An SEO audit should end with a short, ordered list of what to do next. A long document describing everything that could theoretically be improved leaves the prioritizing undone.
What an Audit Examines
Four areas, because a problem in any one of them will cap the others.
| Area | Question it answers |
|---|---|
| Technical | Can engines reach, render and index the site, and how quickly does it respond |
| Entity | Is it clear who this company is, and do the facts agree everywhere they appear |
| Content | Do the pages answer the questions buyers ask, and can any passage stand alone |
| Authority | Who references this company, do those references come from places anyone reads, and who references competitors instead |
The Deliverable
Findings, each with a severity and an effort estimate, ordered so the first item is the one worth doing first. Plus the evidence behind each finding, so nothing has to be taken on trust.
In practice the list is short. Most sites have a handful of things holding them back and a long tail of minor imperfections that will never be the reason anything changes. Reporting 200 issues is easy and unhelpful; identifying the four that matter is the work.
What Comes up Most Often
The same findings recur across sites that have never had a proper audit.
- Content That Only Exists After JavaScript Runs, invisible to crawlers that do not execute it.
- Conversion Tracking That Is Broken or Double Counting, which means every performance number under discussion is wrong.
- Business Details Formatted Differentlyacross the site, business profile and directories, undermining entity recognition.
- Service Pages of Two Hundred Wordscompeting against detailed alternatives.
- No Presence in Bing, which is the route into ChatGPT and the index most companies never check.
- Comparison Articles Ranking for the Categorythat name competitors and omit the client entirely.
How Long Does an Audit Take?
Two to three weeks for a site of ordinary size. Longer if the site is large, has several templates, or if index and analytics access takes time to arrange.
Most of that is not report writing. It's crawling, comparing against competitors, checking coverage across engines, and verifying that a suspected problem is real rather than an artifact of how a tool measured it.
What Happens Afterwards
Either we execute the plan as part of an ongoing program, or you take the list to your own team. Both are fine and the audit is written to be usable either way, which means specifications precise enough for a developer who wasn't in any of the conversations.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the Audit Free?
A full audit is paid work. It takes weeks of analysis and produces something you can act on regardless of whether we do the acting. Free audits are generally automated tool output with a sales call attached, and the tool output is available to you directly.
Do We Have to Sign up for Ongoing Work?
No. The audit stands alone and the plan is yours. The aim is a document you can act on.
How Is This Different From Running a Site Through a Crawler Ourselves?
A crawler finds issues. It doesn't know which ones matter for your business, can't tell a real problem from a false positive, and has no view on what competitors are doing that you aren't. The tool output is an input to the audit rather than the audit.