The cheapest audit in SEO takes ten minutes, needs no tools you do not already have, and regularly turns up something that should have been caught months ago. This is written as practitioner guidance; the topic is prompted by the Unscripted SEO episode with Matt Mellinger of SEO Gets and Local SEO Partners, which covered Search Console data accuracy and how a small business owner can tell a legitimate SEO from a scam.
The Ten-Minute Indexation Check
Practitioner guidance. Open Search Console. Go to the Pages report under Indexing. You are looking at two numbers and one list.
- Indexed count vs. your actual page count. If you have 240 published pages and 31 are indexed, stop reading and go ask why.
- The “Not indexed” reasons table. Sort by page count. The top three reasons are your diagnosis.
- Spot-check your money pages by URL. Paste each into the URL Inspection tool. A service page that is not indexed is not a ranking problem, it is an absence.
If you do not have Search Console access, that is itself the finding. An agency that will not give the owner read access to their own property is a red flag on its own.
Reading Page-Level Data Instead Of Site Totals
Practitioner guidance. Site totals flatter everybody. Switch the Performance report to the Pages tab and sort by clicks.
The shape you will almost always see is concentration: a small handful of URLs account for the overwhelming majority of clicks. That is not necessarily bad, but it tells you where the business actually is, and it tells you whether the last twelve months of published content moved anything.
Compare the page-level export against the query-level export as well. The two do not reconcile as cleanly as most people assume, and knowing which one you are quoting matters when you report to a client. The regex-based segmentation approach in GSC regex for custom data segmentation makes this a repeatable pass rather than a one-off.
The Three Reasons Pages Silently Drop Out
Crawled — currently not indexed. Google fetched it and decided it was not worth storing. Usually a quality or duplication signal, occasionally a symptom of a site-wide thin-content problem.
Discovered — currently not crawled. Google knows the URL exists and has not got to it. Typically crawl budget, internal linking, or a site that publishes faster than it earns authority.
Excluded by a directive you forgot. A noindex tag left on after a redesign, a robots.txt rule from a staging environment, a canonical pointing somewhere else. These are the ones that feel like sabotage and are almost always an accident.
The crawl quick wins write-up covers the fixes for each in order of effort.
What To Ask Your Agency On Monday
Three questions, in this order:
- How many of our pages are indexed right now, and what was that number ninety days ago?
- Which five URLs produce most of our organic revenue, and what did you do to those five last month?
- Show me the report you would send if the answer were bad.
The third one is the tell. A team with a real process has an answer. A team selling activity will change the subject to rankings.
Turning The Check Into A Monthly Habit
Calendar it for the first Monday of the month. Ten minutes. Log three numbers in a spreadsheet: indexed pages, clicks, and clicks from the top five URLs. Over a year that spreadsheet is worth more than any dashboard, because it is the only record that survives an agency change.