The 30-Minute Technical SEO Audit Anyone Can Run

The three free tools you need

Skip the £299 audits. These give you everything that matters:

• Google Search Console — the source of truth for what Google sees
• PageSpeed Insights — real Core Web Vitals scores from actual users
• Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free up to 500 URLs) — desktop crawler

Check indexing first

In Search Console, open the Pages report. It splits your URLs into 'indexed' and 'not indexed with reasons'. That reasons list is gold: 'crawled — currently not indexed' usually means thin or duplicate content. 'discovered — not indexed' means Google found it but hasn't bothered crawling — usually a signal your site's authority is low.

Core Web Vitals — the ones Google actually uses

Three metrics: LCP (largest paint under 2.5s), INP (interaction response under 200ms), CLS (layout shift under 0.1). Failing any of them is a soft ranking penalty.

Most fixes are the same handful: compress images to WebP/AVIF, remove unused JavaScript, set explicit width/height on images and embeds, defer third-party scripts.

Crawl your own site

Run Screaming Frog against your domain. In 5 minutes you'll see: broken internal links, missing titles/descriptions, oversized images, redirect chains, duplicate content and orphan pages. Fix the reds first, then the yellows.

Mobile-first is not optional

Google indexes the mobile version of your site, not the desktop one. Open your site on your phone. Is anything hidden, hard to tap, or unreadable? That's what Google is judging you on.