Many SEO audits are a crawler export with a logo on top: hundreds of warnings, color-coded by severity, with no sense of which ones cost you money. A useful audit answers three questions instead. What's holding the site back? What should we fix first? And what should we expect when we do? That's the audit we deliver.
How is a real SEO audit different from an automated report?
An automated report lists everything a crawler can detect; a real audit decides what matters. It combines crawl data with Search Console, analytics, backlink data and manual review, explains why each issue exists, estimates its business impact and ranks the fixes. Tools find symptoms. An experienced auditor finds the causes behind them.
| Automated SEO report | Our SEO audit | |
|---|---|---|
| Data sources | One crawler | Crawl, Search Console, GA4, backlinks, server logs where available, manual review |
| Output | Hundreds of warnings sorted by the tool's own severity labels | A ranked fix list tied to traffic, leads and revenue |
| Context | A missing alt attribute looks as urgent as a noindexed product page | Issues weighted by the pages and queries they affect |
| Content and intent | Word counts and duplicate titles | Whether each key page matches what searchers and AI engines want |
| AI search | Rarely covered | How ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI features describe and cite you |
| Next steps | Left to you | Developer-ready tickets, owners and a 90-day roadmap |
That doesn't make tools useless. We use crawlers, Search Console and our own free tools in every audit; our inlinks audit tool, for example, turns a crawler's internal link export into a scored list of orphans, chains and broken links. The difference is that a person decides what the output means for your business.
What does our SEO audit cover?
Our SEO audit covers eight areas: technical health, indexation, content and keyword targeting, on-page elements, internal linking, backlinks, local search where relevant, and AI search visibility. We also check that analytics and conversion tracking work, because an audit that can't connect rankings to leads can't tell you what to prioritize.
Technical health
Crawlability, robots.txt, sitemaps, canonicals, redirects, status codes, Core Web Vitals, mobile rendering and JavaScript.
Indexation
What Google has indexed versus what you want indexed, with the reason behind every gap in Search Console's Page indexing report.
Content and keywords
Whether each key page targets a real query with the right intent, where pages compete with each other, and which topics competitors cover that you don't.
On-page and internal links
Titles, headings, meta descriptions, structured data, click depth, orphan pages and anchor text.
Backlinks
The quality and relevance of your link profile compared with the competitors who outrank you, plus any risky patterns worth knowing about.
Local search
For businesses with locations or service areas: Google Business Profile, citations, reviews and location pages, benchmarked against the map pack.
AI search visibility
How ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews answer your buyers' questions, who they recommend, and whether AI crawlers can reach your pages.
Analytics and tracking
GA4 and Search Console setup, conversion events, and whether you can attribute leads to organic search at all.
Depth varies by business. A dentist in Austin gets more attention on the map pack and local SEO signals; a B2B SaaS company gets more on content, comparisons and how AI assistants describe it.
What do you get at the end of an SEO audit?
You get a prioritized plan, not a data dump. A full audit ends with an executive summary, a ranked issue log with the evidence behind each finding, developer-ready tickets for technical fixes, a content and keyword gap map, and a 90-day roadmap. We walk through it with your team on a call.
- Executive summary: the handful of findings that matter most, in plain English, for leadership
- Issue log: every finding with affected URLs, evidence, impact, effort and a recommended owner
- Developer tickets: the exact change, acceptance criteria and how to test it
- Keyword and content gap map: topics and queries you're missing, grouped by intent and value
- Backlink review: strengths, gaps against competitors and any risky links
- AI visibility snapshot: buyer prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI features, with who gets cited
- 90-day roadmap: what to do in which order, and what result to expect
- Walkthrough call: findings presented to your team, with time for questions
Every finding is written so someone who wasn't on the call can act on it. If a recommendation can't be turned into a task, it doesn't belong in the audit.
How long does an SEO audit take?
A full SEO audit typically takes two to four weeks from kickoff to walkthrough, depending on site size, complexity and how quickly we get access. A 50-page local service site sits at the short end; a large ecommerce catalog with faceted navigation or a recent migration sits at the long end. The free audit is faster and lighter.
- Kickoff. We collect Search Console, GA4 and CMS access and learn about your customers, margins and best leads.
- Data collection. A full crawl, Search Console and analytics exports, backlink data, Core Web Vitals field data and AI prompt runs.
- Analysis. Manual review of templates, key pages, competitors and every flagged issue, to separate real problems from noise.
- Prioritization. Each issue is scored on impact, effort and risk, then turned into tickets and a roadmap.
- Walkthrough. A call with your team to present findings, agree on owners and answer questions.
What slows an audit down is rarely the analysis. It's waiting on access to Search Console, analytics or a staging site. Sharing those at kickoff is the simplest way to keep the timeline short.
What's included in the free SEO audit?
The free audit is a focused first look, not a sales teaser. We review your technical health, rankings, content gaps, backlinks and Google Business Profile, run buyer prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, and send back a prioritized plan with the three things we'd fix first. There's no cost or obligation.
It's useful on its own. Many of the problems with the biggest impact, like a noindexed section, a broken redirect from a high-traffic old URL or a competitor dominating AI answers for your main service, show up in a first review. A full audit goes deeper into every template, every content cluster and every link.
To request one, tell us about your site on our contact page. We reply within one business day. If you'd like to check a few things yourself first, the free robots.txt checker and meta length checker cover two common problems, and our technical SEO checklist lists the rest.
When should you get an SEO audit?
Get an SEO audit when something has changed or is about to: an unexplained traffic drop, a planned redesign or platform move, a new marketing leader or agency, or a plateau after months of steady work. Even without a trigger, an annual audit catches the slow problems, like content decay and creeping technical debt.
- Traffic or leads dropped. We check whether the drop lines up with a Google update, a site change, a tracking break or a competitor's gain, because each needs a different fix.
- You're planning a migration. An audit of the current site sets the benchmark and URL inventory a migration needs. Our SEO migration services start from exactly that.
- You're choosing an agency. An independent audit gives you a baseline to judge proposals against. Our guide on how to choose an SEO agency covers what to ask.
- You've hit a plateau. Growth that stalls usually points to a structural limit: authority, architecture or content that doesn't match intent.
What happens after the SEO audit?
After the audit, you choose who implements. Your team can run with the roadmap on its own, we can advise while your team executes, or we can do the work. There's no obligation either way; the audit is built to be usable whoever picks it up, with tickets and priorities your developers and writers can follow.
If your team has capacity but wants senior oversight, our SEO consulting keeps the roadmap on track. If the biggest issues are technical, our technical SEO services ship the fixes in your code. And if you want everything handled, including content, links and AI visibility, our full SEO agency services pick up where the audit ends. Comparing quotes? Our SEO pricing guide explains typical US market ranges.
When we're involved in implementation, we re-run the key checks after fixes go live, so you can see that the problems are actually gone rather than taking it on trust.