How to check if your website is SEO friendly: a 10-point check

An SEO-friendly website is one that search engines can find, crawl, index and understand, and that gives searchers what they came for. The first part is technical and can be checked quickly with tools. The second, whether your content is genuinely the best answer, needs human judgement. This guide covers both, in ten checks.

For a quick start, run your homepage and one important inner page through Rudra's free SEO checker, which reviews on-page signals plus your robots.txt and sitemap. To check the same page for speed, mobile layout, accessibility, security and broken links in one report, use the free website audit. Then work through the list below.

The 10-point check

1. Are your pages indexed?

Searching site:example.com gives a rough idea of what Google has indexed, but it's not a precise count. The reliable source is Google Search Console: the Page indexing report shows which URLs are indexed and why others aren't, and the URL Inspection tool tells you the status of any single page. If you haven't set up Search Console, do that first; it's free.

2. Can search engines crawl and index them?

Each important page should return HTTP 200, not be blocked in robots.txt, and not carry a noindex directive in a robots meta tag or an X-Robots-Tag header. A leftover noindex from a staging site is one of the most damaging, and most common, SEO mistakes. Rudra's SEO checker flags all three, plus a page-level nofollow. Our guide to robots.txt and sitemap.xml explains the difference between blocking crawling and blocking indexing.

3. Does each page have one clear URL?

The same content reachable at http:// and https://, with and without www, or with and without a trailing slash splits signals between duplicates. Pick one version and redirect the others to it in a single hop. Then give each page a canonical tag with its absolute preferred URL: <link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/pricing">. The SEO checker reports missing, multiple or relative canonical tags, canonicals pointing to a different URL, a missing HTTP-to-HTTPS redirect, and long redirect chains.

4. Are titles and meta descriptions unique and descriptive?

The title tag is a strong signal of what a page is about and usually becomes the clickable headline in search results. Write a unique title for every page, with the main topic near the start; around 30–60 characters usually displays in full. The meta description doesn't affect rankings but shapes whether people click; see what a meta description is and how to write one.

5. Is the heading structure clear?

Each page should have one <h1> describing its main topic, followed by <h2> and <h3> headings in order. Headings help readers scan and help search engines understand how the content is organized. Missing H1s, multiple H1s and skipped levels (an H2 followed directly by an H4) are flagged by the checker.

6. Does the content answer the searcher's question?

This is the part that matters most, and tools can only hint at it. Search for the terms you want to rank for and look at what already ranks: is your page as useful, specific and trustworthy? Rudra flags pages with very little visible text (under about 150 words) and unusually repetitive wording, but treat those as prompts to review. A short page can be the perfect answer, and a long one can say nothing.

7. Are pages well linked, with no broken links?

Search engines discover pages mainly by following links, and internal links show which pages you consider important. Every important page should be linked from other relevant pages with descriptive anchor text, not orphaned or reachable only through the sitemap. Broken links waste those paths; the broken link checker and our guide on how to fix broken links help you clean them up.

8. Does it work well on mobile?

Google uses mobile-first indexing, so the mobile version of your page is the one that counts. You need a viewport meta tag, readable text, no horizontal scrolling, and the same content as on desktop. The mobile checker renders your page on phone, tablet and desktop screens and flags content that spills off the screen; how to make a website mobile friendly covers the fixes.

9. Is it fast enough?

Core Web Vitals are part of how Google evaluates page experience. Good means LCP of 2.5 seconds or less, INP of 200 milliseconds or less and CLS of 0.1 or less, measured on real visits. Check field data in Search Console or PageSpeed Insights, and use a lab test like the website speed checker to find causes. More in why is my website slow.

10. Do images, structured data and other signals help?

• Images: descriptive alt text helps both screen reader users and image search.
• Structured data: JSON-LD using schema.org types (Article, Product, LocalBusiness, FAQPage and so on) helps search engines interpret a page and can make it eligible for rich results. Rudra checks that JSON-LD is present and declares a type; use Google's Rich Results Test to check eligibility.
• Language: set <html lang>, and on multilingual sites use valid hreflang annotations, including an x-default.
• Sitemap: an up-to-date XML sitemap, referenced in robots.txt and submitted in Search Console.
• Social tags: Open Graph and Twitter Card tags control how links look when shared. They don't affect rankings, but they affect clicks from social media.

What SEO tools can't tell you

• Whether your content matches what searchers actually want, and whether it's better than what already ranks.
• Whether your site is seen as a trustworthy, authoritative source on the topic.
• How many other sites link to you, and how good those links are.
• How competitive your target searches are.
• What Google sees on JavaScript-heavy pages. Rudra's SEO checker reads the HTML your server returns; if your content is added later by JavaScript, check the rendered HTML in Search Console's URL Inspection tool as well.

Make it a routine

Check your key pages after every significant change: a redesign, a CMS or theme update, a new template, a migration. Review Search Console's indexing report monthly. And when you fix something, re-run the check to confirm it, then give search engines time to recrawl; you can ask Google to recrawl an important page with the URL Inspection tool.

Common mistakes

• Chasing a perfect score instead of fixing the issues that stop pages from being indexed.
• Spending time on informational findings while a critical one, such as noindex on a key page, goes unfixed.
• Optimizing for keyword density rather than for the reader.
• Using robots.txt to try to remove pages from search results.
• Assuming a technically perfect site will rank without content people want and links that vouch for it.