How to Do a Free SEO Website Check

Most websites have more SEO issues than their owners realise. Missing title tags, broken links, redirect chains, duplicate content, non-indexable pages - these problems accumulate silently over time, and they cost rankings.

The good news is that a thorough free SEO website check does not require an expensive tool. Here is how to check your website for SEO issues - step by step, at no cost.

What a proper SEO check covers

A surface-level SEO check looks at a handful of pages and flags a few obvious problems. A proper check covers the entire site:

• Indexability - are search engines able to find and index every page you want indexed?
• Response codes - which pages are returning errors or redirecting incorrectly?
• On-page metadata - which pages are missing titles, descriptions, or H1s?
• Duplicate content - are multiple pages sharing the same metadata or body content?
• Internal linking - are there broken links, orphan pages, or redirect chains?
• Images - are images missing alt text?
• Structured data - is schema markup present and valid?
• Security headers - is the site sending the correct security response headers?

Checking all of this manually on any site larger than a few dozen pages is not realistic. You need a crawler.

Step 1: Download Crawly (free)

Crawly is a free native macOS SEO crawler. It crawls unlimited pages with no subscription required. Download and install it - it takes about 30 seconds.

If you are on Windows, Screaming Frog offers a free version that crawls up to 500 URLs.

Step 2: Run a crawl

Open Crawly, click New Crawl, and enter your domain. Leave the settings on their defaults for a first run. Crawly will spider the entire site, following every internal link and recording response codes, metadata, links, and images for each URL.

For most sites under 1,000 pages, the crawl will complete in a few minutes. Crawly crawls 10 pages concurrently by default, so it is faster than crawlers that process pages one at a time.

Step 3: Check the Issues tab

The Issues tab is your starting point. Crawly groups problems into three severity levels:

• Errors - things that are definitively wrong and should be fixed: broken pages (4xx), server errors (5xx), missing title tags, missing H1s, pages with a noindex directive that should be indexable.
• Warnings - things that need attention but are not always critical: titles that are too long or too short, redirect chains, missing meta descriptions.
• Notices - things worth knowing about: thin content, non-canonical pages, hreflang issues.

Work through errors first. Each issue type expands to show the affected URLs.

Step 4: Check indexability

Go to the Pages tab and filter by Non-indexable. This shows every URL that search engines cannot index, along with the reason:

• Noindex meta tag
• Canonical pointing to a different URL
• Blocked by robots.txt
• Non-200 status code

Some non-indexable pages are intentional - thank you pages, admin pages, filtered category pages. Others are accidents - a noindex tag left on from development, a canonical pointing to the wrong URL after a site rebuild.

Review the list and check that every non-indexable page is intentionally excluded.

Step 5: Check for broken links

Filter the Pages tab to Broken (4xx). This shows every URL on the site that returns a client error. Click any broken URL to see its inbound links - the pages that link to it. Those are the pages you need to update.

Broken links waste crawl budget and, if the broken URL has external links pointing to it, they cost you link equity.

Step 6: Check redirect chains

Filter the Pages tab to Redirects. Crawly flags redirect chains - sequences where A redirects to B which redirects to C. Each extra hop in a redirect chain costs a small amount of crawl budget and page speed. Chains longer than two hops should be collapsed to a single redirect.

Step 7: Check for duplicate metadata

In the Issues tab, look for Duplicate title tags and Duplicate meta descriptions. Crawly groups pages that share identical metadata so you can see which URLs are affected.

Duplicate titles usually occur when a CMS generates the same default title for multiple page types, or when pagination pages inherit the parent page's title. Both cases send confusing signals to search engines about which page to rank.

Step 8: Check images for missing alt text

The Issues tab includes an Images missing alt text count. Alt text serves two purposes: it tells search engines what an image depicts, and it provides a text alternative for users who cannot see the image.

Pages with large numbers of images without alt text are leaving descriptive content off the table. Fix the most important pages first - homepage, product pages, key landing pages.

Step 9: Use the free SEO tools for additional checks

Crawly's free SEO tools cover individual checks that complement a crawl:

• SERP Preview - see how your title and description will appear in Google search results
• Title Tag Checker - validate length and pixel width for a specific URL
• Meta Description Checker - check length and get recommendations
• Canonical Tag Checker - verify canonical tag presence and target URL
• Redirect Checker - check the full redirect chain for any URL

These tools are useful for spot-checking individual pages after you have fixed issues identified in the crawl.

What to do with the results

After going through the issues, you will have a prioritised list of fixes. A useful order:

1. Broken pages with inbound links from external sites
2. Non-indexable pages that should be indexable
3. Missing title tags and H1s on important pages
4. Redirect chains
5. Duplicate metadata
6. Missing alt text on key pages

Not everything needs to be fixed in one go. Focus on the high-priority issues first, especially anything that prevents pages from being indexed.

Running regular checks

A single check is useful. Regular checks are better. Crawl your site monthly - or after any significant deploy - and use Crawly's crawl comparison feature to see what changed. New broken links, lost titles, pages that became non-indexable: the comparison diff surfaces all of it immediately.

---

A thorough SEO check does not need to cost anything. For a deeper walkthrough of the full audit process, see the technical SEO audit guide or jump straight into the step-by-step audit checklist.

Download Crawly and check your site for free - unlimited pages, no account required.