How to Check Your Website's SEO for Free: A Beginner's Guide

By Neha·Published October 1, 2026·Updated October 15, 2026

You have a website. People tell you it needs "SEO". An agency offers a "complete audit" for a few thousand rupees. Before you pay anyone, it helps to know what is actually wrong, and you can find most of that out yourself, for free, in a few minutes.

This guide shows you how to check website SEO without any technical knowledge. You will run a free audit, learn what the score means and what it leaves out, decide what to fix first, and know which follow-up checks are worth your time. It is written for owners of shops, clinics, salons, coaching centres and small service businesses, and for freelancers who look after their websites.

Short answer: Run your home page address through Upgrowly's free website audit. It reads up to 25 pages, takes one to two minutes and needs no account. Fix the task at the top first, then work down the "Fix these first" list. The score covers how well the site is built for Google and for customers; it does not measure your rankings, visitors, links or Google Business Profile, so check those separately.

What "checking your SEO" actually means

SEO (search engine optimisation) is the work of helping Google understand your website and show it to the right people. An SEO check, often called an SEO audit, is a health check of that: a list of what is broken, what is missing and what to fix first. If you have wondered how to do an SEO audit without hiring anyone, a free tool plus an hour of your own attention gets you most of the way.

For a small business, a good audit answers three practical questions:

1. Can Google find and read my pages? If not, nothing else matters.
2. Do my pages clearly say what I do and where? Titles, headings and text.
3. Can a customer on a phone quickly see my details and contact me? Speed, phone layout, tap-to-call, address.

A free tool can answer most of the first and third questions mechanically. The second needs a tool plus your own judgement, because only you know which services matter most.

Step by step: run your free audit

Here is how to run the free SEO audit on Upgrowly.

1. Type your website address, for example pawarphysio.in. Start with the home page; the audit finds the other pages from there.
2. Press "Check my website". You do not need an account. Free users get three audits a day.
3. Wait one to two minutes. The audit reads up to 25 of your pages, starting from the home page and using your sitemap and your own links to find the rest, so your most important pages are read first. It also asks Google's PageSpeed test how fast your site loads on a phone and a computer.
4. Read the "Start here" task first. It is the single highest-impact problem found.
5. Then go down "Fix these first", the changes that will make the biggest difference, most important first.

The audit identifies itself as UpgrowlyBot, reads your pages a few at a time and obeys your robots.txt file, so it will not slow your site down. On a paid plan it reads more pages: 50 on Starter, 100 on Pro and 200 on Agency.

How to read your score

You get one score out of 100 and a grade. 85 or more is an A, 70 to 84 a B, 55 to 69 a C, 40 to 54 a D, and below 40 an F.

The score is built from about 50 checks in six groups. Each group is scored out of 100, and the groups are weighted like this:

Inside each group, every check carries a weight. Problems are marked serious, important or minor. A serious problem costs the full weight of that check, an important one 85% of it and a minor one 60%. If a check could not be run, for example because Google's speed test was busy, it is left out rather than counted against you.

Two things follow from this. First, Google basics and your contact details together make up half the score, because for a local business those matter most. Second, a few serious problems pull the score down far more than many small ones, which is how it should be.

What to fix first

An audit can produce a long list. Sort it into three piles and work in this order.

1. Anything that stops Google showing a page. A noindex tag (a hidden instruction telling Google not to list a page), a robots.txt rule blocking Google, a page that shows an error. Until these are fixed, nothing else on that page counts. If the audit flags one, confirm it on the exact page with the indexability checker. Our guide on why a website is not showing up on Google walks through each cause.

2. Quick wins that customers notice. A phone number that cannot be tapped, no address, every page carrying the same title, huge photos that take ages to load on 4G. These are usually an afternoon's work.

3. Slower improvements. Security headers, social previews, tidier code. Worth doing, but they will not change your enquiries next week.

Make one batch of changes, then run the audit again. The results show what changed since last time, which is more useful than the score alone.

What the score does not measure

This part matters, because a score can give the wrong impression. The audit reads your website from the outside, the way Google's robot does. It does not measure:

• Your rankings. Where you appear for "physiotherapist in Chandigarh" is not part of the score.
• Your visitors. It does not know how many people come to your site.
• Links from other websites. These still matter to Google, and the audit does not count them.
• Your Google Business Profile and reviews. For many local businesses the Maps listing brings in more calls than the website.

