How to Do a DIY SEO Audit (Without Paying for One)

When an agency quotes you for an "SEO audit," they're usually running through a checklist that isn't secret — it's a known, repeatable set of checks that catches the most common and most damaging issues on a small business website. You can run most of that same checklist yourself, for free, before you ever pay anyone. This won't replace a genuinely deep competitive or technical audit, but it will tell you, honestly, whether your site has the kind of obvious problems that are worth fixing before you spend money finding out about them a more expensive way.

Work through these in order — they're roughly sequenced from fastest-to-check and highest-impact toward more time-consuming checks, so you get the most useful information for the least effort first.

1. Title tags and meta descriptions

Your title tag is the clickable headline in a search result, and your meta description is the summary underneath it. Both are frequently left as defaults, duplicated across pages, or stuffed with the business name repeated three times. You don't need to check every single page — spot-check your homepage, your top 3-5 service pages, and your top location pages if you have them.

• Is the title tag unique for each page, or does every page share the exact same title?
• Does the title actually describe the page's specific topic (the service, or the service plus location) rather than something generic like "Home" or just the business name?
• Is there a meta description at all, and does it read as a genuine, compelling summary rather than being left blank (which lets Google auto-generate one, usually poorly)?
• Are titles reasonable in length — long enough to be descriptive, short enough not to get cut off in results?

The SERP snippet preview tool lets you paste in a title and description and see roughly how it will actually display in a Google result, including whether it gets truncated — a faster way to spot-check this than guessing at character counts.

2. Google Business Profile completeness

If you're a local service business, this is arguably higher-leverage than anything on your actual website, and it's the fastest thing on this list to check. Log into your Google Business Profile and go through it section by section.

• Is the business category set correctly, and are relevant secondary categories added?
• Are hours accurate, including holiday hours if applicable?
• Is the service area or address correct and consistent with what your website says?
• Are there recent photos, and is the profile actively getting new reviews rather than sitting stale?
• Are you responding to reviews, including negative ones?

The Google Business Profile guide walks through this in full detail if you find gaps here.

3. Site speed

Run your homepage and one or two key service pages through Google's PageSpeed Insights (free, no account needed). You're not trying to hit a perfect score — you're looking for obvious red flags: a score well into the red, a "Largest Contentful Paint" or "Cumulative Layout Shift" flagged as poor, or a page that visibly takes several seconds to become usable on a phone. See the website speed guide for what these specific metrics mean and what usually causes them.

4. A single, clear H1 and logical heading structure

Every page should have exactly one H1 — the main page headline — followed by a logical nesting of H2s and H3s underneath it, roughly mirroring an outline of the page's content. A common issue: no H1 at all (sometimes because a logo or hero image is the only large text on the page, with no actual heading tag behind it), multiple H1s competing for the same slot, or headings used purely for visual styling with no real hierarchy behind them.

You can check any live page's actual heading structure with the heading structure checker — paste in a URL and it shows you the real outline, not what it looks like visually.

5. Mobile usability

Open your site on an actual phone — not just a resized browser window — and try to do what a real visitor would do: read a service page, tap the phone number, fill out the contact form.

• Is text readable without pinching to zoom?
• Are buttons and links big enough to tap accurately, with enough space between them?
• Does the phone number actually trigger a call when tapped, rather than being plain unlinked text?
• Does the contact form work cleanly on a small screen, without fields cut off or a keyboard covering the submit button?
• Is there an intrusive popup or overlay that's hard to dismiss on mobile?

6. Basic schema markup

Run your homepage through Google's Rich Results Test to see what structured data, if any, it currently detects. At minimum, a local service business should have LocalBusiness schema (or a more specific subtype) on the homepage. If you have dedicated service pages, Service schema on each is worth checking for too. See the schema markup guide for what each type does and why it matters — and the schema generator if you find you don't have it yet.

7. Google Search Console: crawl errors and indexing

This is the section that requires the most setup if you don't already have it, and it's worth doing regardless. Search Console is free and shows you how Google itself is actually seeing your site — not a guess, not a third-party simulation.

• Coverage / Pages report: are there pages Google has "discovered but not indexed," or pages excluded with an error? Are your important pages actually indexed?
• Performance report: is there a sudden, unexplained drop in impressions or clicks for any date range? (This overlaps with diagnosing an algorithm-related issue — see the guide on recovering from an algorithm update if you spot one.)
• Are there mobile usability errors flagged directly in the report?
• Is a sitemap submitted, and is Search Console reporting it was read successfully?

8. Internal linking

Click through your own site the way a visitor or a search crawler would. Can you get from the homepage to every important service and location page within a click or two? Do your service pages link to each other where it's genuinely relevant (a page about drain cleaning linking to a page about pipe repair, for instance)? Are there pages that exist but aren't linked from anywhere else on the site — effectively orphaned, and much harder for Google to find and understand as important?

What to do with what you find

Don't try to fix everything in one sitting. Prioritize the issues that are both high-impact and low-effort first — a missing meta description or a duplicated title tag is a five-minute fix with a real upside. A site-wide speed problem caused by unoptimized images across two hundred pages is a bigger project, worth scoping properly rather than rushing. If you go looking for outside help after this, you'll walk into that conversation already knowing specifically what's wrong — which puts you in a much stronger position to evaluate whether a quote is actually addressing your real issues or just running through a generic sales script. See how to choose an SEO agency for what to ask once you get there.