Free SEO Checker | Stop Guessing What Google Wants

This SEO checker shows you exactly what you need to fix on your site to ensure your pages have the best chance of ranking on Google.

Often, your ranking struggles emerge from easily fixable technical issues.

You could be publishing fantastic content and still fail to drive any results if your SEO foundations are all wrong.

Usually, the issues you’ll discover with our SEO checker are straightforward to resolve. The trick is to know what these problems exactly are.

Our free site SEO analyzer helps you get the big picture about your site's health or individual pages (up to 3 in a day).

Let’s break down some of the steps you can take to improve your site based on the data from this on-page SEO checker.

Check Authority Score and Backlink Profile

Authority Score and backlinks indicate a website’s search strength and its ability to rank for high-value keywords in a competitive space.

As soon as you run a scan with the SEO checker, you’ll see a summary of domain analytics.

The two key metrics to check here are your Authority Score (AS) and referring domains.

At a glance, you can tell if you or your competitor is seen as a strong and trusted website by Google (high Authority Score).

And with referring domains, you’ll know exactly how many unique websites are linking to your domain. Referring domains are one of the strongest ranking signals a domain can have.

The more links you build, the more you’ll increase your AS. And with a higher AS, you’ll be able to rank faster.

To evaluate your referring domains and AS, it’s best to compare these metrics with your main competitors.

Use the free backlink checker by entering your competitor’s domain to gauge where you stand in relation to your rivals.

Ideally, your referring domains should be noticeably higher than your competitors. At the very least, they should be roughly equal.

If you’re behind on referring domains, it’s going to be that much harder to rank for competitive keywords.

The quality of your referring domains also matters.

Fewer links from relevant, high-quality domains make a much bigger impact than a bunch of links from weak or spammy domains.

The Semrush Backlink Audit gives you deep insights about your link quality and whether your profile contains too many toxic links.

You can use these insights to understand if you need to target better domains for backlinks or if everything’s already working out well for you.

There are many ways to acquire links:

• Creating high-quality, original content that journalists will want to use as a source
• Using platforms like HARO to submit answers that other writers can quote
• Contacting domains already linking to your competitors but not to you
• Asking a website to replace broken links to a competitor with your own

Ranking Keywords

The total number of ranking keywords reveals the SEO performance of your domain. These numbers signal broad visibility across search results.

Focus on improving existing rankings before chasing new ones.

A keyword jumping from position 15 to 8 often delivers more traffic than ranking #50 for something new.

While it’s helpful to know the total number of your ranking keywords to evaluate your search presence, you’ll need to explore your exact keyword performance to get the full picture.

The Semrush Organic Research tool shows you the exact keywords you’re ranking for.

You can check the positions you’re occupying for each keyword, as well as any SERP features you’ve claimed, like AI Overviews.

Even with AI search prompts becoming more popular, traditional keywords still hold value.

Any comprehensive SEO check would be incomplete without an analysis of your ranking data.

On-Page SEO Audit

A good SEO checker will enable you to perform basic on-page checks to make sure your page is set up to meet Google’s expectations of a high-quality page.

You don’t absolutely need a tool to take care of the basics yourself.

But you’re much more likely to miss important things if you’re only optimizing your page manually.

Here’s a quick breakdown of some common on-page issues this part of the tool can surface for you:

URLs and Canonicalization

Simple URLs are easy to read, both for crawlers as well as your visitors. And like your page title, your URL is one of the first things people will notice about your page.

This is why it’s good practice to use short and descriptive URLs.

But this is something you should be checking BEFORE you publish your page. Not after.

That’s because it’s almost never a good idea to update your page URL after it’s been indexed on search engines.

Canonical tags are a different story.

These can always be changed as needed to help Google understand which version of duplicate (or near-duplicate) pages should be indexed.

It’s good practice to use self-referencing canonicals for every page just to be sure. John Mueller from Google also confirmed the same a few years ago.

But when you have duplicate content, canonicals become more than just an optional best practice.

We were reminded of this fact recently when moving our free SEO tools to new URLs.

Our canonicals were misdeclared, and Google continued to serve the old URLs for weeks.

It wasn’t until we updated the canonical tags to reference the new URLs that Google started indexing the correct URLs.

It’s thanks to the SEO checker that I was able to spot this issue with canonicals

I strongly recommend making an on-page SEO analysis with a tool a part of your post-publishing workflow. You’ll be much less likely to let mistakes slip through by performing a comprehensive check with a tool.

Title and Meta Data

The meta title is as important for your SEO today as it always has been. Typically, Google displays roughly 50-60 characters for titles and up to 160 characters for meta descriptions.

In my experience, longer titles work best as long as they’re not exceeding Google’s character limit and are not cut off.

Use the available space to describe your page and generate curiosity with the title, but don’t stretch it. Otherwise, you end up looking sloppy.

The same is true for meta descriptions.

It’s best to pay attention to these fine details before you hit publish.

Failing that, you can use the on-page audit tool to flag these gaps when you’re returning to existing content for an update.

That way, you can make sure your revised page comes into its best possible shape.

Additionally, every image needs descriptive alt text. When SEO checkers find images without alt attributes, they're flagging real accessibility issues detrimental to your search performance.

Alt text helps screen readers and gives Google context about your images.

It also plays a role in image search traffic, which is more important than ever today as search becomes multimodal.

Content Accessibility

A low text-to-code ratio usually means your site is heavy on code but light on meaningful content.

Even if you have substantial word counts, bloated code can slow things down. AI search engines struggle to read content that’s padded with tons of JavaScript.

The simple solution to this is to simplify your website design and dial back on fancy, resource-intensive code elements.

