SEO checks
Every fault our audit looks for, with a guide to fixing it. No jargon, no prerequisites: what the problem is, what it actually costs you, and the steps on the platform you are running.
Rather than read all of them: run the free check and find out which of these your own site has.
Check your SEO — freeIndexability and crawling
Whether search engines are allowed to see your pages at all. Nothing else on this list matters for a page that cannot be indexed.
- How to fix canonical tag problemsA canonical tag names the real URL for a page when the same content is reachable more than one way. Getting it wrong is quieter than most SEO faults: nothing on the page looks broken, and its value quietly goes to the wrong address — or to one that cannot rank at all.
- How to fix XML sitemap problemsA sitemap is how search engines discover pages your own links do not lead to well, and how they learn something changed. Two things go wrong with it: there is not one, or the one you have lists URLs that do not work.
- How to fix a page accidentally set to “noindex”If a page you care about is nowhere in Google, not even when you search its exact title, a noindex tag is the first thing to rule out. It is one line, it overrides everything else you do for that page, and it usually got there by accident.
- How to fix a robots.txt that blocks your whole siteDisallow: / in your robots.txt is the fastest way to disappear from search. It asks every crawler to skip the whole site at once, and it is a common leftover from launch day.
- How to fix redirect chains on your siteA redirect that points at another redirect makes the reader wait through every hop, and a bit of the value from the original link leaks away at each one. Chains build up quietly over years of moving pages around.
- How to fix a page that is both canonical and noindexedSome pages say two contradictory things at once: this is the definitive version of this content, and also, do not index it. The usual result is that the page, and anything canonicalised to it, both drop out of search.
- Links pointing at pages blocked by robots.txtYour robots.txt tells crawlers to stay out of some pages, and your own site links to them. For a login, a cart, or an admin area that is exactly right and there is nothing to do. It is worth a glance because the same rule occasionally catches a section nobody meant to hide.
- How to fix pages that return errorsSome of your URLs answer with an error instead of a page. A 404 wastes the crawl budget Google gives your site; a 5xx makes it slow down or stop crawling for a while.
- How to find and fix broken internal linksYour own pages link to pages that are gone. Readers follow the link and hit a dead end, and search engines spend crawl budget on URLs that lead nowhere.
- How to fix soft 404 errorsURLs that do not exist on your site answer with a normal 200 page instead of a 404. Google ends up indexing an unlimited number of near-empty pages, and broken links on your own site become invisible to you.
- Do you need a robots.txt file?There is no robots.txt on your site. Nothing breaks without one, but it is where you point crawlers at your sitemap and keep them out of admin and internal-search pages.
- How to fix www and non-www serving the same siteBoth www.yoursite and yoursite serve the site directly. Search engines treat them as two sites with identical content, which splits the value of every link you have ever earned between them.
- How to fix mixed content warningsThese secure pages load images, scripts, or stylesheets over plain http. Browsers block or downgrade those requests, so parts of the page may not appear, and the padlock is lost.
On-page and content
What each page says about itself: the title and description that appear in search results, and the headings that tell a reader what they are looking at.
- How to fix title tag problemsThe title tag is the line people read in search results, and the strongest single signal on the page about what it is for. Four things go wrong with it, and a site with one of them usually has two. Each is below, with what it costs and how to put it right.
- How to fix meta description problemsThe meta description is the sentence under your link in search results. It is not a ranking factor, which is exactly why it gets neglected — and it is what decides whether anybody clicks the result you worked to earn. Three faults account for almost all of it.
- How to fix H1 heading problemsThe H1 is the visible heading that tells a reader — and a search engine — what a page is about before either goes any further. Three faults are common, and a template is behind most of them, which means one fix usually clears the whole site.
- How to fix a broken heading structureThe headings on these pages skip levels, for example an H4 directly under an H2. Screen readers use the heading outline to navigate, and search engines use it to understand how a page is organised.
- How to add alt text to your imagesImages on these pages have no alt attribute. Alt text is what screen-reader users hear instead of the image, what appears when it fails to load, and what puts your images in image search.
- How to fix a missing lang attributeThese pages do not declare which language they are in. Search engines guess, screen readers pick a pronunciation, and browsers offer the wrong translation.
Technical
How the page is delivered — speed, mobile layout, and the declarations a browser needs before it can render anything correctly.
- How to improve your Core Web VitalsGoogle watches how quickly your page becomes usable and how much it shifts around as it loads, and it feeds that into ranking. The more direct problem is simpler: a slow page loses readers before they see anything at all.
- How to fix a missing mobile viewport tagWithout a viewport tag, a phone draws your page at desktop width and then shrinks the whole thing to fit. Text comes out too small to read, taps land on the wrong link, and Google indexes the mobile version of your site, so this is the version that counts.
- How to fix a missing character encodingThese pages do not declare a character set, so the browser guesses. When it guesses wrong, accented characters and quotation marks come out as garbage.
- How to make your pages mobile-friendlyThese pages fix their layout to a desktop width in pixels. On a phone that means horizontal scrolling and tiny text, and since Google ranks what it sees on mobile, it is the version that counts.
- How to fix content that only appears after JavaScriptMost of the text on these pages only appears after JavaScript runs. Search engines do render JavaScript, but later and less reliably, so content that is not in the HTML your server sends may never be indexed.
Structured data and social previews
The machine-readable description of a page: what earns a rich result in search, and what a link to it looks like when somebody shares it.
- How to add structured data for rich resultsStructured data is the markup behind the rich results you see in Google: the star ratings, the prices, the FAQ drop-downs. A result with one of those takes up more room and pulls more clicks than two plain lines of text.
- How to add Open Graph tags for link previewsThese pages have no Open Graph tags, so when somebody shares the link on Slack, LinkedIn, or WhatsApp, the preview is blank or scraped at random. It does not affect ranking; it affects whether anybody clicks a shared link.
Links
Where your pages point, inside the site and out of it.
Site-wide configuration
Settings that belong to the whole site rather than to any page: the certificate, the https redirect, and what happens at an address that does not exist.
- How to build a custom 404 pageWhen someone follows an old link to a page that is gone, a bare server error tells them nothing and they leave. A 404 page with your normal layout, a short line of explanation, and a search box turns that dead end into a way back into the site.
- How to move your site to HTTPSThe site is served only over plain http. Browsers mark it as Not Secure, anything typed into it travels in the clear, and HTTPS has been a ranking signal for years.
- How to redirect http to httpsThe http:// address does not redirect to https://. Both versions are reachable, so search engines see two copies of the site and some visitors stay on the insecure one.
- How to fix an invalid HTTPS certificateThe HTTPS certificate does not verify: expired, self-signed, or issued for a different name. Browsers show a full-page warning before anyone reaches the site, and search engines will not index it normally.