Free SEO Audit Tools: How I Audit a Site

Want the audit done for you instead? Get a free site audit, run with the same toolkit described below.

Most articles about free SEO tools are written by people who have never audited a site professionally. They list twenty tools, describe what each one claims to do, and leave you with no idea what to actually run first on a Tuesday afternoon.

I am going to do this differently. By day I am a senior strategist at a 950 person SEO agency, where I work with the expensive enterprise stack. On nights and weekends I run Ravana Solutions, where I audit and rank local business websites myself. And because I got tired of slow SaaS dashboards that charge hundreds a month to miss half the problems, I built my own audit toolkit, Raptor, a Rust crawler with 114 plus analyzers covering everything from title tags and schema markup to security headers and content readability. The early prototype is public on GitHub under an MIT license.

So this is not a roundup of tools I found on other roundups. This is the audit I actually run, step by step, with the free tool that does each job, and an honest note on where free stops being enough.

What Is the Best Free SEO Audit Tool?#

The honest answer is that there is no single best free SEO audit tool, because an audit is a sequence of different jobs. The strongest free combination is Google Search Console for indexing and query data, a crawler for finding on page and technical problems across every page, and PageSpeed Insights for performance. Google Search Console is the one nothing else can replace: it is the only tool that shows you what Google itself sees, and it is completely free. Everything else on this page supports what it tells you.

If you only have one hour, spend it in Search Console. If you have an afternoon, run the full sequence below.

Why I Built My Own Audit Tool#

A quick word on where my perspective comes from, because it shapes every recommendation here.

Commercial audit tools have three recurring problems. They are slow, because they run in someone else's cloud queue. They are shallow on JavaScript, because real browser rendering is expensive, so sites built on modern frameworks get audited as half empty pages. And they treat analysis like a black box, handing you a numeric score with generic advice and no way to see why.

Raptor was my answer: an async crawler written in Rust that tears through a site in seconds, renders JavaScript heavy pages through Cloudflare Browser Rendering when needed, runs 114 plus analyzers on what it finds, and produces a single file HTML report that opens offline in any browser. No account, no subscription, no telemetry. The full toolkit runs inside every Ravana engagement today, and the prototype that started it is public.

I tell you this not to sell you a tool but because building one teaches you what audits are actually made of. Every check Raptor runs falls into one of the six steps below, and every step has a free tool that does the job.

The Audit, Step by Step#

Run these in order. Each step assumes the one before it, and the order is the difference between an audit and a pile of screenshots.

Step 1: Find out what Google can see#

Tool: Google Search Console, free.

Before you look at a single title tag, answer the only question that gates everything else: which of your pages are actually in Google's index? Open the Pages report under Indexing. Every page listed as "Crawled, currently not indexed" or "Discovered, currently not indexed" is a page Google chose not to include, and no amount of on page polish matters until you understand why.

Then open the Performance report and sort your queries by impressions. This is your real keyword data, straight from Google, and it beats any third party estimate. Look for queries where you show up between positions 8 and 20 with real impressions and no clicks. Those are the pages an audit can actually move.

While you are here, verify your site on Bing Webmaster Tools too. It takes ten minutes, imports your Search Console setup, and Bing's index now feeds ChatGPT browsing and Copilot, which is traffic most of your competitors are not watching.

Step 2: Crawl the whole site#

Tool: Screaming Frog SEO Spider, free up to 500 URLs. Or a crawler you build yourself.

Search Console shows you what Google indexed. A crawl shows you everything, including the problems that explain the gap: broken links, redirect chains, orphaned pages, duplicate titles, missing meta descriptions, thin pages, and pages blocked by robots.txt that should not be.

For most small business sites, Screaming Frog's free tier covers the whole site with room to spare. Export the crawl, then look at exactly four things first: pages returning anything other than 200, titles that are missing or duplicated, pages with no internal links pointing at them, and meta descriptions over about 160 characters, because Google truncates the rest mid sentence. I found that last problem on my own site this month, which is a good reminder that audits are for everyone, including auditors.

One warning from the builder's side: if your site is built on a JavaScript framework, a plain crawler may see far less than your visitors do. Check any important page with the URL Inspection tool in Search Console and compare the rendered HTML against what you expect. This exact blind spot is why Raptor integrates browser rendering.

Step 3: Measure speed the way Google does#

Tool: PageSpeed Insights, free.

PageSpeed Insights runs Lighthouse, which is itself open source, and gives you two kinds of data: lab numbers from a simulated device and field data from real Chrome users when your site has enough traffic. The field data is the one Google's ranking systems care about.

Test your homepage and your two or three most important service pages, on mobile first. Ignore the temptation to chase a perfect score. What matters is passing Core Web Vitals and fixing anything egregious: images shipped at full resolution, render blocking scripts, fonts that swap visibly late. A site that loads in under two and a half seconds on a phone is fine. I have written more about what speed is actually worth in Core Web Vitals and business impact.

Step 4: Check the on page fundamentals#

Tool: your crawl export from step 2, plus the Rich Results Test, free.

Now the classic checks. One unique title under about 60 characters per page, written for the click rather than stuffed with keywords. One meta description under about 160. One H1 that says what the page is. Headings in a sensible order. Images with alt text. Internal links with descriptive anchors pointing at the pages you care about.

