You can check the basics of your website's SEO in about 30 minutes with free tools: confirm Google can find and index your important pages, make sure nothing is blocking search engines, review your page titles and descriptions, and test speed and mobile use. These checks won't tell you how to beat a competitor, but they can flag problems that stop a site being found at all, which are the ones to fix first.

Times below are rough. Have Google Search Console open if your site is already set up in it. If not, our guide to setting up Google Search Console explains how; you can still do most checks without it.

Check 1 (3 minutes): Is your site in Google at all?

Search Google for site:yourdomain.com.sg (replace with your own domain, without "https://" or "www").

  • You see your pages: good, Google has indexed at least part of your site.
  • You see nothing: check further, but don't assume your site isn't indexed. Your site may be very new, blocked or affected by a technical problem. Use checks 2 and 3 to investigate.
  • You see odd pages (test pages, old promotions, pages from a previous owner): note them for later.

Don't use this as a page count or a definitive indexing test. Google says indexed URLs aren't guaranteed to appear in site: results (Google Search Central: site: operator, checked 2026-10-21). It's a quick starting point, not a report.

Check 2 (5 minutes): Are your most important pages indexed?

List your five most important pages: usually the home page, your main service pages and your contact page. For each one, paste the full URL into the URL Inspection tool at the top of Search Console.

  • "URL is on Google" means it's indexed.
  • "URL is not on Google" means it is not indexed. Expand the Page indexing details for the reported reason, such as a crawl block, noindex or a duplicate page. The result describes Google's recorded version; use Test live URL to check recent changes, not to confirm indexing (URL Inspection help).

Then open the Pages report (under Indexing) for a site-wide view. Don't panic at the "Not indexed" number. Google says "Don't expect every URL on your site to be indexed", but adds that "all of your important pages should be indexed" (Search Console Help: Page indexing report, checked 2026-10-21). Focus on relevant reasons under "Not indexed", not on the total. The example URL lists can be incomplete, so use URL Inspection to check each key page.

Check 3 (3 minutes): Is anything blocking search engines?

Open yourdomain.com.sg/robots.txt in your browser.

  • A short file is not automatically safe: even two lines can block crawling. A genuine HTTP 404 for a missing robots.txt means Google assumes no robots.txt crawl restrictions; server errors are different (Google robots.txt specification).
  • A line reading Disallow: / under User-agent: * tells crawlers that follow that group not to crawl the site, though more specific crawler groups or allow rules can change the result. This can get left behind after a website build. If you see it on a live site, ask your web developer about it today.

Also check that important pages don't carry a noindex tag or HTTP header. URL Inspection can report it only if Google can crawl the page; a robots.txt block can hide it. If you use WordPress, look under Settings › Reading for "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" and make sure it's unticked.

One common misunderstanding: robots.txt controls crawling, not indexing. Google says it is "not a mechanism for keeping a web page out of Google"; use noindex on a crawlable page or password protection for that (Google Search Central: robots.txt introduction, checked 2026-10-21).

Check 4 (7 minutes): Do your page titles and descriptions make sense?

Go back to your site: search and read the results as a customer would. For important pages missing from those results, check the title and description in your website editor. Ask:

  • Does the title say what the page is? "Home" or "Services" alone tells nobody anything. "Commercial cleaning in Singapore | [Business name]" does.
  • Is each title different? Google advises against boilerplate titles shared across many pages, and against stuffing in repeated keywords (Google Search Central: title links, checked 2026-10-21).
  • Does the description under the title help? Google sometimes uses your meta description when it describes the page more accurately than the page text itself. Identical descriptions on every page aren't helpful (Google Search Central: snippets, checked 2026-10-21).

If Google shows a different title from the one you wrote, that isn't necessarily a fault. Google generates title links automatically and may rewrite titles that are vague, out of date or inaccurate. A future guide in this series covers writing titles and descriptions in more detail.

Check 5 (5 minutes): Is the site fast and usable on a phone?

Run your home page and one service page through PageSpeed Insights. Look at the Core Web Vitals section at the top, which uses real visitor data when enough is available. Check whether it shows this URL or the wider site (origin); missing field data is not a failed test (PageSpeed Insights documentation). Google's "good" thresholds, assessed at the 75th percentile, are (Web Vitals, checked 2026-10-21):

  • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): 2.5 seconds or less (how quickly the main content loads)
  • Interaction to Next Paint (INP): 200 milliseconds or less (how quickly the page responds when someone taps or clicks)
  • Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): 0.1 or less (how much the page jumps around while loading)

Don't chase a perfect score. Google says Core Web Vitals are used by its ranking systems, but good scores don't guarantee high rankings, and it still seeks to show the most relevant content. A failing result is worth raising with your developer; a few points off 100 isn't.

Then open the site on your own phone. Can you read the text without zooming? Can you tap the phone number and the contact button easily? Does anything cover the content? If it's awkward for you, it's awkward for customers.

Check 6 (4 minutes): Does each important page have a clear job?

Open each of your main service pages and check:

  • One clear main heading that says what the page is about.
  • The answer near the top. Someone looking for "office renovation in Singapore" should know within a few lines that you offer it, where and roughly how.
  • No two pages doing the same job. If you have three near-identical pages for the same service, search engines have to guess which one to show. Combining them, or giving each a distinct purpose, usually helps.
  • Links between related pages. Your service pages should link to each other and to your contact page with descriptive link text, not "click here". Google finds most new pages through links (Google SEO Starter Guide, checked 2026-10-21).

Check 7 (3 minutes): What are people already searching to find you?

In Search Console, open Performance › Search results and set the date range to the last three months. Click the Queries tab.

  • Are these the searches you'd expect? If you're a bookkeeping firm and most visible queries are your own business name, that suggests an opportunity to investigate visibility for service-related searches. It doesn't prove new customers aren't finding you: Search Console omits some queries (query data limitations).
  • Any queries with lots of impressions but few clicks? Check the pages shown for those queries and their average position before blaming the title or description. Low click-through rate is a clue to investigate, not a diagnosis; review whether the result matches what the searcher wants.

Write down two or three queries that matter to you. They'll be useful for every other check in this series.

What to fix first

Use this as a practical priority order, not a strict dependency chain:

  1. Blocked or missing pages (checks 1–3). If Google can't index a page, nothing else about it matters for search.
  2. Unclear titles and pages without a clear job (checks 4 and 6). These affect whether the right page shows and whether people click.
  3. Speed and mobile problems (check 5), especially anything rated "Poor".
  4. Possible content gaps (check 7). Queries may suggest useful topics to investigate, but they don't prove a new page is needed.

Google says some changes "might take effect in a few hours, others could take several months" (Google SEO Starter Guide). Fix what you find, then re-check in a few weeks rather than the next morning.

What this check won't tell you

This is a health check, not a full audit. It won't show you how your site compares with competitors, whether your content matches what people want when they search, technical issues on a large site, or problems with links from other websites. It also can't promise better rankings: search results depend on many things outside your website, including what your competitors publish.

Guides in this series

This guide is the starting point for our SEO series. Further guides will cover:

  • Keyword research without paid tools
  • Writing title tags and meta descriptions people click
  • Finding and fixing pages Google isn't showing
  • Deciding whether a service page or a blog post should rank
  • A simple internal linking system for small websites