The short answer: open Google Search Console to see whether your pages are indexed and what they already rank for, run your most important page through Google PageSpeed Insights, then search Google for your own business name and one thing you sell. Those three checks take about ten minutes, cost nothing, and find most of what is wrong with a small business website. Everything below is how to read what they tell you, and which free tools are worth adding after that.
Check the SEO of your website in three steps
1. Ask Google whether it can see your pages
Nothing else matters if Google has not indexed the page. In Google Search Console, paste a page address into the URL Inspection bar at the top. It will tell you whether the page is on Google, and if it is not, it usually says why.
Then open the Pages report under Indexing. It splits your site into pages Google has indexed and pages it has not, with a reason against each group. Work down the not-indexed list first. A page Google refuses to index cannot rank for anything.
Search Console is free, and it is the only tool on this page that reports what Google itself did with your site rather than an outside guess at it. If you set up nothing else, set up this.
2. Measure how the page loads on a phone
Put your home page and your main service or product page through PageSpeed Insights. Read the mobile tab, not the desktop one, because that is the version most of your visitors get.
Two things on that report are worth your attention. The Core Web Vitals assessment at the top is measured from real visits to your site, when there is enough traffic to report it. The performance score below it is a lab test on a simulated phone, so treat it as a diagnostic rather than a grade. The opportunities list under the score is the useful part: it names the specific images, scripts and fonts that are slowing the page.
3. Search for yourself, the way a customer would
Search Google for your business name. Then search for the thing you sell plus your area, the way a customer who does not know you would type it. Look at what comes back.
You are checking three things. Does your site appear at all. Does the title and the grey description line under it read like something a person would click. And does anything else outrank you for your own name, such as a directory listing or an old social profile you have forgotten about.
This is the check people skip because it feels too simple. It is also the one that most often finds the real problem, which is usually a title tag written for a search engine and not for a reader.
What to fix first, in order
Once you have those three answers, the order of work is fairly settled:
- Pages that are not indexed. Fix the reason Search Console gives before you touch anything else.
- Titles and descriptions on your money pages. These are what a searcher actually reads. Our on-page SEO checklist walks through what belongs on a page and in what order.
- The slowest page on a phone. Usually an oversized image or a plugin nobody uses any more.
- Pages nobody can reach. If a page is not linked from your menu or from another page, both visitors and search engines have trouble finding it.
If you have an hour rather than ten minutes, we have written up the quick wins worth doing in that hour.
Free tools worth adding after those three
The three checks above cover most small business sites. These are the free tools we reach for when they do not.
Google Search Console
Beyond the indexing checks above, the Performance report is where Search Console earns its place. It shows the searches your pages already appear for, how often people clicked, and roughly where you sit in the results. Sort by impressions and look for pages that are shown often but clicked rarely. That gap is usually a title worth rewriting, and it is the cheapest improvement available to most sites.
Search Console reports on your own site only. You cannot point it at a competitor.
Google PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights runs Lighthouse against a single page and reports performance, accessibility, best practices and a small set of SEO checks. The SEO section is basic on purpose. It looks for a title, a meta description, readable link text and whether the page blocks indexing, which is a useful sanity check rather than an audit.
Run it on more than your home page. The home page is usually the most looked-after page on a site and the least representative of the rest.
Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing Webmaster Tools does for Bing what Search Console does for Google: indexing status, crawl problems, sitemap submission and search performance. It also carries a site scan that flags common on-page problems across your pages at once, which Search Console does not offer.
Bing sends a small share of traffic to most Singapore businesses, so this is a secondary tool. It is worth setting up because it is free and takes minutes, not because Bing is about to change your month.
Yoast SEO, if you run WordPress
Yoast SEO checks a page as you write it. The free plugin analyses one focus keyphrase per page, previews how the title and description will look in results, runs a readability check and generates your XML sitemap.
Treat the green light as a formatting check, not a ranking prediction. A page can score green and rank nowhere, and a page can score orange and do well, because Yoast is reading your page rather than the search results. We have written a fuller review of the Yoast SEO plugin if you are deciding whether it is the right one for your site.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider, free version
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a program you install rather than a website you visit. It crawls your site the way a search engine would and lists every page, with its title, description, headings, response code and outgoing links in one table. The free version crawls up to 500 pages, which covers most small business sites completely.
It is the fastest way to find broken links, duplicate titles and pages missing a description across a whole site at once. It is also the most technical tool here, so leave it until the first three checks are done.
What free tools will not tell you
Free tools are honest about your own site. What they cannot do is tell you what your competitors are ranking for, how many other sites link to them, or which of your pages are worth the effort in the first place. That work needs paid tools such as Ahrefs or Semrush, and more usefully, someone who has read the results before.
They also report problems without ranking them. A speed report will list twenty opportunities without saying that nineteen of them are worth almost nothing on your site. Deciding what to ignore is most of the skill.
When it is worth paying someone
Do the ten-minute check first. It is free, it takes ten minutes, and it will either reassure you or hand you a short list. If the list is short and obvious, fix it yourself.
Pay someone when the pages are indexed, the site is quick, the titles read well, and you still are not being found. At that point the problem is usually about which pages exist and what they say, which no free tool can diagnose for you. That is the work our SEO service does, and you can also ask us for a free website audit first, or send us a brief if you would rather start with a conversation.