It's the way of the game, no quests, objectives etc. I ended up using a guide online which I'd recommend if you are getting frustrated and can just use it to extract general pointers of where to go / what to achieve in various areas. I over-used the guide and basically had it on a second screen guiding me and now I wish I hadn't as it took some of the fun away.
If you follow the yellow lines & explore, you'll find the way. Overall though, I'd recommend roughly sticking to the areas you are meant to be in (this isn't a rule of course and there's lot's of fun to be had going somewhere you definitely shouldnt be!)
Beating the mini-bosses in dungeons gets you a lot of summons & you'll get plenty of spells along the way.
In terms of levels, I wouldn't worry too much as it doesn't matter how strong you are, you can flatten a main boss one minute and get destroyed by two imps the next

. Level 48 for Godrick is on the high side I think, but I guess that's the way it goes if you do a lot of exploration. Just be careful that you are using your levelling points sensibly. I had a massive desire to use a specific set of armour, so I was grinding enemies to get all the pieces, but as I was doing that the armour weight was so high that I had to put most of the levels into endurance, which meant I was a bit unbalanced. As far as I know, the enemies don't scale to your level but obviously higher levels need more runes so for a while after that I couldn't level up my main stats as I wasn't getting enough runes.
I'm doind a second run through now (not New Game+) and I'm keeping the guide use to a minimum mainly to check if I'm missing anything interesting from an area before moving on and I'm trying to keep my level down a bit, as I ended up something like level 180 last time which made even the NG+ too easy. Also doing a pure melee, samurai build for now at least. More than any other game I've played, there's no right or wrong way of doing things in Elden Ring.