SEO audit
Find out what is actually blocking the site.
An audit exists to answer one question: what is stopping this site from performing, in priority order. If it produces a four hundred item list that nobody acts on, it has failed regardless of how thorough it was.
What does an SEO audit actually check?
A real audit covers five areas: whether search engines can crawl and index the site, whether the content is competing with itself, whether the site is technically sound and fast enough, whether the off-site signals such as listings, reviews and links support it, and whether the site converts the visitors it already gets.
The output should be a short prioritised list of what to fix and roughly what each one is worth, not an export of every warning a crawler produced. Most tool-generated issues do not matter, and a competent audit tells you which ones do.
It should also be actionable without hiring the auditor. If the findings only make sense as an argument for a retainer, it was a sales document.
An audit is a diagnosis, not an inventory
Running a crawler over a site and exporting the warnings takes about twenty minutes and produces hundreds of items. Deciding which of them are actually costing you enquiries takes considerably longer and is the entire value of the exercise.
A crawler will flag every page whose meta description is slightly too long. It will not tell you that four of your service pages are competing for the same query, which is the thing actually holding you back.
So the judgement is the product. Which findings matter for your site, in your market, at your stage. What each one is roughly worth. What order to do them in. What you can do yourself for nothing.
We give you the document whatever happens next. An audit that is only useful if you hire us is not an audit.
The five areas
Roughly in the order they constrain each other, which is also the order findings get prioritised.
Can search engines reach and store the pages
A full crawl plus Search Console index coverage. What is blocked, what is excluded and for what stated reason, what is orphaned, what redirects into a chain, and what returns the wrong status code. This is where the largest and least visible problems live.
Is the site competing with itself
Which pages target the same queries, which are near duplicates, and which should be merged. On established sites this is frequently the single largest finding, and the fix is deletion and redirection rather than addition.
Is it technically sound
Canonical tags, sitemaps, robots directives, structured data validity and whether it matches the visible page, mobile rendering, HTTPS, and Core Web Vitals from field data rather than a lab score.
- Field performance data, because lab scores and real visits often disagree
- Structured data checked against what is actually on the page
- Rendering checked with JavaScript disabled, to see what a simple reader gets
See the remaining steps: The five areasHide the remaining steps: The five areas
Do the off-site signals support it
Google Business Profile completeness and category, listings consistency, review volume and recency, and the referring domain profile including anything that looks manipulative and was inherited from a previous provider.
Does the site convert what it already has
This is the area most audits skip and the one that most often produces the fastest return. Whether the enquiry paths work, whether forms actually deliver, whether the phone number is tappable, and where visitors currently drop out.
Number five is worth doing first if the site already has traffic, because fixing conversion works on visitors you have already paid for.
What the results page actually looks like now
Part of an audit is looking at the result page you are trying to win, because the shape of it decides what is available to win.
A query dominated by a map pack is a local visibility problem, not a content problem. A query where an AI answer sits above everything has a lower click ceiling regardless of ranking. A query full of directories needs a different approach from one full of competitors.
This is why an audit that never looks at the search results is incomplete. The site can be perfect and still be aimed at ground that is not available.
The context every audit now has to account for
SparkToro's clickstream analysis of United States Google searches sets the backdrop for how any audit finding should be valued.
SourceZero-click search study, SparkToro with Similarweb clickstream data, 2026
An audit that only measures ranking potential is measuring a shrinking prize. We assess visibility and extractability alongside it.
How to tell an audit is a sales document
Free audits are a lead generation product across this industry. Some are genuinely useful. Most are not.
- It arrived within minutes of your entering a URL. That is a tool export with a cover page, not an audit.
- It contains hundreds of issues with no priority order and no indication of impact.
- Every finding requires the auditor to fix it. A real audit contains several things you can do yourself this week for free.
- It leads with a score out of 100. Those scores are invented by whichever tool produced them and correspond to nothing Google uses.
- It never mentions your competitors or the actual search results you are trying to appear in.
See the full checklist: How to tell an audit is a sales documentHide the full checklist: How to tell an audit is a sales document
- It does not look at conversion at all, which means it cannot tell you whether more traffic would even help.
- It contains statistics with no source, or sourced to another agency's blog.
- It concludes that you need a full rebuild without establishing what the current site is actually costing you.
The single best test: does the document tell you anything you could act on without buying anything.
How findings get prioritised
Every finding gets two rough judgements: how much it is likely to be costing, and how hard it is to fix. That produces four groups and the order follows naturally.
