How to check your website’s SEO in 10 minutes, for free

Your website is live, but nobody seems to find it on Google. A friend says “do SEO”, an agency sends a 40-page report full of red marks, and you still don’t know what to change first. Most of what matters on a small business site, you can check yourself in about 10 minutes.

This guide is a self-check for site owners, not developers: the title, description, headings, pictures, links, speed, structured data and the files that tell search engines and AI tools what they may read. The free SEO checker beside the guide follows along, so you can test your own title and description as you read.

How to check the SEO of a website, one page at a time

Google ranks each address, not “your website”. So pick the pages that bring you customers: home, your main product or service page, and contact. For each one, ask: can search engines read it, do they understand it, will people click it, and does it work on a phone?

Paste the address into the SEO checker and it answers all four in plain words. Or walk through the list below by hand.

Title and description: does your page fit in search results

The title is the blue line people click. Google says there is no limit on its length, but it cuts the title to fit the screen: on a computer, roughly 55 to 60 characters. Wide letters like W take more room than i, so good checkers measure in pixels.

Take Meena, who runs a silk saree shop in Salem. Her shop page’s title was “Meena Silks Salem | Best silk sarees Salem | Kanchipuram silk sarees | Wedding sarees | Soft silk”. That is 97 characters. Google shows the first part and cuts the rest with “…”, and repeating “silk sarees” three times doesn’t help anyone. Her description was “Welcome to our website”, which tells a searcher nothing.

What a good title does:

• Puts the words people search for first: “Silk sarees in Salem”.
• Adds what makes you different: “wedding and Kanchipuram”.
• Ends with your shop’s name after a | or a dash.
• Is different on every page.

The description is the grey text under the title. Google often writes its own from your page, but a good one gives it something to use: one or two plain sentences, about 140 to 160 characters, saying what you sell, where, and what to do next.

Is my website SEO friendly: headings, words and pictures

Meena’s new title is 59 characters and her description 146. Both fit. Now look at the page itself.

Check	What good looks like	Common mistake
Main heading	One clear heading that says what the page is	Only the logo, or no heading
Sub-headings	Short headings like “Wedding sarees” or “Delivery”	Bold text not marked as a heading
Words	Plain text on what you offer, where and the price range	Only photos, or text inside pictures
Alt text	A short line on what each photo shows	Empty, “IMG_2034”, or keywords
Links	Words that say where they go	“Click here”, or dead links

Google says heading order doesn’t change rankings, but a clear structure helps screen readers and skimmers. One main heading per page is a good habit.

Google calls alt text the most important detail it reads about a picture. “Red Kanchipuram silk saree with gold border” is useful. “saree saree silk saree best saree” is keyword stuffing, and Google may treat it as spam.

If a stranger can’t tell from your title and first heading what you sell and where, Google can’t either.

How to check website speed and how it looks on a phone

Most of your visitors are on phones, often on mobile data. Google measures three things it calls Core Web Vitals:

You don’t need the names. Open your page on your phone, on mobile data, and watch: does the main photo take long, does a button move as you tap it? The usual causes are huge camera photos, too many plugins and pop-ups. Resize photos before uploading (our image resizer does it on your device).

Structured data, robots.txt and AI crawlers

Structured data is a small block of code that tells search engines facts like your address, hours or a product’s price. For a local shop, LocalBusiness data is worth having. Beware old advice: in 2023 Google stopped showing HowTo results and limited FAQ results to well-known government and health sites.

robots.txt is a file at yoursite.com/robots.txt that tells crawlers what they may read. One wrong line can hide your whole site, and so can a noindex tag on a page.

If your site was built on a test address first, check robots.txt and the noindex setting the day it goes live. A blocked site can look perfect and still get no visits.

AI crawlers come in two kinds. OpenAI says OAI-SearchBot finds pages for ChatGPT search, while GPTBot collects pages that may be used to train its models. Blocking the training crawler doesn’t hide you from ChatGPT answers; blocking the search crawler does. The checker’s AI readiness tab shows which are allowed.

Google Search Console: the free check that never stops

A checker shows what is wrong on one page today. Google Search Console shows what Google actually sees over time, for free:

• the searches that already show your site, and how often people click;
• pages Google couldn’t read, and why;
• the URL Inspection tool, which shows how Google sees one page.

Add your site, prove it is yours (your web person or hosting company can help) and submit your sitemap. If a search shows you often but few people click, work on that page’s title and description.

For “near me” searches, a free Google Business Profile often matters more than the website. And a WhatsApp link on the page turns a visit into a conversation.

What Meena changed, and what to expect

Meena spent one evening on three pages: shorter titles, a real description for each, alt text on 12 product photos, photos resized from 4 MB, and a dead Facebook link fixed. Then she added the site to Search Console.

None of this guarantees page one. Nobody outside Google can promise that, and a checker’s score is guidance, not a ranking. It removes the reasons a good page gets skipped. If you’d rather have someone build or fix the site for you, our website service starts from ₹7,999.

Questions

How can I check the SEO of my website for free?

Use a free page checker like our SEO checker for one page at a time, and Google Search Console for the whole site over time. Both are free and need no paid plan. Start with your home, service and contact pages.

What is a good SEO score?

A score sums up the checker’s own list, so it is a guide, not a grade from Google. On our checker, 85 and above is strong and 65 and above is good. Fix blockers like noindex first.

How long should a page title be?

About 55 to 60 characters, so it isn’t cut on a computer screen. Google has no fixed limit; it cuts titles to fit the screen. Put the words people search for at the start and your name at the end.

How do I check if my website is indexed on Google?

Type site:yourwebsite.com into Google to see the pages it has. For a single page, Search Console’s URL Inspection tool tells you whether it is indexed and why not. A noindex tag or a robots.txt block are the usual reasons.

Does having one H1 matter for SEO?

Google says heading order doesn’t change rankings, so it won’t punish two. Still, one clear main heading is a good habit: it tells visitors, screen readers and search engines what the page is about at a glance.

Should I block AI crawlers in robots.txt?

Only the ones you don’t want. Search crawlers like OAI-SearchBot help you appear in AI answers; training crawlers like GPTBot collect pages for training. Blocking training only is a fair middle way.

How often should I check my website’s SEO?

Check a page when you change it, and look at Search Console once a month. Check robots.txt and noindex settings right after any redesign or move to new hosting, since those are when sites most often get hidden by mistake.