I built a free SEO audit tool in 60 seconds — here's what I learned from the first 3 months

The problem I kept running into: every time I wanted to improve a site's SEO, I'd spend the first hour just finding the obvious technical issues — broken links, missing meta tags, slow page speed, redirect chains. Expensive tools like Screaming Frog or Ahrefs are overkill for a solo freelancer auditing a small business site. Free tools give you 20% of what you need.

So in January 2025 I started building RankyPulse (https://rankypulse.com) — a technical SEO audit that runs in ~60 seconds, is free for freelancers and small businesses, and uses AI to explain what each issue means and how to fix it.

What I built:

• Crawl errors, broken links, missing/duplicate meta tags
• Core Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, FID) via PageSpeed API
• Redirect chain detection
• Canonical tag issues
• AI-generated fix steps for each finding

3 months in, here's what surprised me:

1. The free tier converts better than expected. Freelancers run an audit, show it to the client, and the client wants to fix everything. That's when they upgrade. I didn't plan for that use case — users taught me.

2. "60 seconds" is the only marketing that works. Every other positioning I tried ("AI-powered SEO", "technical audit tool") got ignored. People click on speed.

3. SEO tools are crowded but there's still room. Most tools are built for large agencies. The $0–$50/month tier is underserved for technical audits specifically.

Still early — working on a shareable PDF report feature. Would love feedback from anyone who's done SEO work or built tools in this space.