Heading Structures

Well-structured content is favored by conventional search engines as well as AI-powered search engines.

Our on-page analysis tool gives you a breakdown of your heading levels and how frequently each level appears.

Search engines take H1s very seriously, using your H1 wording to determine what your page is about.

So if you’re using more than one H1 in your page, it can confuse Google and AI search engines.

And if you’re using too few headings in the body of your content, that’s also often a sign of loose structure that affects both search engine and human readability.

Keyword Density Checks

You shouldn’t obsess over your keyword density. It’s never been helpful to count how often keywords appear in your content.

Your goal should be to create high-quality content that leads to natural usage of the right terms as you describe the topic.

That said, it’s not uncommon to find overoptimized articles on the web, especially because keyword density used to be the craze in a not-so-distant past.

So when you’re updating your older content, keep an eye out for potential keyword stuffing. The SEO checker will help determine excessive keyword density in your pages.

Technical SEO Checks

The technical aspects of SEO are best analyzed with a comprehensive audit that’s usually beyond the scope of free tools.

This SEO Checker still helps you detect some common issues with the technical setup that your site might be missing.

Robots.txt and XML Sitemaps

Robots.txt files dictate access rules for crawlers visiting your site. If your website is missing a robots.txt file, the tool will flag this.

Now that your SEO isn’t just about Google and Bing, make sure you’re not restricting access to newer AI-powered search engines and chatbots.

I recommend adding these crawlers to your robots.txt allowlist at the very least:

• Googlebot
• OAI-SearchBot
• ChatGPT-User
• PerplexityBot
• Perplexity‑User
• Bingbot

Missing XML sitemaps get flagged, too.

The value of sitemaps has decreased somewhat since search engines are smart enough to crawl a website without one.

At the same time, it’s a good idea to make it as easy as possible for search engines to see your entire website. And XML sitemaps hand understand how different pages are related.

So if you’re lacking a sitemap, go ahead and add one.

Site Security and HTTPS

HTTPS is the accepted web security standard today, and it’s used as a ranking signal by search engines like Google.

Sites without HTTPS are seen as a security risk, and Google can demote these sites on SERPs because it can’t trust them.

The free SEO analysis tool at the top of this page will do a simple check to determine if HTTPS is properly configured on your site.

But a complete analysis of HTTPS implementation also requires checking the inclusion of any HTTP URLs in your sitemap or internal links to HTTP pages.

You’ll need to perform a sitewide audit with the Semrush Audit tool to investigate HTTPS-related issues in detail.

Internal and External Links

Internal links play many important roles for your page:

• Help users navigate your website better
• Encourage visitors to stay longer on your site
• Assist search engines in understanding the semantic relationship between pages
• Pass link equity from strong authoritative pages to newer pages
• Speed up website indexing

You need to link your pages smartly to get the most value out of them.

Scanning a page for all the links it contains can be a pain to do manually. It’s way more convenient to use a good SEO analysis tool instead.

For instance, our tool will show you a list of all the links as well as the anchor text for each.

I use this data to review existing internal links and whether they’re using appropriate anchor text.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when creating links:

• Use descriptive anchor text (not "click here")
• Interlink relevant pages, such as a pillar page with its related subtopics
• Place your most important links near the top half of your page
• Check any broken/redirected links and replace them with live pages
• Avoid squeezing too many links together
• Link to authoritative sources when relevant

Analyze Top-Performing Content

At the bottom of the SEO analysis tool, you’ll get a glimpse of the topic two pages of the domain you’re analyzing.

This may not reveal anything new to you since you can obtain the same information from your GA4 data.

But there are interesting insights to be had if you’re analyzing a competitor domain.

If a particular page attracts a significant fraction of the total traffic alone, it’s worth studying.

Analyze what makes these pages successful.

Is it the topic? The format? The depth of coverage? Take notes from your analysis and use those ideas to create improved content on your site.

Additionally, this tool will show you the top-ranking keywords for a domain as well.

The keyword ranking table also includes helpful metrics to help you make decisions if you’re looking at competitor data for keyword ideas.

Focus on keywords with manageable keyword difficulty scores.

Sometimes, improving existing rankings delivers faster results than targeting new keywords.

So if you find an interesting keyword from this table, remember to ask yourself:

Would it make more sense to incorporate it naturally into an existing page?

Or would the keyword be best targeted and expanded on in a separate dedicated page?

This small sample of data can inform your content planning and give you ideas for covering keyword gaps with your competitors.

For advanced analysis, you can get the Semrush free trial to explore all ranking keywords, their positions, and SERP features of your competitors.

Discover Top Backlinks

The tool highlights your strongest backlinks pointing to your domain. It reveals the anchor text as well as the follow status for each link as well.

If you’re analyzing your domain, you can learn which websites are linking to you and from which pages.

Knowing the kind of websites that are linking to you can help you find ideas for finding other similar sites that might also be interested in linking back.

That way, you’ll have a better chance of success by targeting the right websites in your outreach campaigns.

And if you’re analyzing competitor instead, you can discover their top backlinks. These could turn into excellent opportunities for you and allow you to catch up by covering the backlink gap.

Prepare Your SEO Action Plan

Our free SEO checker excels at showing you exactly what needs attention.

Start with quick fixes such as poor titles, missing meta tags, suboptimal anchor texts, and canonicalization.

Then tackle bigger projects like content gaps or technical infrastructure issues.

Remember that free tools provide solid foundations, but you need extensive site-level analysis to maintain a healthy site.

When you're ready to scale, the Semrush free trial is the perfect place to start, from traditional SEO to AI search optimization.