Why does everyone think you need a special tool to check your own website's basic SEO?

I keep seeing people in here ask about expensive tools to see if their title tags are right or if their pages are indexed. But you can check most of that for free in five minutes. For example, just type 'site:yourwebsite.com' into Google to see your indexed pages. Or right-click on your page and hit 'view page source' to read your own meta tags. I found three broken pages on my friend's site that way last week. So why do we make this seem so hard when the basics are right there? Has anyone else fixed a simple SEO problem just by looking at the free stuff first?

4 comments

4 Comments

jamiesullivan2mo ago

My cousin runs a small bakery site and was convinced she needed some monthly subscription. I mean, I just looked at her page titles and they were all just "Bakery Page 1". We spent an afternoon fixing them by hand in her website builder. It was literally just typing. Idk why she thought it had to be more complicated than that. The free Google Search Console email even told her about a mobile speed issue last month. She fixed it with a plugin. Maybe it's just me but people really overcomplicate the simple stuff.

bell.felix2mo ago

Check your own site right now with "site:yourdomain.com" in Google. Found a page I wrote in 2019 that still had "New Post" as the title. Also, run your homepage URL through Google's Mobile Friendly Test. It's free and will show you exactly what's broken, like oversized images blocking the page. I fixed that by just compressing a few photos.

lucas3112mo ago

Totally agree about the "site:" search. I found a whole section of my blog that wasn't indexed because I'd blocked it in robots.txt by accident years ago. Fixed it in two minutes.

caseywalker2mo ago

Used to think you needed fancy software, but a simple site search showed me pages I forgot existed. What's the most basic check you do now?