Free SEO audit: the complete method to check your website

An SEO audit is a health check of your site as seen by Google and, now, by AI assistants like ChatGPT or Gemini. Good news: most of it can be checked for free, online, without being an expert. Here's the method we use, pillar by pillar, with what to look at and how to fix it.

Why run an SEO audit

Most sites don't lack ideas, they lack priorities. People rewrite copy while an important page is set to “noindex”, or chase links while the homepage title doesn't say what the business does. An audit is first about one thing: knowing where to start.

• You find invisible blockers (indexing, robots, redirects).
• You see which real searches your pages don't cover.
• You learn whether AI recommends you, or cites your competitors.
• You get a list of actions ranked by impact, instead of a list of “best practices”.

Pillar 1: technical SEO (can Google read your site?)

This is the foundation. If Google can't crawl or index a page, nothing else matters for it. What to check:

1. The site uses HTTPS and the http version redirects to https.
2. The robots.txt file doesn't block important pages.
3. An XML sitemap exists and lists your pages.
4. No important page has a “noindex” tag (common after a redesign).
5. Every page has a consistent canonical URL.
6. The site displays well and fast on mobile.

For a specific page, the indexability checker tells you whether Google can index it and, if not, why. Our technical SEO checklist covers the ten most common checks.

Pillar 2: content (do your pages really answer?)

Google ranks pages that answer an intent. A page that's too thin, unstructured, or about everything and nothing rarely ranks. For each important page, check:

• A unique title tag of 30 to 65 characters, with the main search query.
• A meta description that makes people want to click.
• A single H1, then H2 subheadings that break down the topic.
• Enough useful text to answer completely, without filler.
• Links to your other important pages (internal linking).

The SEO tag checker checks the title, description, H1 and several key files of your homepage. The Google SERP preview shows how your page appears in results.

Pillar 3: keywords (do you cover real searches?)

A keyword is simply what your customers type. The classic mistake: writing with your company's vocabulary instead of theirs. Start from Google's search suggestions around your business, then sort them:

• Covered: a page answers it, and the query appears in its title or subheadings.
• Barely covered: the topic is mentioned in the text, but no page is built for it.
• Missing: no page answers it. These are often the best opportunities.

A “barely covered” search can often be fixed in minutes: a title, a subheading, a paragraph that answers directly. A missing search needs a new page or article.

Pillar 4: authority (do other sites talk about you?)

Google and AI trust sites that are cited elsewhere more: articles, industry directories, partners, comparisons. A free audit can't measure authority as finely as paid tools, but it can spot obvious gaps: no Google Business Profile for a local business, no mention in your city's directories, no page that earns links.

Pillar 5: AI visibility (do AI assistants cite you?)

This is the pillar most audits forget. When a customer asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity “what's the best…”, these tools cite two or three names. To find out, you have to ask them the real question, the way your customer would, and note who comes up.

Also check that their crawlers can read your site: the AI crawler checker tells you whether GPTBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot are blocked. To go further, read how to get recommended by ChatGPT and how to show up in Gemini.

WordPress, Wix or Shopify SEO audit: the settings to check

The method is the same whatever your platform, but the settings live in different places. On WordPress, an SEO plugin (Yoast, Rank Math) handles titles, descriptions and the sitemap; above all, check the “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” box in Settings > Reading, often left on after launch. On Wix and Shopify, titles and descriptions are set page by page, and the sitemap is generated automatically. CoolSEO gives a step-by-step guide for each platform in your action plan.

Special case: an ecommerce SEO audit

An ecommerce SEO audit adds specific checks, because a store often has hundreds of near-identical pages:

• Do product pages have unique descriptions, or the supplier's?
• Do filters (size, color, price) create thousands of duplicate pages?
• Do category pages have text that explains the range, or just a product grid?
• Is Product structured data (price, availability, reviews) present?
• Are permanently discontinued products redirected to an alternative?

If you run a Shopify or WooCommerce store, our ecommerce SEO page details the priorities.

Ranking the fixes: the real work

An audit that lists 80 issues in no order is useless. Rank each fix with two questions: what impact? (a page blocked from indexing comes before an image without alt text) and what effort? (changing a title takes two minutes, rewriting a page takes an hour). Start with high impact, low effort.

Run the audit in one minute

CoolSEO's free SEO audit does all of this automatically: it reads your real pages, checks technical SEO, compares your pages with real Google searches and asks Gemini your customers' question. You get a score out of 100, pillar by pillar, and your fixes ranked by impact. No account, no credit card.