How to check your website's SEO in 15 minutes

You can check website SEO yourself in about 15 minutes with Google and your browser. Search site:yourdomain.com, open the Page indexing report in Search Console, view the source of your key pages for the title, meta description and canonical, run PageSpeed Insights, check the page on a phone and read your robots.txt. That covers the problems that actually stop a small site from ranking. Rankings, backlinks and content quality are a separate, longer job.

Do the steps in order. The first two tell you whether Google has your pages at all, and if it doesn't, nothing further down matters yet.

Is Google indexing your site?

Check this first, because a page Google hasn't indexed can't rank no matter how good it is.

Search site: on Google (1 minute)

Type site:yourdomain.com into Google. Does your home page appear? Do the titles and snippets read the way you wrote them? Are there pages you never meant to publish, like staging copies or tag archives?

Don't trust the result count. Google's documentation says the site: operator doesn't show every indexed page. Zero results on an established site is the one number that means something. If you see that, stop and read why your website is not showing up on Google.

Open the Page indexing report (3 minutes)

Search Console is the only place Google tells you, page by page, what it indexed and why it skipped the rest. Verify your site if you haven't.

Go to Indexing > Pages and compare the indexed count with the number of pages you expect to rank. Then open each reason under "Why pages aren't indexed." Redirects and deliberate noindex tags are harmless. Pages you care about sitting under "Crawled, currently not indexed," "Excluded by noindex tag" or "Blocked by robots.txt" are worth your time. Our guide on how to check if a page is indexed explains each URL Inspection answer.

Check titles, descriptions and canonicals in the source

View source on your home page and two of your most important pages. Press Ctrl+U (Cmd+Option+U on a Mac) and search with Ctrl+F for these tags:

<title>Plumber in Leeds | Same-day repairs | Smith Plumbing</title>
<meta name="description" content="Emergency and planned plumbing across Leeds. Fixed prices, 2-hour call-outs.">
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.smithplumbing.co.uk/">
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

• Title. One per page, unique, says what the page is. Duplicate titles across pages are the most common thing I find on small sites.
• Meta description. Present and written for a person. Missing isn't fatal, but Google then picks a snippet for you.
• Canonical. It should point to the page's own preferred URL. A canonical that points every page at the home page tells Google to ignore the rest. The canonical tag guide covers odd cases.
• Robots meta. The last line above should not exist on any page you want ranked.

If the source is nearly empty and content only appears after scripts run, Google can usually still render it, but many AI crawlers can't. That's a separate check.

Check page speed and how it looks on a phone

Paste your home page and busiest landing page into PageSpeed Insights and read the mobile tab (3 minutes).

The top section is field data from real Chrome users. You want Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds and Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1, per web.dev's Core Web Vitals thresholds. Small sites often have no field data, so the lab score below is a rough guide. Don't chase 100. Fix the biggest image or slowest script and move on.

Then pick up your phone (2 minutes). Google retired its Mobile-Friendly Test in December 2023, and it indexes the mobile version of your site, so what's missing on mobile is missing from Google. Check that text reads without zooming and nothing scrolls sideways. Then compare content with desktop. Accordions that drop whole sections or a mobile menu missing half your links are the real problems, as mobile-first indexing explains.

Read your robots.txt

Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt in a browser (2 minutes). This blocks your whole site from every crawler:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

It ships by accident more often than you'd think, usually left over from staging. Also check that the file lists your sitemap and doesn't block CSS or JavaScript folders.

When to use an automated SEO check

The manual pass works for one site and a handful of pages, done now and then. It stops scaling when you have more pages to compare, want structured data validated, or need to recheck the same list after a fix. That's the point to run a full SEO audit or work through the technical SEO checklist.

Check your website's SEO automatically

Our website check runs most of the above on your home page and up to two more pages on the same site. The default checks cover crawling and indexing (indexing, robots.txt, redirects and headers), on-page SEO, structured data and content, at 67 credits for one page and 47 for each extra page. You can add performance, rendering and mobile, images, and a 150-page crawl for internal links and sitemap coverage. The price shows before you run it.

You get one fix list sorted by priority and 0 to 100 scores for SEO readiness, AEO readiness and AI access. Rerun it after you publish fixes and it reports the percent of issues fixed and any new ones. It doesn't read Search Console or check rankings and backlinks, so the indexing steps above are still yours. A quick preview of your home page costs no credits and takes about 20 seconds.