A client in Olching called us last year because his most important product page simply wasn't showing up on Google. No ranking, no clicks, nothing. It took us ten minutes to find the cause: in Search Console, the page was set to noindex. A single checkbox, ticked at some point during a site rebuild and then forgotten. It cost him an estimated four months of visibility. You can find things like this yourself, without us, once you know where to look.
That's what this article is for. No sales pitch. Just a walkthrough of how you, as a small business, can run your own SEO audit using only tools that cost nothing.
What does an SEO audit actually get you?
An audit is a stock-take. You check whether Google can find your pages, whether they load quickly, whether the technical side under the hood is clean, and whether anything is broken. That's it. The goal isn't a pretty report with 200 metrics, but a short list of concrete problems you can work through afterwards.
And honestly: 80 percent of the issues we see on small-business websites around the western Munich area can be found with four free tools. The rest is fine-tuning that you genuinely don't need to do yourself.
Tool 1: Google Search Console, the foundation
If you set up only one tool, make it this one. Google Search Console shows you what Google actually thinks about your site. Not what some third party estimates, but the real data from Google's index.
Setup takes a few minutes. You confirm that the domain is yours (usually via a DNS record or a file on your server), and then the tool starts collecting data. Expect to wait a day or two before enough has accumulated.
What to look at:
- Pages report (indexing): This tells you which pages are in the index and which aren't. If important pages show up under "Not indexed," click through. That's exactly where our Olching client's noindex problem was hiding.
- Performance (clicks and impressions): Which search terms bring in visitors? You'll often rank for words you never thought of. A tradesman in Puchheim suddenly ranked for "weekend emergency service," even though he'd never advertised it. That turned into a dedicated landing page.
- Position and CTR: Pages sitting at position 8 to 15 are your best levers. They're close to page one. Slightly better copy or a cleaner title, and they move up.
What you can safely ignore: the raw number of impressions as a measure of success. Impressions are nice, but they don't pay the bills. Clicks, and the enquiries that come from them, are what count.
Tool 2: PageSpeed Insights for load time
Open it, enter your URL, wait. PageSpeed Insights from Google tests how fast your page loads, split into mobile and desktop. And mobile is the test that matters, because most of your customers are searching on their phones.
You get a score between 0 and 100. Don't lose sleep over it. A score of 100 is barely achievable on a normal business site with images, and you don't need it anyway. What matters more are the three Core Web Vitals below it:
- LCP (how quickly the largest element appears) should be under 2.5 seconds.
- CLS (whether the content jumps around as it loads) should be close to zero. Nothing is more annoying than a button that slides away just as you're about to tap it.
- INP measures how snappily the page responds to clicks.
Usually the biggest drag is something completely mundane: oversized images. A photographer in Germering had embedded product images at 4 MB each. After shrinking them to under 200 KB, the site was twice as fast. No magic, just never done before.
Tool 3: The Rich Results Test for structured data
Structured data is extra information in your source code that helps Google understand your site. Opening hours, address, reviews, prices. When it's set up cleanly, Google sometimes shows it directly in the search results. Stars, phone number, that little box with your hours.
Google's Rich Results Test checks whether your data is correct. Paste in a URL and you'll see which data types are recognised and whether there are any errors. For a local business, the "LocalBusiness" type is important; for a restaurant maybe "Menu"; for a service provider, the reviews.
A note from experience, because this often goes wrong: only mark up what's genuinely on the page. Inventing rating stars for reviews that don't exist can land you a formal warning (an Abmahnung under German law). Stay honest.
Tool 4: A simple crawler for broken links
Broken links (the infamous 404 page) irritate visitors and signal sloppiness to Google. You can find them with a free crawler. The desktop version of Screaming Frog lets you crawl up to 500 URLs for free, which is more than enough for the vast majority of small-business sites.
The program runs through your entire website once and lists what it finds. You filter by status code. Anything showing 404 is a broken link. You'll also see missing meta descriptions, duplicate title tags, and pages without an H1. Small things, but they add up.
Which metrics really count, and which don't?
The biggest mistake on your first audit is getting lost in numbers that look nice and mean nothing. Stick to what leads to enquiries.
This counts: your important pages being indexed, clicks from search, load time on mobile, working links, correct local data.
You can ignore: a so-called "Domain Authority" score from third parties (a made-up metric Google doesn't even use), the raw number of backlinks, and chasing PageSpeed perfectionism beyond 90.
The order for your afternoon
Here's how we'd tackle it if you want to get through in a single afternoon:
- 1. Set up Search Console and look at the indexing report. Is anything important set to noindex? Fix it straight away.
- 2. Go through the performance report. Which terms bring clicks, and which pages sit at position 8 to 15?
- 3. Run your homepage and the two or three most important sub-pages through PageSpeed Insights. Shrink images where needed.
- 4. Run the Rich Results Test on your homepage. Are your address and opening hours cleanly in place?
- 5. Send the crawler across the whole site and note down the 404s.
At the end you won't have a 40-page analysis, but an honest to-do list. And that gets you further than any bought report nobody reads afterwards anyway.
If you get stuck somewhere while working through it, or if the list turns out longer than you'd like, we're happy to take a look. Out of Fuerstenfeldbruck, we do web design and SEO for small businesses in the region, and we offer a free website check. 30 minutes, an honest assessment, no sales pitch. Just get in touch through our contact form.