An SEO analysis is the work of finding and prioritising the problems that stop or limit a website from appearing in search engines. A good analysis looks at four layers: can Google see and index the pages, are the pages technically sound, does the content match what people search for, and is the site fast enough. Most of it can be done free with Search Console, PageSpeed Insights and a crawler; the hard part is not collecting findings but deciding which to fix first.
What "Free SEO Analysis" Tools Give You, and What They Don't
Sites where you type in a domain and click "analyse" return a score out of 100 and a long list of warnings within seconds. These tools look at a single page, usually the home page, and run surface checks: title length, meta description, image alt text. The score itself means nothing: a site scoring 62 can get more organic traffic than a competitor scoring 85. The questions that matter are invisible to them: how many of your pages has Google indexed, which pages get impressions but no clicks, are your category pages duplicating each other.
A real analysis starts with your own data. For a site connected to Search Console, the first hour is spent there; the crawler is the second hour. Use the scoring sites after your own analysis is done, to check whether you missed anything.
Step 1: How Google Sees the Site
Indexing comes before everything. The Pages report in Search Console tells you how many of your pages Google has indexed and how many it left out, and why. On a 3,000-product e-commerce site it is common to find only 900 pages indexed; the rest usually pile up under "crawled, currently not indexed" or "duplicate, Google chose a different canonical". These two headings point to problems that should be solved before adding new content to the site.
From the same report, check: how many pages are deliberately kept out with "noindex", and are they really the ones that should be out. Are there internal links to pages that return 404. Have redirect chains formed (page A to B, B to C). Has the sitemap been submitted to Google, and do the pages in it actually return 200.
site:yourdomain.com into Google is a rough estimate, not a substitute for the index report. But in ten minutes it shows you one thing: whether filtered, parameterised or test pages have leaked into the index.Step 2: Technical Crawl
A crawler behaves like Googlebot, follows every link on your site and lists, for every page, the status code, title, meta description, H1, canonical tag, redirects and page size. The free version of Screaming Frog crawls up to 500 URLs; enough for small sites, not for mid-sized e-commerce. AdsLuma's Site Crawl screen queues the crawl, processes pages up to your plan limit and ranks findings by severity; because it sits next to Search Console data, you can see which problem is actually costing traffic.
The findings that usually stand out in a crawl:
- Dozens of pages carrying the same title or meta description (mostly category and filter pages)
- Product pages whose canonical tag points to another page instead of themselves
- Templates with several H1s or none at all
- Old campaign pages that are linked from within the site but return 404
- Redirects from http to https and from non-www to www that chain into each other
- Orphan pages: in the sitemap, but no link from anywhere on the site
The finding count runs into the hundreds on most sites. Rather than trying to fix all of them, look at which template they come from: a canonical error on 400 product pages closes with a single template fix.
Step 3: Content and Search Intent
The Performance report in Search Console gives you the searches you appear for and the clicks you get, by query and by page. Two lists are enough here. First, queries with high impressions and a low click-through rate: Google is showing you, the user is choosing someone else; your title and description probably do not match the intent behind the search. Second, queries ranking between 8 and 20: deepening the content slightly can move these onto the first page, far faster than writing a new page from scratch.
The practical way to check intent is to search your top 20 queries by impressions in a private window and look at what kind of content sits on page one. If the query returns product listings, you will not compete with a blog post; if it returns guides, you will not compete with a category page.
Cannibalisation
If two or three of your pages take turns ranking for the same search, Google cannot decide which is the main page. Merge the pages, or point one at the other with a canonical.
Thin content
Category pages with a couple of sentences and 200-word "blog" posts are a burden on the index. Merge them, deepen them, or keep them out with noindex.
Step 4: Speed and Core Web Vitals
PageSpeed Insights measures a page for mobile and desktop and gives Core Web Vitals values plus improvement suggestions. A single-page measurement can mislead; test the home page, a category page and a product page separately. Three values matter: the time until the largest content element appears (LCP, target under 2.5 seconds), responsiveness to interaction (INP, under 200 milliseconds) and how much the page shifts while loading (CLS, under 0.1). If the site has accumulated real-user data, the report shows that too; it is more reliable than the lab measurement.
Most speed problems come from three places: large uncompressed images, third-party scripts that load before the page does (chat tools, marketing pixels) and late-arriving fonts. Each is a few hours of work for a technical team; the effect shows up in purchase rates, especially on mobile.
Step 5: External Links
The Links report in Search Console shows which domains link to your site. For small and mid-sized sites this list is usually short and the analysis yields nothing beyond "few links". What to look for here is quality: if hundreds of links are coming from spam-looking domains, note it; Google already ignores most of these, but a sudden spike can indicate the site has been pulled into a malicious network.
Ranking the Findings: The Backbone of the SEO Report
The output of an analysis should be an ordered work list, not a list of problems. The order we use:
A page Google cannot see never ranks. Wrong noindex, broken canonicals, blocking robots rules, chained redirects.
Problems that affect hundreds of pages with one fix: duplicate titles, missing H1, empty category pages.
Strengthening the content of specific pages, moving queries ranking 8 to 20 onto page one, speed improvements.
Next to each finding write three things: the evidence (which report, which number), the expected impact (how many pages, which queries) and who will fix it. "Meta descriptions should be improved" is not a work item; "126 category pages carry the same meta description, template fix, developer" is.
Checklist
- Indexed and excluded page counts in Search Console, with exclusion reasons
- Sitemap submitted and every address in it returns 200
- robots.txt blocks only the paths that genuinely need blocking
- One canonical, one H1, a unique title and meta description on every page
- No internal links to pages returning 404; redirects reach their target in one step
- Intent match checked for the 20 queries with the most impressions
- Queries ranking 8 to 20 listed with their pages
- Core Web Vitals measured for the home, a category and a product page
- Findings ranked with evidence, impact and owner
To see Google's own expectations in one place, the Search Essentials page summarises the technical and content conditions a site needs to meet to appear in search.
Frequently Asked Questions About SEO Analysis
Which SEO analysis tools are free?
Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse inside Chrome and Bing Webmaster Tools are completely free. The free version of Screaming Frog crawls up to 500 addresses. These four are enough for a full analysis of a small site.
How long does an SEO analysis take?
On a site of a few hundred pages, data collection takes half a day and turning findings into a ranked report takes a day. On e-commerce sites with thousands of pages the crawl alone can take hours, which is why crawl tools queue the job and run it in the background.
What should an SEO report contain?
Indexing status, technical findings, content and query performance, speed measurements and an external link summary. Each finding should carry evidence, expected impact and an owner; the report should deliver an ordered work list, not a score.
Is a site analysis the same as an SEO analysis?
In everyday use they mean the same thing. Technically a site analysis may also cover speed, accessibility and security topics unrelated to search; an SEO analysis looks only at the part of those that affects search visibility.
AdsLuma crawls your site and ranks findings by severity; combined with Search Console and GA4 data, it shows which problem is actually costing you traffic.
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