A free SEO audit checks, from the bottom up, whether a page can be crawled, indexed, loaded fast, matched to intent, trusted by other sites and cited by AI answers. Google publishes the speed bar: main content within 2.5 seconds, responses under 200 ms, layout shift under 0.1. The last layer matters more each year: 68% of U.S. Google searches ended without a click in early 2026.
Sources: Google Search Central, updated 10 Dec 2025; SparkToro, 17 Jun 2026. Analysis by The Business Engineer.
How we source: company figures come from SEC filings (Form 10-K), with the fiscal period stated; search and marketing benchmarks come only from named, dated studies, linked. Frameworks and diagrams are labelled as ours. Last refreshed October 2026. Our methodology.
The six-layer SEO audit
| Layer | Check | Free tool |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Crawlable | robots.txt, status codes, internal links | Search Console |
| 2 Indexed | canonical, sitemap, no stray noindex | Search Console |
| 3 Speed | LCP ≤2.5s, INP <200ms, CLS <0.1 | PageSpeed Insights |
| 4 Relevance | intent, title, headings, depth | Search Console queries |
| 5 Authority | links and mentions from relevant sites | Search Console links |
| 6 Citable | author, sources, dates, original data | Manual review |
Source: FourWeekMBA framework; thresholds from Google Search Central.
On-page vs off-page, updated
The earlier version of this page made a simple split that still holds: relevance is mostly on-page, authority mostly off-page. In 2026 add a sixth layer above both: whether an AI answer can identify your page as a trustworthy source.
Why the last layer matters
When Google shows an AI summary, users click a search link on 8% of visits vs 15% without (Pew Research, 22 Jul 2025). Pages that are cited inside the answer, or that offer something the answer can’t, keep their clicks. See zero-click searches 2026.
What to watch
- Core Web Vitals report in Search Console.
- Indexed vs submitted pages.
- Clicks per impression on pages with AI Overviews.
Keep exploring
- SEO after AI answers (hub)
- Zero-click searches 2026: the data
- E-commerce SEO
- Technical SEO
- Digital marketing channels: own, earn or rent (hub)
Earlier analysis and background
Earlier analysis and background (pre-2026 figures)
The text below is the earlier version of this page. Its figures refer to earlier periods and some were corrected above; the current, sourced figures are in the sections above.
Extract of a guest post I wrote for: seo-hacker.com
SEO 101: Off-Page vs. On-Page SEO
When you want to make your website rank through search engines, like Google, you learn right away that there are two kinds of strategies to adopt: on-page and off-page. Often the two walk hand in hand. Yet some content marketers choose either the former or the latter.
What is the main difference?
Each time Google ranks a page, it crawls and indexes the page. Therefore, before your pages get in Google’s ranking, you may want to make sure that the previous steps of the process are taken care of, which you can do by simply publishing content or submitting your sitemap to search engines.
What we look at in this article is the final part of the process- ranking. How does a search engine decide whether a page or website deserves to rank?
It looks at authority and relevance.
Simply put, authority is about off-page SEO; while relevance is about on-page SEO.
A good proxy for authority is domain and page authority. Those are two metrics that MOZ created to assess how a domain or a page are seen through Google’s lenses.
Domain authority is connected to off-page SEO activity. In short, when other sites link to your website, from your website’s perspective those are called backlinks. The more quality backlinks you get, the more your domain authority will improve over time.
The other factor is relevance. Relevance is about on-page SEO. How is relevance assessed? There are several ways to evaluate how relevant a page can be. The main ones would be keywords, internal linking, page formatting, user experience, and quality of data.
If I had to put it in a simple diagram, it would be:
Now you can get a top-notch SEO audit of your website for free that takes into account several crucial factors. If you do register for the SEO audit you will be included in WordLift.io mail list to receive news and updates about WordLift.
What are the main factors to track in a successful SEO strategy?
There are at least fifteen to look at:
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Title Tag
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Meta Description
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Headings
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Keyword Consistency
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Alt Attribute
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In-Page Links
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Broken Links
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Robots.txt
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XML Sitemap
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Mobile Friendliness
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Mobile Speed
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Structured Data Markup
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Speed Tips
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Backlinks Score
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Backlinks Counter
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and more…