High impact and easy first. These are the free wins: a wrong Google Business Profile category, a broken form, a page blocked from indexing, a missing redirect after a site move. Most audits find at least two of these and they are worth more than anything else in the document.
High impact and hard second. Consolidating competing pages, restructuring a site, migrating off a platform that cannot be fixed. These are projects and they need a decision rather than a task.
Low impact and easy third, as housekeeping when convenient. Meta description lengths, image file names, minor markup issues. These fill up tool reports and rarely change anything.
Low impact and hard: say so and move on. An honest audit includes a list of things it recommends not doing, which is a section almost nobody writes.
What you can check yourself, free, today
Search Console page indexing report. If a large share of your pages are excluded, or important pages say crawled but not indexed, you have a real problem and you have just found it for nothing.
Search for your business name plus your city. If you do not appear in the map pack from your own location, something is wrong with the profile, and it is usually the category or verification.
Read the full breakdown: What you can check yourself, free, todayHide the full breakdown: What you can check yourself, free, today
Submit your own contact form from a phone on mobile data. A surprising share of sites we audit have a form that silently fails, and it costs nothing to check.
Open your site with a slow connection simulated in your browser's developer tools, or just on a weak mobile signal, and count how long until you can read the headline.
Search for a distinctive sentence from one of your pages in quotation marks. If it appears on other sites, your content was copied or was never unique in the first place.
We would rather you did these before paying anyone, including us. If they all come back clean, the problems are deeper and worth a proper look.
What an audit should leave you with
A short list of prioritised findings, each with a plain explanation of what is wrong, why it matters, and roughly what fixing it involves. Not a spreadsheet of warnings.
A baseline. Whatever we measure at the audit stage is what progress is judged against later, and it should be captured properly rather than reconstructed afterwards.
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A clear statement of what we could not determine, and why. Audits always have gaps: no access to a system, insufficient history, a market we cannot see into. Saying so is part of the job.
And a recommendation about whether ongoing work is worth it at all. Sometimes the honest answer is that the site needs three fixes and then leaving alone for six months, and we would rather say that than manufacture a retainer.
We do not publish a price for this piece of work on its own, because the right scope depends on what already exists. What is published is the bundle pricing: 2,400, 3,600 or 4,800 dollars a month depending on which channels are running. You can read the full breakdown on the pricing page, and you will get an exact number in writing before anything starts.
How this connects to the rest
An audit is the sensible starting point for the whole SEO and GEO program, because it decides which of the other nine pieces you actually need.
Most audits point first at technical SEO, since crawling and duplication problems cap everything else, and at local SEO and Google Business Profile management, where the fastest free wins usually are.
Where the findings are about speed or conversion rather than search, they route into website speed optimisation and conversion rate optimisation instead.
If you are currently spending on paid advertising, an audit usually finds that some of the enquiry leakage is on the landing pages rather than in the campaigns, which changes where the next dollar should go.
Get the findings, whatever you do next.
The document is yours. If the right answer is three fixes and no retainer, that is what it will say, and you can take it to whoever you like.
Straight answers.
How long does an audit take?
A proper one takes days rather than minutes, because most of the time goes on judgement rather than on running tools. Larger and older sites take longer, mostly because the duplication analysis is bigger.
Anything delivered within minutes of entering a URL is a tool export.
Do I have to hire you to fix what you find?
No. The document is yours and it is written so your own developer, or another agency, could act on it.
Several findings in a typical audit are things you can do yourself in an afternoon, and we will point those out rather than bury them.
What is a good SEO score?
There is no such thing. Scores out of 100 are invented by the tool that produced them and correspond to nothing Google uses.
The meaningful measures are index coverage, visibility for the queries that matter to you, and enquiries.
How often should a site be audited?
A full audit at the start, then a lighter review annually or after a significant change such as a redesign, a migration or a platform update.
Continuous auditing is mostly a way to bill monthly for something that is genuinely occasional.
What access do you need?
Read access to Google Search Console and Analytics, and ideally the website admin. Without Search Console we are guessing at index coverage, which is where the most important findings usually are.
If you do not have Search Console set up, getting it verified is worth doing before anything else.
Where this comes from.
Primary documentation and published research behind the guidance on this page.
- Google Search Console Help (opens in a new tab)
- Google Search Essentials (opens in a new tab)What Google requires, recommends and forbids.
- Core Web Vitals, web.dev (opens in a new tab)
- Guidelines for representing your business on Google (opens in a new tab)
- Structured data general guidelines (opens in a new tab)
Talk to the team
A short call, a look at how the business currently shows up, and a straight answer on what we would do first.