SEO Checker

How to read the report

The report groups its checks into crawling and indexing, titles and content, mobile and language, links, structured data and sharing, and page size. Each check is marked:

• Fix: a problem that can keep the page out of search results or confuse visitors, such as a noindex rule or a missing title.
• Warning: worth improving, such as a title that may be cut off or images without alt text.
• Passed: nothing to do.
• Info: context, such as the response time or the number of links.

There is no overall score. One noindex rule outweighs twenty perfect alt texts, and no single number predicts rankings, so start with the items marked Fix.

Check indexing first

If search engines can’t crawl or index a page, nothing else on it matters. Four things decide that:

1. Status code. The page should answer 200 (OK). Google doesn’t index pages that answer with a 4xx error.
2. noindex. A noindex rule in a robots meta tag or an X-Robots-Tag header asks search engines not to show the page. It is often left switched on by accident after a site launches.
3. robots.txt. A Disallow rule stops crawlers fetching the page. It isn’t a way to hide a page: a blocked address can still appear in results, without a description. To keep a page out of Google, allow crawling and use noindex.
4. Canonical link. A rel="canonical" link that points elsewhere asks Google to treat this page as a duplicate of that address.

Titles and descriptions

Google uses the <title> element as one of the main sources of the title in search results, but may write its own from headings, og:title or link text when a title is missing, vague or stuffed with keywords. It sets no length limit and shortens titles to fit the screen, so we flag titles outside about 30–60 characters as a rule of thumb. Meta descriptions work in a similar way: Google builds snippets mainly from the page content, and uses your description when it summarises the page better. We use about 120–160 characters as a guide.

To see how a title and description might look in Google, try the SERP preview tool.

Headings, alt text and language

Google says heading order doesn’t matter for Search and there is no ideal number of headings. A single <h1> and headings in order still help visitors scan the page and help screen-reader users move around it, so the checker reports them as warnings or information rather than failures. Alt text matters for both people and search: it describes images to people who can’t see them, and Google uses it to understand images. For a fuller accessibility review, run the accessibility checker.

What this checker doesn’t do

It doesn’t look at keywords, content quality, backlinks or your positions in search, which matter more than most technical details. It reads the HTML your server sends, so a page built entirely with JavaScript may look emptier here than in a browser; the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console shows how Google renders it. For loading speed and Core Web Vitals, use the website speed test.

If you want a review of your whole site, our digital marketing team handles technical SEO, on-page optimisation and local search, and our website team can rebuild pages that need more than a fix.