Free SEO tools that actually check your site

On-page & content

The page-level signals that control how you appear in search and on social.

Which SEO checks matter, and in what order

Technical SEO has a dependency order. Work it out of sequence and you spend effort on pages that could never have ranked anyway, because something upstream was blocking them the whole time.

First: can the page be reached and indexed

Indexability is a gate rather than a scale. A page that is blocked in robots.txt, carries a noindex directive, canonicalises to a different URL, or returns anything other than 200 will not rank no matter how good it is. That makes these the only checks worth running first, and it makes their results binary: fix them and the page becomes eligible, ignore them and everything downstream is wasted.

The failure mode here is almost never a page nobody looked at. It is a directive that shipped on a shared template and silently applied to a whole section, or a canonical tag pointing at a URL that no longer exists. Both look fine on the page and are invisible without a check.

Second: can search engines understand what the page is about

Once a page is eligible, the question becomes whether its meaning is clear. That is titles and meta descriptions that describe the page rather than repeating a template, a single H1 that matches the subject, a heading structure that follows the actual argument, and image alt text where the image carries information. Structured data belongs here too: valid schema tells a search engine what type of thing the page describes rather than making it infer.

These checks are cheap and their fixes are usually template-level, which means one edit frequently clears the same issue across hundreds of pages. That combination of low cost and high multiplier is why this tier is worth clearing completely rather than partially.

Third: does the site hold together as a structure

A site is a graph, not a pile of pages, and the graph has its own failure modes. Broken internal links waste crawl budget and dead-end users. Redirect chains add latency and hops. Orphan pages sit outside the graph entirely and receive no internal link equity. Hreflang clusters break when one locale is added without updating the others.

None of these are visible from a single page, which is what separates a site crawl from a page checker. They only appear when you look at how every page references every other page, and they are the reason a whole-site audit finds things that per-page tools structurally cannot.

Last: is the page fast enough to keep the visitor

Core Web Vitals and page speed come last, not because they do not matter but because they are the only tier where a bad score still leaves you ranking. A slow page that is indexable, well-described and properly linked will rank and lose some visitors. A fast page that is noindexed ranks nowhere at all.

Measure these with real field data where you can, because lab scores on a fast connection routinely disagree with what actual visitors experience on mobile networks.