What a Real SEO Audit Includes

What you should be holding at the end

A real audit leaves you with decisions, not a PDF of warnings. When it is finished you should have:

1. A ranked fix list. Each item names the page or template affected, shows the evidence and explains why it matters to enquiries.
2. A short list of what is already working. Changing a page that already earns traffic can lose it, so the audit must say what to leave alone.
3. An owner and a rough effort for each fix. You, your developer or your SEO provider.
4. A baseline. Today's clicks, impressions, indexed pages and enquiries, so a re-check in three months means something.
5. Plain-language explanations. If you need a developer to translate it, the audit is unfinished.

If the deliverable is a score out of 100, you have bought a scan.

The seven sections of a real audit

Each section answers one question, and each should come with evidence you can check yourself.

For the technical rows, our technical SEO checklist lists what the reviewer should check and how.

Automated report or genuine audit?

Tools are useful for collecting data. They are not the audit. The judgement about what matters for your business is the audit. These signs suggest you have an automated report with a logo on it:

• The same findings would apply to any website
• Findings are counts ("142 errors") without URLs
• Nothing is ranked by importance
• It recommends tactics Google says it does not use, such as the keywords meta tag
• It never mentions your actual customers, services or searches
• No one can explain a finding when you ask

Google's Starter Guide is a useful yardstick, because it states what Google does and does not use. An audit that contradicts it, with no explanation, deserves a question.

Red flags in an audit offer

Google's advice on hiring an SEO is specific. Be careful when you see:

• Unsolicited emails offering an audit or services
• Guaranteed rankings, since no one can promise a number one position
• Requests for write access during an audit. Google advises granting read-only Search Console access at first
• Claims of a special relationship with Google or a priority submission

Google also suggests asking whether the provider cites official Google documentation to support its recommendations.

A free audit is not a red flag in itself. A free audit that exists only to frighten you into signing a contract is a sales tactic, and you can usually tell by whether the findings cite URLs.

What it costs and how long it takes

Neither of the two pricing surveys we read, from Ahrefs and SE Ranking, reports audit prices on their own. Their one-off project figures are the closest guide: in Ahrefs' poll of 439 providers, the most common project band was USD 2,501 to 5,000, and in SE Ranking's survey of 260 agencies, about two thirds of agencies charged USD 500 to 2,000 for a project. An audit is usually smaller than a full project, so ask for a fixed price and a written scope. Our guide to SEO costs explains how to read those surveys.

In our view, a human review of a small site takes a few days. That is an opinion about effort, not a survey result. A site with thousands of pages takes longer.

What to do with the audit afterwards

1. Fix anything that stops pages being indexed first. Nothing else matters if Google cannot include the page.
2. Next fix problems on the pages that already bring enquiries.
3. Then work through quick wins, such as unclear titles.
4. Leave the long list of minor items until the first three groups are done.
5. Set a re-check date three months out and compare against the baseline.

You do not have to buy every fix from the person who wrote the audit. A good audit works without them.

When an audit is the wrong purchase

Skip a paid audit if your site has fewer than a couple of dozen pages and you have never looked at Search Console. Our website audit checklist walks you through the same questions in about an hour, for free. Also skip it if you are about to rebuild the site, because a migration plan is the better first step.

If you ask us for an audit

Hold any audit we produce to the list above, and ask to see the structure before you agree to anything. You can request one here, or read about our wider SEO service first.