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Quick Guide

Basic SEO Audit
in 10 Minutes

Find the biggest issues holding your site back — no expensive tools required

January 3, 2026 7 min read
Key Insight

You don't need expensive tools or an agency to check if your SEO is working. In 10 minutes, you can find the biggest issues holding your site back.

What You'll Need

1 Your website URL
2 Google Search Console (free)
3 A notes app or spreadsheet

Let's go.

Minutes 1-2

Check If Google Can See Your Site

Why it matters: If Google can't crawl your pages, nothing else matters.

How to check:

  1. Go to Google and type: site:yourwebsite.com
  2. Count how many pages show up

What you're looking for:

Your main pages appear
Way fewer pages than expected = indexing problem
Pages showing that shouldn't (test pages) = cleanup needed
Quick Fix

If pages are missing, check for accidental noindex tags or robots.txt blocks.

Minutes 3-4

Check Your Page Titles

Why it matters: Titles tell Google (and users) what each page is about.

How to check:

  1. Open your site in a browser
  2. Look at the browser tab—that's your title
  3. Check 5-10 of your most important pages

What you're looking for:

Each page has a unique, descriptive title
Generic titles like "Home" or "Services"
Multiple pages with the same title
Titles that are cut off (keep under 60 characters)
Good Title Formula

Primary Keyword – Benefit | Brand Name

Example: "SEO Audit Tool – Free Website Health Check | SEO Pulse Check"

Minutes 5-6

Check Page Speed (Mobile)

Why it matters: Slow sites lose visitors AND rankings.

How to check:

  1. Go to PageSpeed Insights
  2. Enter your homepage URL
  3. Check the Mobile score
Good Above 80
Needs Work 50–80
Urgent Below 50

Top speed killers:

  • Uncompressed images (biggest culprit)
  • Too many plugins/scripts
  • No caching
  • Slow hosting
Minutes 7-8

Check for Broken Links

Why it matters: Broken links hurt user experience and waste your site's "link juice."

How to check:

  1. Install a free Chrome extension like "Check My Links"
  2. Run it on your homepage and top 5 pages
  3. Look for red (broken) links

What you're looking for:

All links work
404 errors
Links to pages that redirect multiple times
Quick Fix

Update or remove broken links. Redirect old URLs to relevant pages.

Minutes 9-10

Check Search Console for Errors

Why it matters: Google tells you exactly what's wrong—if you look.

How to check:

  1. Log into Google Search Console
  2. Go to "Pages" (under Indexing)
  3. Look at the "Why pages aren't indexed" section

What you're looking for:

Your important pages are indexed
"Crawled - currently not indexed"
"Blocked by robots.txt"
"Duplicate without canonical"
Also Check

"Experience" → "Core Web Vitals" for performance issues, and "Security & Manual Actions" for penalties.

Your Checklist

Your 10-Minute Audit Checklist

Copy this and check off as you go:

What to Do With Your Findings

Found issues? Prioritize like this:

Priority Issue Why
High Pages not indexed No index = no traffic
High Manual actions Google is penalizing you
Medium Slow page speed Hurts rankings + conversions
Medium Duplicate titles Confuses Google
Low Some broken links Fix when you can

Want to Go Deeper?

This 10-minute audit catches the big stuff. But a full audit includes:

  • Keyword analysis
  • Competitor comparison
  • Backlink profile
  • Content gaps
  • Technical crawl errors

Start with the basics. Fix those first, then level up.

Automate Your Audits

Doing this manually every month gets old. Get an instant SEO health report in 60 seconds.

Run Free SEO Health Check

Quick Recap

In 10 minutes, you checked:

1 Google can see your site
2 Page titles are unique and clear
3 Site loads fast on mobile
4 No broken links
5 Search Console has no critical errors

That's more than most website owners ever do. Now fix what you found, and check again next month.