A website SEO audit is a check of everything that decides whether Google can find, understand and rank your pages: crawling and indexing, speed, on-page content, structured data, local signals and links. You do not need a paid subscription to do a useful one. Below are the free SEO audit tools I use on every new client site in Dubai, in the order I use them, with the exact things to look at and what to fix first.

A quick story that explains why this matters. When I audited my own site this month, I found that a content clean-up earlier in the year had left 125 old URLs returning 404 errors, including service pages that were already earning impressions. Organic clicks had dropped to zero. None of the tools below cost anything, and together they found every one of those problems in under an hour.

1. Google Search Console: is Google indexing the right pages?

Tool: Google Search Console (free, needs site verification).

Start here because it shows you what Google actually sees, not what a crawler guesses. Check these four reports:

• Pages (Indexing): how many URLs are indexed versus “Not indexed”, and the reasons. “Crawled, currently not indexed” usually means thin or duplicate content; “Discovered, currently not indexed” means Google is not crawling you often enough, often because of weak internal linking.
• Performance: sort queries by impressions. Keywords with high impressions and position 8 to 20 are your fastest wins; one more paragraph or an internal link can move them to page one.
• Sitemaps: submitted versus indexed URL counts. A big gap is a quality or crawl problem.
• Links: which external sites link to you and which internal pages receive the most links. Your money pages should be near the top.

Fix first: 404s on URLs that have impressions. Redirect them to the closest live page, or recreate the content.

2. PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse: speed and Core Web Vitals

Tool: PageSpeed Insights (free). Lighthouse is built into Chrome DevTools.

Test your homepage and your most important service page on mobile. You want Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1 and Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds. The “field data” section shows what real visitors experience when there is enough traffic; the lab score is what to work with until then.

Fix first: oversized images, render-blocking scripts from plugins and page builders, and missing width and height on images (that is what causes layout shift). On WordPress sites in the UAE I usually see the biggest gains from image compression and a caching layer; hosting in or near the region helps with server response time.

3. Screaming Frog SEO Spider: crawl your site like Google does

Tool: Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free up to 500 URLs, which covers most business sites).

Crawl your domain and look at: response codes (every 3xx chain and 4xx), page titles (missing, duplicate, over 60 characters), meta descriptions (missing or duplicate), H1s (missing or multiple), canonical tags, and pages with very low word counts. Export the “Inlinks” for your key pages to see how many internal links each one has.

Fix first: pages with no H1, duplicate titles, and service pages with fewer than five internal links pointing to them.

4. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools: backlinks and a second index

Tools: Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (free for verified sites) and Bing Webmaster Tools (free).

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools gives you a backlink profile, a site health score and a list of technical issues on your own site. Compare your referring domains with two competitors ranking above you; the gap tells you how much authority you need to build. Bing Webmaster Tools matters more than most people think: ChatGPT’s web search runs on Bing’s index, so if you are not indexed in Bing you will not be cited in AI answers.

5. Rich Results Test and Schema Markup Validator: is your structured data valid?

Tools: Rich Results Test and Schema Markup Validator (free).

Paste in your homepage and a service page. You want a valid Organization or LocalBusiness entity with name, phone, address and sameAs links to your social profiles, and FAQPage markup wherever you have an FAQ. One missing comma makes Google discard the whole block, which is exactly what I found on one of my own landing pages, so test every page that carries custom schema.

6. Google Business Profile: the local audit

If you serve customers in Dubai or Abu Dhabi, your Google Business Profile is half of your SEO. Check that the primary category is right, the name matches your website exactly, the phone and address match every directory listing, you have photos from the last 90 days, and you are answering reviews. Then search your main service plus your area in an incognito window and see who appears in the map pack above you.

7. Manual checks that no tool does for you

• Search intent: Google your target keyword and compare the top five results with your page. If they are long guides and yours is a 300-word service page, you will not rank until the content matches the intent.
• Answer-first content: does each page answer its main question in the first two sentences under the H1? AI assistants and featured snippets both pull from there.
• Arabic: if your customers search in Arabic, do you have Arabic pages with hreflang tags? In Dubai this is the most ignored opportunity I see.
• Conversion: is there a call to action, a phone number and a WhatsApp link visible on mobile without scrolling?

A 30-minute audit checklist

1. Search Console → Pages: note not-indexed reasons and 404s with impressions.
2. Search Console → Performance: list keywords at position 8 to 20.
3. PageSpeed Insights on homepage and top service page (mobile).
4. Screaming Frog crawl: titles, H1s, response codes, inlinks.
5. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools: referring domains versus two competitors.
6. Rich Results Test on homepage and one service page.
7. Google Business Profile review and a map-pack search for your main keyword.
8. Manual intent and answer-first check on your three most important pages.

If you would rather have this done for you, I run a free SEO audit for Dubai and UAE businesses as the first step of my SEO service. You get the findings and a prioritised plan whether or not we work together.

Frequently asked questions