What a website SEO checker looks at and how to use it

A website SEO checker scans the pages of your website and lists what makes them harder to find in search. That includes missing or repeated titles, copied content, broken links, slow pages and pages that search engines are told to skip. The checker doesn't fix anything for you. Instead, it gives you a to-do list, so you know where to start.

What a website performance scan checks

An SEO site scan measures your pages against the basics of search engine optimisation (SEO), the work of improving your website so it ranks higher in search engines.

• Keywords and titles: whether your pages use the words people search for, and whether each page has a title of its own. Pages with the same title are hard for searchers to tell apart, so the scan points them out.
• Duplicate content: the same text on more than one page. Google shows only one version in its results when it finds several pages that are the same, and sometimes it chooses a different page from the one you'd pick.
• Broken links: visitors who click a link to a page that doesn't work end up on an error page instead of the page they wanted.
• Mobile use and loading speed: whether your pages work well on a phone and load quickly. The pages the scan flags as slow show you where it's worth taking the time to make your site faster.
• Pages kept out of search: whether a noindex tag keeps a page out of Google's results, or your robots.txt file tells crawlers not to visit it. A sitemap works the other way and lists the pages you want them to find.

Choosing an SEO checker: free tools or a paid one

Google Search Console is a free SEO checker made by Google itself, and any website can use it. It works on your own website rather than on any address you type in, and helps you monitor and troubleshoot your site's presence in Google Search results. To start, you add your website to it, and our guide to Google Search Console shows how to set it up.

A paid website analyser tool goes further. You can add the marketgoo SEO tool to your order with us, and it turns its findings into a step-by-step list of recommendations.

For loading speed, Google's PageSpeed Insights reports how a page performs on mobile and desktop and suggests how to improve it.

Our advice: start with Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights, because Search Console shows you how Google sees your site and PageSpeed Insights shows how your pages perform. Add marketgoo as a paid add-on when you'd rather have one tool that scans your website for you and tells you what to change next, without learning each report yourself.

What to fix first after an SEO scan

A scan report can be long, so it helps to work through it in order. Start with anything that keeps a page you want people to find out of search. Google drops a page with a noindex tag from its results entirely once it crawls the tag, even if other sites link to it. You can usually switch the tag off in the page's settings in your SEO plugin.

It's worth fixing broken links next and giving every page its own title and meta description. A meta description is a short summary of what a page is about, written to inform and interest the people who find it in search. Where two pages say the same thing, merge them or rewrite one, so each page has a purpose of its own.

After that, you'll probably want to work on your content and the speed of your slowest pages. Keyword research shows you the words people search for, so your content can answer them. When you've made your changes, run the scan again to check that the issues are gone.

No tool can promise you a place at the top: as Google puts it, no one can guarantee a #1 ranking. You don't need to be an SEO expert to make progress if you take the findings one at a time.

SEO analysis with marketgoo

Besides its recommendations, the marketgoo add-on gives your website an SEO score. You can add it to your order with us at checkout, or unlock it later for an existing order in your control panel. What you pay each month depends on whether you choose marketgoo Start or marketgoo Evolution.

If you're new to SEO, start with a marketgoo Start subscription and upgrade later if you want more detail.

With a marketgoo subscription, you get a full SEO analysis of your website and a list of high-priority changes to make.

Your next step

Whichever tool you choose, you can check your website's SEO for free with Search Console today. Open its Page indexing report, which shows which of your pages Google can find and index. Check that the pages you most want people to find are indexed. If you'd rather have someone make the changes for you, you can get help from our SEO experts.