An SEO audit, in the minds of many executives, is a forty-page document with a high price tag. In practice, it is first of all a series of questions, asked in the right order. And for the first questions, free tools are more than enough.
We use the following six tools every week, on our own sites as well as our clients'. The list itself is no secret. What changes everything is the order in which we make them talk, and then the precise question we ask each of them.
So we may as well give you the complete sequence, in order.
An SEO audit starts with a question, not with a tool
Before opening anything at all, define the problem. “My site does not bring me any enquiries” is not a diagnosis, it is a symptom. Behind it lie three possible causes, and they are not treated the same way.
Either Google does not see your pages. Or it sees them, but nobody searches for them or clicks. Or visitors arrive and leave without writing to you. Every tool in this list answers one of these three questions. That is why the order matters so much.
Google Search Console: the only source of truth
Everything starts here, because it is the only tool that shows real data rather than estimates. Google Search Console is free, official, and it tells you exactly which queries your pages appear for, how many people click, and at what position.
The most useful report for a company director fits into two columns: impressions and clicks. A page with many impressions and zero clicks is a shop window everyone walks past without going in. The problem is then not visibility, it is the title and the description shown on Google. The classic case: a page that racks up several thousand impressions in three months, ranks in position 35 or 40, and does not collect a single click. At that ranking depth, you simply do not exist. This kind of gap is spotted in ten minutes in the report, and it alone justifies setting up the tool.
The indexing tab deserves the same seriousness, incidentally. A services page that Google has not indexed does not exist for your prospects. If you were to configure only one tool this week, it would be that one. And if your site appears nowhere, the usual causes are well known, so it is worth checking them before suspecting the algorithm.
PageSpeed Insights: what your visitors actually experience
Second question: when someone arrives, what do they endure? PageSpeed Insights measures the speed and stability of your pages, on mobile first. Since Core Web Vitals, these measurements have been among Google’s official ranking criteria.
Two indicators are enough to form a view on this. LCP tells you how long the page’s main element takes to appear, and Google sets the bar at 2.5 seconds. CLS measures whether the page moves during loading, which causes missed clicks and irritates everyone.
Test your five most important pages, not just the home page. On websites in French-speaking Switzerland, the culprit is almost always the same: beautiful photos that are far too heavy, uploaded as they are to look premium. A red score here means advertising budget leaking away, since every paid visitor lands on a page that drags.
Screaming Frog: the X-ray of your structure
Third question: what does Google’s robot see when it crawls your site? Screaming Frog is a piece of software you install that simulates exactly that pass. Its free version analyses up to 500 URLs, which covers the vast majority of SME sites.
It lists everything, coldly. Broken links leading to 404 errors. Redirect chains that waste crawler time. Orphan pages, the ones that exist but have no link pointing to them. Images with no alternative text.
The tool is austere, presenting its results in raw tables. It is also the most precise on this list for finding the technical error blocking an entire section of a site. Allow an hour to get to grips with it, and keep the export: it will serve as the point of comparison next time round.
Ubersuggest and Ahrefs Webmaster Tools: the playground
Then comes the question of the market: what are people looking for, and who captures those searches today?
Ubersuggest, Neil Patel’s tool, offers a few free searches a day. That is more than enough to check the essentials. Type in a query from your line of work, “accounting firm Lausanne” or “solar installer Valais”, and look at two figures: monthly volume and difficulty. A keyword nobody types is not worth an article. A keyword with high difficulty will take months of work, and that is strategic information in itself, not bad news really.
Ahrefs Webmaster Tools completes the picture, free of charge for sites whose ownership you can prove. Its historic strength is backlinks, in other words who links to you, and with what authority. Its automatic audit also scans your site every week, and it alerts you by email as soon as something starts to degrade. It is passive monitoring, and it is valuable: technical problems never announce their arrival. On that point, regular monitoring helps you avoid the nasty surprises you discover three months too late.
Woorank: the quick check before a meeting
Woorank plays a more modest role, that of the thermometer. Its browser extension scores a page out of 100 in a few seconds: tags present, mobile compatibility, structured data.
This score replaces none of the earlier analyses. It serves a different purpose: checking a supplier’s work in two minutes, or taking stock before a redesign. The free version is limited, and full reports require a subscription. For quick checks, the free version is enough.
One last point of method: write your starting figures down somewhere, even in a simple spreadsheet. An audit with no point of comparison measures nothing at all, and in six months you will be very glad to know where you started from.
What these six tools will not do
Let us be clear about the limits, because that is where misunderstandings become expensive.
These tools produce scores, alerts and tables. They do not produce decisions. Knowing that your LCP is 4.8 seconds does not tell you whether to change host, compress images or rebuild the theme. Knowing that a competitor is ahead of you on twenty queries does not tell you which ones bring in work and which ones only bring volume.
Interpretation, prioritising the work, budget arbitration: all of that remains a job in its own right. That is precisely what a proper SEO strategy covers, and it is also why a serious audit costs money: not for the figures, for the reading of them.
But the first pass, the one that answers the question “where is the problem”, is within your reach this week. Open Search Console, test your five key pages in PageSpeed, run a Screaming Frog crawl. With those three steps, you will already know whether your problem is one of visibility, technique or content. And if you would rather we made the diagnosis together, the first conversation is there for exactly that.