Then validate your structured data with the Rich Results Test. If you run a local business, your key pages should carry LocalBusiness schema, your FAQ content should match its FAQPage markup exactly, and the details in your schema must agree with your Google Business Profile: same name, same address format, same phone. Mismatched schema is worse than none, because it teaches Google to distrust your data. My full checklist for this layer is in the technical SEO checklist.

Step 5: Audit the local layer#

Tool: Google Business Profile, free.

If you serve a local market, this step moves more revenue than every other step combined, and most audits skip it because it is not on the website. The local map pack sits above the organic results on nearly every buying query, and pack ranking runs on your Business Profile, not your site.

Audit it like a page. Every field complete. Primary category chosen deliberately. Services listed. Real photos. Hours accurate. And reviews, because review count and recency are the closest thing local SEO has to a ranking lever you fully control. When I pull live search results for my own market, the businesses in the pack are separated from the ones outside it mostly by review count. Ask every happy customer, one at a time, and never pay for reviews.

Step 6: Check how AI search sees you#

Tool: the AI assistants themselves, free.

A growing share of buyers now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews who to hire instead of scanning ten blue links. So finish every audit by asking them. Ask "who is the best [your service] in [your city]" and "what is [your business name]" and read what comes back. You are checking two things: whether you are named at all, and whether what the AI says about you is accurate.

If you are invisible there, the fixes are unglamorous and testable: pages that answer real buyer questions in extractable paragraphs, schema that corroborates your business facts, and consistent profiles across the sources these systems cite. I published the full method with measurements in my generative engine optimization field report.

Are Open Source SEO Tools Any Good?#

Yes, with an honest caveat about what open source is good at.

The open source tools that win are the ones doing mechanical work: crawling, rendering, measuring, validating. Lighthouse is the obvious example, open source and also the engine inside Google's own PageSpeed Insights. Crawlers are another natural fit, which is why I built RaptorProto in the open: fetching pages, honoring robots.txt, extracting structured audit data, and handing it to an AI for analysis is exactly the kind of transparent pipeline open source does well.

Where open source tools lag is data: search volumes, backlink indexes, and rank tracking all require someone to maintain an enormous, expensive index, which is precisely what the commercial subscriptions are actually charging you for. So the practical split is this: run your audits on free and open tools as often as you like, and pay for data only when a specific decision needs it.

What SEO Tools Does a Small Business Actually Need?#

Fewer than you think. The honest minimum stack for a local small business is Google Search Console, Google Business Profile, PageSpeed Insights, and one crawler, and every item on that list is free. That covers indexing, local visibility, performance, and site health, which is the whole audit loop.

The paid tier, tools like Semrush and Ahrefs, earns its cost when you need competitive data: what your competitors rank for, where their links come from, which keywords are worth chasing next. I use that class of tool professionally every day, and for most single location businesses it is a thing your SEO consultant should own, not a subscription you carry yourself.

The most expensive mistake I see is the opposite pattern: a small business paying for three overlapping dashboards while their Business Profile sits half finished and their meta descriptions truncate in every search result. Tools do not do audits. The sequence above does.

When to Stop Doing It Yourself#

Run the six steps and you will land in one of two places.

Sometimes the list is short and mechanical: a handful of titles to rewrite, some images to compress, a Business Profile to finish. Do it yourself over a weekend and re run the audit in a month. You do not need to pay anyone for that.

Sometimes the list is structural: the site is not indexable, the market is competitive, every page needs rebuilding, or you are simply out of hours. That is the point where a focused monthly retainer beats heroic weekends, and you should judge any provider by whether they show you the audit evidence behind every recommendation.

If you want the baseline without doing the work, request a free audit and I will run the full sequence on your site with Raptor, including the rendered crawl and the AI visibility check, and send you the report either way. No obligation, and the findings are yours whether or not we ever talk.

Frequently Asked Questions#

What is the best free SEO audit tool overall?

Google Search Console, and it is not close. It is the only tool showing you Google's actual view of your site: what is indexed, what is not and why, and which real queries you appear for. Every other tool on this page adds detail around that core. If Search Console is not set up on your site today, stop reading and set it up.

Can I do a full SEO audit without paying for anything?

Yes. Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, a free tier crawl, PageSpeed Insights, the Rich Results Test, and your Google Business Profile cover indexing, technical health, speed, structured data, and local visibility without spending a dollar. What you cannot get free is competitive data, meaning search volumes and competitor backlink profiles, and a small business can defer that until a specific decision needs it.

How often should I audit my site?

Fully, twice a year, or after any redesign, migration, or platform change. Lightly, monthly: fifteen minutes in Search Console watching the Pages report for new indexing problems and the Performance report for queries that gained or lost ground. Most disasters I get called into would have been caught by the monthly fifteen minutes.

How long does a proper audit take?

With the sequence above and free tools, an honest first audit of a typical small business site takes an afternoon. My own toolkit compresses the crawling and checking into minutes, but the thinking, deciding which findings matter and in what order, is still the real work. Any audit delivered as an instant PDF score with no prioritization is a lead magnet, not an audit.

Want the audit done properly? Request a free site audit and I will run the full sequence on your site, with the rendered crawl, the schema validation, and the AI visibility check included, and send you a report you can act on with or without me.

Related reading:

How to Audit Your Website With Free SEO Tools (From Someone Who Built One)