Speed comes from one run of Google's test and can vary a little from run to run. A high score makes ranking easier; it does not guarantee it. A site can score 90 and still sit on page three if competitors are stronger or the pages do not match what people search for.

Free follow-up checks worth doing

Once the audit's top problems are fixed, these free checks fill in what it leaves out. If you want to compare other audit tools as well, see our roundup of the best SEO audit tools, free and paid.

• Check one important page against the phrase you want it found for. The on-page SEO checker takes a page and a phrase like "physiotherapy in Chandigarh" and tells you, item by item, whether the title, main heading, address, description and opening lines are set up for it.
• Work through a full checklist. The SEO audit checklist covers the human checks no tool can do: whether each service has its own page, whether you show proof like reviews and qualifications, whether the next step is obvious.
• Score your Google listing. The Google Listing Scorecard works from answers you type in about your Business Profile and gives a score with a fix list. Upgrowly never reads Google listings or Maps automatically. Our Google Business Profile guide explains each item.
• Look at speed in more detail. The mobile speed check shows Google's speed scores and the fixes that save the most time.
• Find duplicate titles. If the audit says several pages share a title, the duplicate title finder lists exactly which ones. See our guide to finding duplicate titles and meta descriptions.
• See what Google already knows. Google Search Console is free and shows which searches bring people to you. Our Search Console guide covers setup.

A worked example: a physiotherapy clinic in Chandigarh

Here is an imaginary clinic, to show the process rather than a real result.

Dr Pawar's site scores 52, a D. The "Start here" task says his "Back pain treatment" page carries a noindex tag. That goes first: until it is removed, the page cannot appear on Google at all.

The "Fix these first" list then shows: the phone number in the header is plain text and cannot be tapped on a phone; there is no address with a PIN code anywhere on the site; all six pages carry the title "Home"; and the home page photos are several megabytes each.

He asks his developer to remove the noindex, make the phone number tappable and add the full address and a Google Maps link to the footer. He writes six titles himself, such as "Back Pain Treatment in Chandigarh | Pawar Physio", and compresses the photos. A week later he runs the audit again. The score has moved into the B range and the comparison shows which checks now pass.

What the score cannot tell him is whether the clinic will now appear for "physiotherapist near me". That depends on his Google listing, his reviews and nearby competitors, so his next job is the Google Listing Scorecard and asking happy patients for reviews.

For freelancers: turning the audit into a report

If you look after websites for clients, the same audit can become a branded PDF. The client report builder turns an audit into a plain-language report with a 30-day plan; you can see a sample report first. A free account can put your own logo on one report a day, and paid plans start at ₹499 a month. Nothing renews automatically. Our guide to onboarding SEO clients covers what to do after the report. For a shop, clinic or office, add the listing, reviews and directories with our local SEO audit workflow for clients.

What to do this week

• Run the free website audit on your home page address.
• Fix the "Start here" task, especially if it is a noindex or a blocked page.
• Make your phone number tappable and put your full address with PIN code on every page.
• Give each important page its own title.
• Run the audit again and look at what changed.
• Score your Google Business Profile separately, because the website score does not cover it.

Frequently asked questions

Is a free SEO check enough, or do I need a paid audit?

For most small business sites, a free check finds the problems that matter most: blocked pages, missing titles, slow loading and missing contact details. A paid audit adds human judgement about your content, competitors and strategy. Fix what the free check finds first; you may find you do not need more.

How often should I check my website's SEO?

After any change to the site, such as a new theme or a new developer, and about once a month otherwise. Running it every day mostly shows noise. The audit shows what changed since your last check, so a monthly run tells you whether your fixes worked.

Why is my score different on other SEO tools?

Every tool checks different things and weighs them differently, so scores do not match between tools. Do not chase a number. Look at the specific problems each tool finds and whether they affect real customers.

Can I check a competitor's website?

Yes. The audit reads any public website from the outside, so you can check a competitor's site the same way. It is a useful way to see what a business that ranks above you does differently.

My score is high. Why am I still not getting customers from Google?

The score measures how well your site is built, not where it ranks. Rankings also depend on your Google Business Profile, reviews, links from other websites and the competition in your area. If your pages are on Google but not showing for your services, read what to check when your site is indexed but not ranking.