Your first audit in 60 seconds.

This guide walks you through your first audit on Smart SEO Audit, end to end. It takes about 60 seconds of active time — plus however long you want to spend staring at your results.

1. Create your account

Head to smartseoaudit.com/#pricing and click Start free on the Free plan. The Free plan is forever free, includes all 50+ SEO checks, and doesn't require a credit card.

Enter your email, set a password, and you're in. You land on the Dashboard, which becomes your home base for everything else.

2. Run your first audit

On the Dashboard, you'll see a URL input at the top of the page with a blue Start audit button. Type or paste the URL you want to audit — let's use your own website.

Click Start audit. That's it — no other configuration needed for a basic audit. You're redirected to the audit page, and within ~10 seconds you'll see:

• An SEO score out of 100
• A breakdown of Major / Moderate / Minor issues
• An AI summary that translates the findings into plain English
• A list of every check that passed, warned or failed

Want to audit something other than a single webpage?

Click the 🔧 Settings button (wrench icon) next to the URL input before starting. This opens an expanded view where you can choose between four audit modes:

• Single webpage — audit one URL (the default)
• Sitemap — submit a sitemap URL and audit every page inside it
• Bulk — paste a list of URLs, one per line, to audit them all at once
• HTML — paste raw HTML source code to audit a page before it's live

We cover all four modes in detail in The four audit modes. For your first audit, single webpage is usually where you want to start.

3. Read your results

Your audit page has three main sections:

The header: your score at a glance

At the top you see a circular score widget showing a number out of 100, a summary sentence ("We have identified 21 issues, 35 passed tests based on 56 total tests"), and a benchmark comparing your score to the global average across all audits on the platform.

Below that, four metric tiles show response time, time-to-first-byte, page size and DOM depth — the fundamentals of how your page performs technically.

The issue bar and AI summary

A coloured bar visualises the distribution of your issues: red (Major), yellow (Moderate), grey (Minor) and green (Passed). Next to it, the AI summary walks you through what matters most in plain language.

The checks tab

This is where the detail lives. You'll find every one of the 50+ SEO checks the audit ran, grouped by category (On-page, Technical, Content, Media, Links, Indexability). Each check has a status — passed, warning, or failed — plus a short explanation and the specific value found on your page.

Other tabs — Generated HTML, Raw HTML, DNS, HTTP Headers, IP, Whois, SSL, Redirects, Hosting, Ping — give you deeper technical data about the audited URL. Useful when a check surfaces something unexpected and you want to investigate.

A full breakdown of every tab and what it means is in Understanding your audit.

4. What to do next

You've got your first audit. Depending on what you're trying to do, here's where to go next:

• Fix the highest-impact issues first. The AI summary tells you which to prioritise. Ship the Major issues this week, Moderate within a month.
• Re-run the audit after fixing. Click Refresh audit (the circular arrow icon) in the audit header. Previous versions are kept in the audit history, so you can compare before/after.
• Set up scheduled rechecks. If you want the platform to monitor your URL automatically, edit the audit and set an audit check interval. Get notified the moment something changes.
• Audit more pages. Most sites have more than one important page. Run a sitemap audit to audit everything in one go, or use bulk mode to paste a custom list.