How to Audit Your Own Website in an Afternoon

You do not need to buy an audit to find out whether your website has obvious problems. Most of what a paid audit surfaces in its first ten pages is findable in an afternoon with free tools and a willingness to look at your own site honestly.

Work through this in order. Write down what you find rather than fixing as you go, because fixing as you go is how three hours becomes three weeks.

Step 1: Check whether Google can see your pages (10 minutes)

Search Google for site:yourdomain.com. That returns roughly what Google has indexed.

Three things to look for. Is the total roughly what you expect, or wildly higher or lower? Are your important pages in there? Is there anything in there that should not be, like staging pages, test pages, or old versions?

A site with twelve pages showing four hundred indexed results usually has a duplication problem. A site with forty pages showing six has a crawling problem. Either is worth knowing about.

If you have Search Console set up, the Pages report tells you this properly, including why specific pages were excluded. If you do not have it set up, stop and do that first. It is free and it is the single most useful thing you can connect to a website.

Step 2: Run the speed test (15 minutes)

Put your homepage and two important interior pages through PageSpeed Insights. Look at mobile, not desktop. Mobile is where most of your traffic is and where the problems live.

Ignore the overall score for a moment and look at three things: Largest Contentful Paint, which is how long until the main content appears. Cumulative Layout Shift, which measures how much the page jumps around while loading. And the list of specific opportunities underneath.

Most small business sites have the same three culprits: oversized images uploaded straight from a camera, a third-party chat or booking widget loading synchronously, and too many plugins or scripts. All three are fixable without rebuilding anything.

Step 3: Use your own site on your phone, as a stranger (20 minutes)

This is the step people skip and it finds more real problems than the tools do.

Open your site on your phone on cellular data, not your office wifi. Then go through it as though you had never seen it.

• Can you tell within five seconds what the business does and where it operates?
• Is the phone number tappable, and does tapping it actually dial?
• How many taps from the homepage to booking or contacting you?
• Does any text require pinching to read?
• Do buttons have enough space around them to hit without missing?
• Does anything cover the content: a popup, a cookie banner, a chat bubble sitting on the call button?
• Fill out your own contact form. Does it submit? Where does the notification go? Does someone actually see it?

That last one deserves emphasis. We have found broken contact forms on sites that had been live for over a year, quietly collecting nothing. Test yours today whether or not you do anything else on this list.

Step 4: Read your title tags and meta descriptions (20 minutes)

Search Google for site:yourdomain.com again and read what appears. That blue link and grey text is what a searcher sees before deciding whether to click.

Common problems: every page carrying the same title, titles that are just the business name, titles cut off because they run too long, missing descriptions so Google invents one from page text, and descriptions duplicated across pages.

Each page should have a distinct title describing that page and, for a local business, generally the city. Keep titles under roughly sixty characters and descriptions under about a hundred and sixty so they do not truncate.

Step 5: Check your heading structure (15 minutes)

On each main page, view the page and identify the headings. Every page should have exactly one H1 that describes the page, with H2s organizing the sections beneath it.

Two frequent problems. Pages with no H1 at all, usually because the designer styled a text block to look like a heading without marking it as one. And pages with several H1s, because headings were chosen by how large they looked rather than by structure.

While you are looking: does the first paragraph under each heading actually answer what the heading promises? That matters for readers and increasingly for AI systems trying to extract answers.

Step 6: Find broken links and images (20 minutes)

Click through your main navigation, your footer, and the links inside your three most important pages. Note anything producing an error, anything going somewhere unexpected, and any image that fails to load.

Pay particular attention to links pointing at other businesses, associations, or resources. Those break silently over the years as other sites reorganize.

Also check your images for alt text. Right-click, inspect, or use your CMS’s media library. Missing alt text is an accessibility problem first and a search problem second, and it is usually a quick batch fix.

Step 7: Compare your business information everywhere (20 minutes)

Write down the exact name, address, and phone number on your website. Then compare it against your Google Business Profile, your Facebook page, Yelp, Apple Maps, and any industry directory you can find.

Search your business name plus your old phone number if you have ever changed it. Old numbers persist on the internet for years and every place carrying one reduces search engines’ confidence in the correct one.

Consistency here is unglamorous and it reliably affects local rankings.

Step 8: Check your structured data (10 minutes)

Run your homepage and one service page through Google’s Rich Results Test. It shows what structured data is present and flags errors.

Most small business sites either have none, or have some generated by a plugin with incorrect details in it. Wrong hours, an old address, or a retired phone number in your schema is actively feeding bad information to search engines and AI systems.

Step 9: Confirm security and the basics (10 minutes)

Does your site load over https with a valid certificate? Does the non-www version redirect to the www version, or the other way round, consistently rather than both resolving separately? Does http redirect to https?

Also check that you have a privacy policy, and that it actually reflects what you do. If you collect phone numbers for text messaging, it needs specific language most templates do not include, which we covered in our piece on SMS compliance.

Step 10: Look at what people do once they arrive (20 minutes)

In your analytics, look at your top ten landing pages over the last three months. For each one, note how many people arrive and roughly how they behave.

You are looking for mismatches. A page getting substantial traffic that nobody engages with has a relevance problem or a content problem. A page converting well with almost no traffic is an opportunity. A page you assumed was important that nobody visits tells you something about your navigation.

You do not need a sophisticated setup for this. Ten pages, two numbers each, and an honest reaction.

Turning the list into a plan

You will finish with a page of problems and no obvious order. Sort them this way.

Fix today: anything actively broken. Forms not delivering, phone numbers that do not dial, wrong information in schema or on your Business Profile, pages not loading.

Fix this month: mobile usability issues, missing or duplicated titles and descriptions, oversized images, inconsistent business information across directories.

Plan properly: anything requiring a rebuild, structural navigation changes, or a real content effort. These are decisions, not tasks, and rushing them produces the problems you will be auditing next year.

What this will not tell you

Being straight about the limits. An afternoon of this finds broken things and obvious gaps. It does not tell you whether your positioning is right, whether you are targeting the right search terms, whether your competitors are doing something structurally smarter, or why a page that should convert does not.

Those questions need judgment and comparison rather than a checklist. But there is little point paying for that analysis while your contact form is silently failing, and a surprising number of businesses are in exactly that position.

If you work through this and want a second opinion on what you found, send us the list. We handle website design and SEO for businesses across Oklahoma, and we are happy to tell you which items actually matter for your situation and which can wait.