Website SEO check: the audit you can do yourself in 20 minutes

What you need before you start

Three things, all free:

1. Google, open in an incognito window, so the results are not influenced by your history.
2. Google Search Console, with your site added and verified. If you do not have it, setup takes 10–15 minutes. Data starts appearing within a few days, so it is worth doing today even if you run the audit later.
3. PageSpeed Insights, which does not require an account.

Write down the results in a simple table with three columns: check, result, what you need to do. At the end you have your to-do list.

Step 1: How many pages does Google know about? (2 minutes)

Search Google for site:your-site.ro. The number of results is approximate, but it shows you the order of magnitude.

For the exact figure, open the Page indexing report in Search Console. It shows how many pages are indexed and, for the rest, the exact reason they are not.

Step 2: robots.txt (2 minutes)

Open your-site.ro/robots.txt. It is a text file that tells robots which areas of the site they may access.

The classic bad sign:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

This blocks the entire site for all robots. It shows up often after launches, because the test version of the site was intentionally blocked and the setting stayed.

A detail few people know: robots.txt does not remove a page from Google. Google's documentation says it is not a mechanism for keeping a web page out of Google. That is what the noindex tag is for.

If you also want to check the robots of AI assistants (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot), follow the guide to AI robots.

Step 3: The sitemap (2 minutes)

Open your-site.ro/sitemap.xml. Sometimes it is called sitemap_index.xml, and the correct address is usually written at the end of robots.txt.

You check three things:

• It exists and is not empty.
• It contains the important pages, not just the blog posts.
• It is submitted in Search Console, under the Sitemaps section, and has the status "Success".

A sitemap does not guarantee indexing. It does, however, help Google find pages it would otherwise struggle to discover. The details are in Google's documentation on sitemaps.

Step 4: HTTPS and a single address (1 minute)

Type the four versions of the domain into your browser, one at a time:

• http://your-site.ro
• http://www.your-site.ro
• https://your-site.ro
• https://www.your-site.ro

All four must end up at the same final address, with https. If two versions display the site without redirecting, Google effectively sees two identical sites.

Step 5: Speed and Core Web Vitals (4 minutes)

Put the address of your home page into PageSpeed Insights and look at the Mobile tab first.

The top section, "Discover what your real users are experiencing", shows data from real visitors. If the site has too little traffic, this section is missing and you only see the lab test below it.

Google's official thresholds, from the web.dev documentation:

Do not be alarmed by the 0 to 100 score. What matters are the three metrics above. In Search Console, the Core Web Vitals report shows you the same data for all your pages, grouped.

The separate mobile test no longer exists: Google retired it, along with the Mobile Usability report, in December 2023. The Mobile tab in PageSpeed Insights replaces it.

Step 6: Titles and descriptions (4 minutes)

Go back to the site:your-site.ro search and read the blue titles in the results.

Google explains in its guide to titles that a good title is unique to each page, descriptive and concise. The text under the title usually comes from the meta description, but Google can generate it itself from the page content.

A good title for a service page looks something like this: Air conditioning installation in Cluj | Your Company. The service, the place, then the name.

Step 7: Structured data (2 minutes)

Structured data is code invisible to visitors that tells Google explicitly what is on the page: a business, a product, an article, a recipe.

Put the address of your home page into the Rich Results Test. The result shows which types Google finds and whether they have errors.

For a local business, the useful minimum is the Organization or LocalBusiness type, with a name, address and phone number identical to those on your Google Business Profile.

Step 8: Your most important page, as Google sees it (3 minutes)

Pick the page that brings you the most customers. It is usually the home page or the page for your core service.

In Search Console, paste its address into the bar at the top, Inspect any URL. The tool, described in the Search Console help, tells you:

• whether the page is indexed;
• when Google last crawled it;
• which address Google considers canonical, that is, the main version;
• whether there are rendering problems.

Also click Test live URL, then View tested page. You see a screenshot of the page as the Google robot sees it. If it is blank or broken, Google cannot read your content.

The audit sheet, in short

What to do with the results

Order matters. First fix what blocks everything, then what slows things down, then what only improves.

1. Urgent: a robots.txt that blocks the site, zero indexed pages, a home page that cannot be indexed.
2. Important: several domain versions without redirects, a missing sitemap, Core Web Vitals in the red.
3. Improvements: duplicate or vague titles, missing structured data.

Some problems you can fix yourself from the site's admin panel: titles, the sitemap, submitting to Search Console. Others depend on the server or the code: redirects, speed, structured data. For these you need whoever built your site.

The eight checks cover the technical basics. They do not tell you whether your content answers what people are searching for or whether other sites recommend you. For the full picture, read the guide to what SEO means.

When your site grows, Google's tools are no longer enough. If you have hundreds of pages or want to track competitors, see the comparison of SEO tools.

The one-minute version

On the siteai.md home page there is a free quick audit. You type in your site's address and it automatically checks five things: HTTPS, the home page title, structured data, the llms.txt file and whether robots.txt blocks AI assistant robots.

It does not replace the eight steps above. It is a starting point when you want an answer in a few seconds.

Sources

• Google Search Central, introduction to robots.txt: what the file does, and the fact that it does not remove pages from the index.
• Google Search Central, sitemaps: the role and limits of a sitemap.
• Google, web.dev, Core Web Vitals: the LCP, INP and CLS thresholds, measured at the 75th percentile.
• Google Search Central, titles and snippets: how the title and description in the results are chosen.
• Search Console Help, URL Inspection: what the tool shows.
• Search Engine Land: the retirement of the Mobile-Friendly Test and the Mobile Usability report, December 1, 2023.