You can find most of what is wrong with a small business website in an afternoon, using free tools. This is the order to do it in, starting with the checks where the failure is total and working towards the ones where it is a matter of degree.

1. Is Google actually indexing your pages?

A page Google has not indexed ranks nowhere, no matter how good it is. This is the highest-stakes check and the fastest.

Search site:yoursite.co.za in Google. Compare the rough count against how many pages you published. Far fewer means an indexing problem.

Then open Search Console and go to the Pages report. It splits your URLs into indexed and not indexed, with a reason for each exclusion. Watch for "Excluded by noindex tag", "Blocked by robots.txt" and "Duplicate without user-selected canonical". Any of those on a page you care about is a live problem.

Finally, paste your three most important pages into the URL Inspection bar at the top of Search Console and confirm each says the URL is on Google.

2. How fast is it, on a phone?

Run your homepage and your busiest service page through PageSpeed Insights, and read the mobile tab. Most South African visitors arrive on a phone on mobile data, so the desktop score is close to irrelevant.

Target Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds. Over five seconds is costing you both rankings and visitors, and the cause is usually uncompressed images.

3. Read your page titles as a stranger

Search site:yoursite.co.za again and read the titles Google shows. This is what a searcher sees.

Look for the three common faults: titles that say "Home" or "Services" rather than what the page is about, the same title repeated across several pages, and titles with no location on a business that serves a specific area.

This is the cheapest fix on the list and it moves rankings more often than anything else you can do in an afternoon.

4. Find pages competing with each other

Take your five most important search terms. For each, search site:yoursite.co.za plus the term.

If two or three of your own pages come back, Google cannot tell which one to rank, so it ranks all of them weakly. Consolidating them into one page and redirecting the others is one of the fastest wins available, and it is invisible unless you look for it.

5. Read the Search Console Performance report properly

This is where the actual opportunities are. Set the range to the last three months and turn on average position.

Sort by impressions. High impressions with few clicks means people see you and choose someone else, usually a title problem.

Filter position 11 to 20. These are page-two rankings, your closest opportunities, and cheaper to move than starting anything new.

Look at the Pages tab. Which pages actually earn clicks? Small businesses are often surprised to find one blog post carrying half their organic traffic.

Compare the last 28 days against the previous 28. Anything falling sharply is worth investigating now rather than in three months.

6. Compare against whoever outranks you

Pick your three most valuable terms. Search each in an incognito window and open the pages ranking above you.

Ask the uncomfortable questions. Is their page more specific? Do they show prices where you are vague? Do they answer questions you skip? Do they have 80 reviews to your 6? Is their page faster?

The answer is usually visible within two minutes, and it tells you what to fix.

What to do with what you find

Finding	Priority	Effort
Important pages not indexed	Immediate	1 to 2 hours
Weak or duplicate page titles	High	2 to 3 hours
Pages competing with each other	High	2 to 4 hours
Page-two rankings needing depth	High	3 to 6 hours each
Slow load times	Medium	2 to 4 hours
Review and authority gap	Ongoing	Months

Do them in that order and change one thing at a time, so you can tell what worked.

When to pay someone instead

When the site is large, when traffic dropped and you cannot find the cause, after a migration or redesign, or when you have found problems you do not know how to fix. A professional audit runs about R8,000 to R25,000 and should end with a prioritised list, not a tool export.

All figures exclude VAT. Advertising spend is billed separately by the platform and is never marked up by Juicy Designs.

Juicy Designs runs a free first-pass review before any engagement. See SEO audit or get in touch. Related: the technical checklist and Search Console for beginners.

Frequently asked questions

How do I do a basic SEO audit of my own website?

Six checks, all free: confirm your pages are indexed, test load speed on mobile, review your page titles and descriptions, check for pages competing with each other, read your Search Console Performance report, and compare your top pages against whoever outranks them.

What tools do I need?

Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights and a browser. Search Console is the important one, and it is the tool most small business owners have connected but never opened.

How long does a self-audit take?

Two to three hours for a site of twenty to thirty pages. Most of the time goes into reading the Performance report properly rather than running checks.

What is the most common problem a self-audit finds?

Page titles that do not match what people search, followed closely by pages Google has not indexed and pages competing with each other for the same term.

When should I pay for a professional audit instead?

When the site is large, when traffic dropped and you cannot find why, after a migration, or when the self-audit finds problems you do not know how to fix. A paid audit runs about R8,000 to R25,000.