Your website might look great and still be invisible in Google. SEO issues are often silent — they don't throw errors or break anything visually, but they quietly prevent your pages from ranking.
To check your website for SEO issues, run a free automated scan, then manually review your meta tags, crawlability, Core Web Vitals, security headers, and broken links. This process reveals the hidden problems that stop search engines from indexing and ranking your pages correctly.
Follow these 7 steps to check your website for SEO issues:
- Run a free SEO scan with WebsiteLinter
- Review your title tags and meta descriptions
- Check robots.txt and XML sitemap for crawlability issues
- Analyze your Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS)
- Review your security score and SSL certificate
- Fix issues in priority order (blockers first)
- Re-scan after making changes to verify fixes
The good news is that finding SEO issues doesn't require hiring an agency or learning advanced tools. This tutorial walks you through the complete process in under 30 minutes, starting with a free scan.
Step 1: Run a Free SEO Scan With WebsiteLinter
The fastest way to get a baseline is to run your URL through WebsiteLinter. The free scan checks your site across four areas simultaneously:
- Performance — PageSpeed score, Core Web Vitals, load time
- SEO — Meta tags, title tags, canonical URLs, robots.txt, sitemap
- Security — HTTP headers, SSL, security grade
- Accessibility — Alt text, color contrast, ARIA labels
Go to websitelinter.com, paste in your URL, and click Scan. Save the report — you'll use it as your checklist for the rest of this tutorial.
Step 2: Review Your SEO Meta Tags
Meta tags are the first thing Google reads when it crawls your page. In your WebsiteLinter report, look at the SEO section for these signals:
Title tag:
- Should be 50–60 characters
- Should include your primary keyword near the front
- Must be unique per page
A common mistake: using your business name alone as the title ("Smith's Bakery") instead of a descriptive, keyword-rich title ("Fresh-Baked Bread and Pastries | Smith's Bakery — Columbus, OH").
Meta description:
- Should be 150–160 characters
- Should describe what the page offers and include a call to action
- Won't directly affect rankings, but affects click-through rate from search results
If either is missing or too short, that's a quick fix with real impact. Update them in your CMS and re-run the scan to verify.
Step 3: Check for Crawlability Issues
Google can't rank what it can't find. Two files control how search engines crawl your site:
robots.txt (found at yourdomain.com/robots.txt):
This file tells crawlers which pages they're allowed to access. A misconfigured robots.txt can accidentally block your entire site from being indexed. WebsiteLinter flags if your robots.txt is missing or contains suspicious directives.
What to look for:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
That's a catastrophic misconfiguration — it blocks all crawlers from all pages. If you see this on a production site, fix it immediately.
XML sitemap (found at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml):
Your sitemap tells Google which pages exist and when they were last updated. If it's missing, Google has to discover your pages entirely on its own — which can mean important pages never get indexed.
WebsiteLinter confirms whether your sitemap is reachable. If it's missing, most CMS platforms (WordPress, Squarespace, Shopify) can generate one automatically with a plugin or built-in setting.
Step 4: Analyze Your Core Web Vitals
Google uses Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor. Your WebsiteLinter report pulls PageSpeed Insights data to give you lab scores for three metrics:
| Metric | What It Measures | Good | Needs Work |
|---|---|---|---|
| LCP | When your biggest content element loads | < 2.5s | > 4.0s |
| INP | How fast the page responds to clicks | < 200ms | > 500ms |
| CLS | How much the layout shifts while loading | < 0.1 | > 0.25 |
LCP is usually the most impactful to fix. Common causes:
- Large, uncompressed hero images
- Render-blocking JavaScript that delays the page
- Slow server response time (TTFB > 600ms)
If your LCP is above 4 seconds, your site is likely being penalized in rankings compared to faster competitors targeting the same keywords.
Step 5: Look at Your Security Score
This one surprises people: your security headers affect your SEO — not directly through rankings, but through user trust. Chrome flags sites with missing security headers in some contexts, which increases bounce rate, which is a soft negative signal.
Your WebsiteLinter report gives you a security grade from A to F based on:
- Content-Security-Policy (CSP) — blocks injected malicious scripts
- HSTS — forces HTTPS connections
- X-Frame-Options — prevents clickjacking
- X-Content-Type-Options — stops MIME-type sniffing attacks
- Referrer-Policy — controls what referrer info is shared
A score below 60 means your site is missing multiple critical headers. Most of these can be added in 15 minutes through your server config, .htaccess, or hosting control panel.
Step 6: Fix Issues in Priority Order
Not all SEO issues are equal. Use this priority order when working through your findings:
Priority 1 — Blockers (fix immediately):
- robots.txt blocking crawlers
- Missing SSL certificate
- Pages returning 4xx or 5xx errors
- Canonical tag pointing to wrong URL
Priority 2 — High Impact (fix this week):
- Missing or duplicate title tags
- LCP above 4 seconds
- No XML sitemap
- Missing meta descriptions on key pages
Priority 3 — Worth Doing (fix this month):
- Low security header score
- Images without alt text
- Missing Open Graph tags
- Low accessibility score
Priority 4 — Nice to Have:
- Schema/structured data markup
- Social media preview tags
- Breadcrumb navigation
Step 7: Re-Scan After Making Changes
SEO fixes only count when they're verified. After you've made changes, re-run your WebsiteLinter scan to confirm the issues are resolved. Don't assume a fix worked — check it.
For title tags and meta descriptions, also verify in Google Search Console → URL Inspection → "Request Indexing" to push Google to re-crawl the updated page.
Common SEO Issues by Site Type
WordPress sites:
The most common issues are slow load times from unoptimized plugins and themes, missing alt text on images uploaded through the media library, and over-permissive robots.txt from staging environments being copied to production.
Shopify stores:
Product pages often have duplicate meta descriptions auto-generated from product descriptions. Category pages frequently lack unique title tags. Image alt text is often empty on product photos.
Custom-built sites:
Missing meta tags are common when developers focus on functionality over SEO basics. Pages may be noindexed in <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> tags left over from development.
What Regular SEO Checks Look Like
Checking your site once isn't enough. A healthy SEO maintenance schedule looks like:
- Monthly: Run a WebsiteLinter scan on your key pages (homepage, main service/product pages, blog)
- After every major update: Re-scan to catch regressions
- Quarterly: Review Google Search Console for new crawl errors or indexing issues
- Annually: Full technical audit including backlinks, competitor gap analysis, and content refresh
Run Your Free Check Right Now
The fastest way to find out what SEO issues your site has is to scan it. No spreadsheets, no guessing, no waiting for an agency.
Start your free WebsiteLinter scan at websitelinter.com — paste your URL and get a full SEO, performance, and security report in under two minutes. No account required.