is where most of the highest-impact problems live. Full-site crawls are part of RankAgent, which is live now: Starter is ₹2,499/mo, cancel anytime, or take the one-time Founding Member offer.

My score is low. Should I panic?

No. Most issues on this list are fixable in an afternoon by whoever built your site, and the report explains each one in plain language you can forward directly to your developer.

How is this different from hiring an agency?

An agency would run roughly this same checklist, wrap it in a 40-page PDF, and charge ₹15,000 to ₹50,000 a month. We'd rather show you exactly what's broken, for free, and let you decide what to do about it.

How often should I run an audit?

Once when you first check, then again after you've made the fixes to confirm they landed. After that, monthly is plenty for a small site unless you're actively publishing or redesigning, in which case re-check after any significant change.

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