The number stared back at me from the screen like a bad exam result.
47 out of 100.
I had been running my website for several months at that point. I was publishing content regularly, sharing it on social media, and doing everything I thought was right for SEO. I genuinely believed my website was in decent shape.
Then I ran my first proper website audit tool and discovered the truth. My site was not in decent shape at all. It was sitting at 47 — below average, flagged with multiple issues across speed, technical SEO, on-page optimisation, and security. Nearly half the things Google looks for when evaluating a website were either missing or broken on mine.
That score was humbling. But it was also exactly what I needed.
Over the following three weeks, I worked through every issue the audit website tool flagged, one by one, fixing what I could immediately and scheduling the bigger items for later. By the end of that process, my score had climbed to 84. My organic traffic started growing gradually. Pages that had been sitting invisible in Google began appearing in search results.
This is the exact story of what I found, what I fixed, and what changed as a result.
Running the Website Audit Tool — What the Report Showed
I used Auditest — auditest.online — to run the audit. It is completely free and does not require any account or technical knowledge. I typed my website address into the search box, clicked the button, and within seconds had a full report in front of me.
The report broke my website's issues into clear categories. Here is what it found.
My page speed score was poor. My homepage was taking over six seconds to load. The report identified large uncompressed images and two render-blocking scripts as the main causes.
My on-page SEO had multiple gaps. Three of my most important pages had no meta description at all. Two pages had title tags that were too long and getting cut off in Google search results. Several images across the site had no alt text.
My technical SEO flagged a missing XML sitemap submission, a robots.txt file that had not been properly configured, and two redirect chains on old URLs I had moved months earlier and forgotten about.
My security check showed my SSL certificate was active, but my website was still serving some images over HTTP instead of HTTPS — a mixed content issue that was triggering warnings in certain browsers.
My mobile usability showed two pages where the text was too small, and the buttons were too close together on small screens.
Forty-seven problems across five categories. Looking at that list felt overwhelming at first. But the audit report prioritised them clearly — showing which issues had the biggest impact on my score and which were minor. I started at the top and worked down.
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Week One — Speed and Images
The biggest impact items were all speed-related, so I tackled those first.
I downloaded every image on my website and ran it through TinyPNG, a free image compression tool. The results were dramatic. My homepage hero image went from 2.4 megabytes down to 380 kilobytes — an 84 percent reduction with no visible difference in quality. Across all my images, I reduced my total image weight by over 70 percent.
I then installed a free caching plugin on my website. This made pages load much faster for returning visitors by saving a local copy of my pages in their browsers instead of downloading everything fresh on every visit.
Finally, I addressed the render-blocking scripts the audit had flagged. Two JavaScript files were loading at the top of my pages, forcing the browser to wait for them before displaying any content. I moved them to load at the bottom of the page instead, which allowed the visible content to appear first while the scripts loaded in the background.
After these three changes alone, my homepage load time dropped from 6.2 seconds to 2.8 seconds. I ran the Auditest report again at the end of week one. My overall score had already climbed from 47 to 61.
Week Two — On-Page SEO and Technical Fixes
With the speed issues resolved, I moved to the on-page SEO problems.
I wrote proper meta descriptions for every page that was missing one. Each description was between 150 and 160 characters, clearly explained what the page was about, and gave a reason for someone to click on it in search results. This took about an hour across all affected pages.
I shortened the title tags that were too long, making sure each one stayed under 60 characters while still including the main keyword for that page.
I went through every image on the site and added descriptive alt text. For each image, I asked myself — if someone could not see this image, what one sentence would explain what it shows? That sentence became the alt text.
For the technical issues, I generated a proper XML sitemap and submitted it to Google Search Console. I cleaned up the robots.txt file to make sure it was only blocking pages I actually did not want Google to crawl. I updated the two redirect chains so each old URL redirected directly to the correct final destination in one step instead of bouncing through multiple URLs.
The mixed content issue — images loading over HTTP instead of HTTPS — was fixed by updating the image URLs in my content from http:// to https://. On WordPress, a free plugin called Better Search Replace can do this across an entire database in minutes.
At the end of week two, I ran the audit again. My score had moved to 76.
Week Three — Mobile and Final Polish
The remaining issues were mobile usability problems on two pages.
On the first page, the text size was too small for comfortable reading on a phone screen. I increased the font size in my theme settings from 14 pixels to 16 pixels across the site. This small change made a noticeable difference to readability on mobile without affecting the desktop layout at all.
On the second page, several buttons were sitting too close together, making them hard to tap accurately on a touchscreen. I increased the spacing between them by adjusting the padding in my page builder. Each button now had enough space around it to tap comfortably without accidentally hitting the wrong one.
I also took this week to add basic schema markup to my homepage — the structured data code that tells Google your site name, organisation details, and what your website does. This took about 20 minutes using a free schema generator tool and my SEO plugin's built-in schema settings.
At the end of week three, I ran the final audit. My score had reached 98 out of 100.
What Changed After the Fixes
The results did not come overnight. SEO never works that way. But the changes were clear and measurable within four to six weeks.
My organic traffic increased by 17 percent compared to the same period the previous month. Pages that had been invisible on Google search results start to appear again and, in some cases, on page one. My bounce rate dropped from 71 percent to 44 percent — meaning far more visitors were staying on my site long enough to actually read my content.
Google Search Console showed a significant increase in the number of pages being crawled and indexed. Several pages that had not appeared in Google at all started showing up in search results for the first time.
None of these improvements required hiring a developer. None required a paid SEO subscription. Every single fix was made using free tools and the clear, prioritised guidance from the Auditest audit report.
The Key Point
A low website SEO score is not a permanent condition. It is a list of fixable problems waiting to be addressed.
If you have never run a proper audit on your website, your score might surprise you — the same way mine surprised me. The good news is that knowing your score and knowing what is pulling it down puts you in complete control of improving it.
Run your free website audit right now at auditest.online. Find your score. See exactly what is holding your website back. Then work through the fixes one by one, the same way I did.
A score of 47 became 98 in three weeks. Your website can make the same journey.
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About the Author
Kester Terna is an SEO specialist and founder of Auditest, where he helps website owners identify technical SEO issues, improve search visibility, and grow organic traffic.