Beginner SEO Case Study: How I Audited a Website Using Only Free Tools

Are you trying to break into SEO but don’t know how to showcase your skills without a job or client? One of the best ways to stand out is by doing real SEO audits — even on portfolio websites. It proves that you do SEO and not just simply know it. Auditing a website shows that you’ve done full research and you know how things can be fixed with a few changes.

Now, how do you do an audit, and what tools do you need? People often think of those fancy, premium tools to do an SEO audit, when in reality, there are tons of free alternatives available. You can also manually do it, but the tools help make the process a lot faster.

In this blog, I’ll show you how I audited a live website using only free SEO tools, what I discovered, and what I learned as a beginner. This blog will be your guide to doing your first SEO audit without any paid tools.

Website Chosen for the Audit: A Portfolio Site

As part of my SEO learning journey, I audited this content writing portfolio hosted on Wix: muskankukreja886.wixsite.com/contentwriter

This audit was done independently for educational purposes, with no affiliation to the site owner. The goal is to identify general SEO and performance improvements that could benefit similar portfolio sites.

Now, when you look at the site, it looks good, but several things could impact the website’s performance. This could mean the overall readability of the site and even the site structure.

Below are the things that I found out in the blog’s audit:

On-Page Issues

The on-page of your website includes things like your content structure, such as header tags, image optimization, and overall readability of your site. These are the things I found during the on-page audit of this site:

• Meta description

  The meta description tells the search engine what your site is about. This site had no meta description.

• Page Title

  The page title is concise and to the point, but it is very generic. It doesn’t implement any keywords within. Could’ve used keywords like “SEO Content Writer” or “Content Writing Services”.

• Heading Hierarchy

  The heading hierarchy usually follows from h1, then h2, and so on. On this website, there is a bad hierarchy; it starts from h2.

• Readability Score

  The readability score of this site is 65, which is average, but it can be improved.

Technical Page Issues

The technical page is more about the technical issues, like crawlability, indexability, and many more that impact your site’s responsiveness. Below are the things that I discovered while doing the technical page audit:

• Crawlability & Indexability

  Crawlability is whether you’re site can be crawled by search engines' bots when a user query is requested or not. On the other hand, the indexability of a site is whether the site is indexable on the results page. This site is both crawlable and indexable.

• Performance

  The overall performance of this site is good. However, some of the core vitals, like the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and speed index, can be improved further. LCP is the measure of how long it takes for the largest element on the site to load. On the other hand, the speed index is how quickly the visible elements load.

Mobile Friendliness

As per Google, Mobile friendliness is the most crucial factor, as Mobile has become the most used device on the planet. Most of the users access the internet through their mobile devices. The mobile-friendliness of a website measures how responsive the website is when opened on a mobile or tablet. Even a one-second delay on the mobile device can ruin the experience of a mobile user, which can lead to an increase in the bounce rate on your site.

The overall metrics for this site are good, but the FCP and LCP are poor and need significant improvement. They can impact the user experience and affect the rankings of the site.

Free Tools That I Used

Who said anything about you needing premium subscriptions to do an SEO audit? SEO audits can be done manually, and there are even free tools that can help you make an SEO audit for a website. Here is a list of free SEO tools that I used during this audit:

• Screaming Frog

  Identifies the technical issues of a website, including the crawlability and indexability of a website. It crawls the website, similar to how search engines do, and extracts data from the HTML code of the site.

• SEO Minion

  A free Chrome extension that lets you analyze the on-page issues, such as the broken links and meta tags of the site. It also previews the search engine results page for the website.

• Pagespeed Insights

  This is an online tool that lets you check the performance of your website. It examines the core web vitals of your site that impact the user experience. It checks the performance for both mobile devices and desktop devices and also provides suggestions.

• WAVE

  A free tool that gives you visual feedback on the site. It gives you feedback related to how accessible the website is on the internet.

What I Learned From This Audit?

This audit has helped me deepen my knowledge of SEO practices. I grew a deep understanding of how even the most simple details play an important role in the ranking of a website. The following are the things that I learned from this audit:

• Mobile-friendliness matters a lot in SEO, as most users today are mobile users and they expect the best performance from your site.

• Your content structure is the determinant of whether the user will stay on your website.

• One should always pay attention to the core web vitals of a site, which are the loading performance, interactive design, and visual stability. They impact the user experience.

• Meta descriptions are very essential for your website, as they tell the search engines what your site’s content is about.

• The title of your website should be engaging and SEO-friendly at the same time. It should be impactful and define what the page is about.

Final Thoughts

In conclusion, this very first audit has helped me understand the fundamentals of SEO. It has helped me get deeper insights into what goes behind an SEO audit and how rankings work. It has helped me enhance my existing knowledge and gain practical knowledge as a beginner and aspiring SEO expert.

🚀 Want a free SEO audit of your website?

I’m currently offering a few detailed audits to sharpen my skills and help site owners improve their visibility, for free.

Connect with me on LinkedIn or DM me directly at mail.