Find out where you actually stand

Almost every audit I have been sent by a prospective client has the same shape. Four hundred rows, exported from a crawler, sorted by that crawler’s idea of severity. Nobody has read past row forty. Nothing in it says which pages make money, so nothing in it can say which issues matter.

A baseline is not that. A baseline is the short list of numbers you will judge every later month against, and it fits on one page. Four numbers, an afternoon, and no budget.

Your baseline is four numbers

In the order they matter:

1. What share of your pages are actually indexed. Not how many pages you have. What fraction of them Google has agreed to store.
2. What you already get impressions for. Especially on page two, where you are one push away from traffic.
3. Clicks over a fixed 28-day window, with the dates written down.
4. One conversion you can trace to organic. One is enough to start.

Everything else in a standard audit is a means to changing one of those four. If a finding cannot be connected to one of them, it goes at the bottom of the list, whatever colour the tool printed it in.

Start with the source that is free and authoritative

Google Search Console “provides information on how Google crawls, indexes, and serves websites,” in Google’s own words. That distinction matters more than it sounds. Every third-party tool is inferring what Google did. Search Console is Google telling you. It costs nothing and it is the only source in this module that is not a guess.

Two reports carry the whole baseline. The Performance report shows “how much traffic you’re getting from Google Search, including breakdowns by queries, pages, and countries.” The Page Indexing report “gives you an overview of all the pages Google indexed or tried to index in your website.” Google suggests checking “around once every month,” which is also roughly the cadence at which anything you change will have had time to register.

Verify with the domain property rather than a URL prefix if you can add a DNS record. A URL-prefix property silently excludes the other protocol and every subdomain, which is how people end up auditing half their site without knowing it.

The number almost nobody checks

Here is the one that changes what people do next. Google’s own documentation is blunt about it: “Google doesn’t guarantee that it will crawl, index, or serve your page, even if your page follows the Google Search Essentials.” Crawling, indexing and serving are three separate stages, and Google says plainly that “not all pages make it through each stage.”

So the useful question is not how many pages you have. It is what percentage of them survived to the index. Divide indexed pages by total pages and you have an indexation rate, and once you have it as a percentage rather than a count you can compare parts of your site against each other.

I will use my own site, because it makes the point better than a client’s would. In August 2026 I split redseo.io’s sitemap into segments specifically so I could measure this, and the answer was not good.

The blog is the worst-performing part of my own website by a wide margin. Thirty-seven percent. Fifty-nine of ninety-three posts sitting outside the index, which is fifty-nine posts of writing that cannot rank for anything because they are not eligible to. The tools, which get a fraction of the attention, are at eighty-six percent.

I would not have found that with a crawler, because a crawler tells you about the pages, not about what Google did with them. And I would not have found it with a single site-wide number either, because averaging 37 percent against 100 percent produces something in the sixties that looks survivable and hides which half of the site is the problem. Segment the measurement and the answer tells you where to work.

Have us measure your indexation rate properly

Reading the Not indexed list without panicking

The Page Indexing report groups un-indexed pages by reason, and the reasons are not equally serious. Roughly, in the order I triage them:

• Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag. You did this, on purpose or by accident. Check whether you meant it. This is the one that occasionally reveals that a staging setting shipped to production.
• Duplicate without user-selected canonical. Google found several versions of the same thing and picked one for you. That is an architecture problem, and it is module 4.
• Crawled, currently not indexed. Google looked and decided not to store it. Uncomfortable, because there is no technical fix. Google lists the causes as “the quality of the content on page is low” among others. This is a content problem wearing a technical costume.
• Discovered, currently not indexed. Google knows the URL exists and has not got to it. On a small site this usually resolves. On a large one it is the beginning of a crawl budget conversation, which module 4 will talk you out of.

What a crawler adds, and what it does not

Once you have the Search Console picture, a crawler earns its place by telling you things Google will not: which pages have no internal links pointing at them, where your title tags are duplicated, how deep your click depth gets. That is genuinely useful and it is what the audit tool below does.

What it cannot do is prioritise. A crawler does not know that your services page is worth two hundred times your privacy policy, so its severity column is sorted by a scale that has nothing to do with your business. The triage rule that actually works: does fixing this change one of the four numbers, on a page that matters? Most findings do not, and saying so out loud is most of the skill.

What I would do in your position

Give it one afternoon. Verify Search Console, write the four numbers on one page, date it, and stop. Do not fix anything yet. The temptation to start fixing while you are still measuring is strong and it is how you end up unable to tell whether anything worked.

Then look at exactly two things. Your indexation rate by section, because that tells you whether you have a publishing problem or an eligibility problem. And your page-two queries, because that is where the cheapest traffic in your entire SEO effort is sitting. Both are free. Neither requires you to buy anything or to have finished this curriculum.

If the indexation rate is low, the next module you want is not the next module in order. Go to module 7 and check the indexing basics, then come back. If the rate is fine and the page-two list is long, you are in better shape than you think and module 5 will pay for itself quickly.