Free Website SEO Checker

A free SEO checker is only useful if you know which results matter and what to do next. This guide walks through every one of the 20 checks this website SEO checker runs, what each result means, how the score is worked out, and which fixes to make first. It is written for business owners and marketers who ran a check, got a number, and now want a plan.

How the score is calculated

The score is simple on purpose. Each of the 20 checks gets one of three results:

• Pass counts as 1 point
• Improve counts as half a point
• Fix counts as zero

The total is divided by 20 and shown out of 100. So every “Fix” costs you 5 points and every “Improve” costs 2.5. A page with 14 passes, 4 improves and 2 fixes scores 80.

That also means every check carries the same weight in the number, even though they don’t carry the same weight in Google. A missing social sharing image and a page blocked by noindex both move the score, but only one of them can remove you from search. Treat the score as a progress marker and use the order below to decide what to fix.

The ring turns green at 80 and above, amber from 50 to 79, and red below 50. Results are listed with “Fix” items first, then “Improve”, then passes.

Every check, what it means and the fix

A few details that explain odd results:

• Server response includes redirects. The timer runs from the address you typed to the final page. If you enter http://yoursite.com and it hops twice before landing on https, that time counts. Enter the final address to measure the page alone.
• The checker reads the HTML your server sends. It does not run JavaScript. If your headings or text only appear after scripts run, the word count and headings can come out low. That is also roughly what many crawlers see on their first pass.
• The sitemap check looks at the first Sitemap line in your robots.txt, or /sitemap.xml if there isn’t one.
• The llms.txt check passes only if the file answers normally and is plain text, not a “page not found” page dressed up in your theme.

For a deeper look at the title, description, canonical and Open Graph tags on the same page, run the meta tag checker.

Fix in this order

Not every red item hurts equally. This is the order an agency SEO would work in:

1. Indexable. If the page says noindex, nothing else matters until it’s gone. This is the classic “the new site launched and traffic disappeared” problem: the staging setting was never switched off.
2. HTTPS and mixed content. Browsers warn visitors about insecure pages and mixed content, and that costs enquiries before it costs rankings.
3. AI crawler access. A single robots.txt line can stop ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity from reading the site. The AI crawler checker shows which bot is blocked and by which rule.
4. Title tag and H1. These tell Google what the page is about. Missing or vague ones are the cheapest ranking fix there is.
5. Server response and HTML size. Slow first byte usually means hosting or caching, which affects every page at once.
6. Content, alt text, internal links. Steady improvements that add up.
7. Schema, social tags, robots.txt, sitemap, llms.txt. Quick wins, often a one-time setup for the whole site. The llms.txt generator drafts the last one for you.

If the Redirects check shows two or more hops, trace them with the redirect checker to see exactly where the chain starts.

Fix the template, not the page. If your service page is missing a canonical or has two H1s, your other service pages almost certainly do too. Fix it once in the theme or SEO plugin and it’s fixed everywhere.

Worked example: Coastline Plumbing

Coastline Plumbing in Austin runs the checker on its water heater repair page and scores 68. Here’s what came back:

• Fix: the title is missing (the theme prints the page name in an H1 and nothing in the title tag), mixed content (two images still load from http://), amount of content (95 words), and image alt text (5 of 7 images have no description).
• Improve: two H1s, no structured data, no llms.txt, server response of 1.2 seconds, and only two internal links.
• Pass: the other 11 checks.

That’s 11 passes, 5 improves and 4 fixes: (11 + 2.5) ÷ 20 = 67.5, rounded to 68.

The owner’s plan, in order: write a title (“Water Heater Repair in Austin, TX | Coastline Plumbing”), update the two image addresses to https, expand the page to cover pricing, brands serviced, how fast they arrive and the areas served, then add alt text. The second H1 turned out to be the logo, marked up as a heading by the theme, so a theme setting fixed it on every page. A rerun after those changes scored 90.

Common mistakes when using a free SEO checker

• Only checking the homepage. The homepage is usually the best-kept page on the site. Check a service page, a blog post and a product page too.
• Chasing 100. A page with no images and no need for an llms.txt can still rank well. Get the important checks green and move on.
• Fixing the warning, not the cause. A 70-character title shortened to 60 by cutting the location (“Austin”) is worse than before. Keep the words that match what people search.
• Reading a block as a bug. If the checker says the site’s security blocked it, the firewall is doing its job. RankThatBot identifies itself honestly and never tries to get around bot protection. You can allowlist it (details at rankthatseo.com/bot), or test a different site.

When you need the full Site Audit instead

One page can’t tell you about problems that only exist between pages. The Site Audit crawls the whole site with 100+ checks and finds things like:

On a WordPress site, the free Bridge plugin can then apply many of the fixes for you, such as titles, redirects, schema and alt text, with one-click undo. See how the WordPress fixes work, or read how to do an SEO audit if you’d rather work through it by hand. Plans and audit limits are on the pricing page.