When should an SEO company conduct site audits?
At three kinds of moment: before planned optimization work begins, on a recurring schedule set by how quickly your site changes, and after specific events that put search performance at risk, such as a migration, a redesign, or a significant drop in traffic. A single audit at the start of an engagement is not enough, because sites change with every update, new page, and plugin, and some problems only appear after those changes.
Before the work begins
The first audit belongs before planned recommendations, content, or links, although urgent faults, such as pages wrongly blocked from Google, are fixed as soon as they are found. Without an audit, the company is guessing at what to fix, and you have no record of the starting point against which later results can be compared. If a company proposes content or link work before it has audited the site, ask why.
On a recurring schedule
After the first audit, the site needs to be checked again on a schedule. New pages, template changes, plugin updates, and content edits all introduce problems gradually: broken links, pages dropping out of the index, slower pages, duplicate versions of the same content. The right interval depends on how much your site changes. A small site that rarely changes needs less frequent full reviews than a large store adding products every week, which benefits from lighter checks of key reports between full audits. Ask the company to tie its schedule to your site’s rate of change and explain the reasoning.
After events that put performance at risk
Some events call for an audit whatever the schedule says. A site migration is the clearest: moving to a new domain, platform, or address structure, where redirects, canonical tags, and indexing need to be checked once the new site is live. A redesign or a new template is another, because a change to one template can affect every page built on it.
Those changes need checks at the level of individual pages, not only in summary reports. Google’s guidance on maintaining your website’s SEO notes that pages Google cannot reach “will not appear in the Page Indexing report”, and that “Blocked resources are shown only at the individual URL level, in the URL Inspection tool.” An audit after a redesign should therefore inspect representative pages from each template, not only scan the reports.
A significant traffic drop is the third trigger, and here the framing matters. If the drop coincides with a Google ranking update, Google’s guide to debugging traffic drops cautions that “there might not be anything fundamentally wrong with your content.” An audit after an update should look for real problems without assuming that one must exist, and it should begin only once the update has finished rolling out.
Writing the audit schedule into the plan
Ask the company when the first audit will be delivered, how often it will re-audit and why that interval suits your site, which events it treats as triggers, and how it checks individual pages after a template change or migration. An audit schedule written into the plan gives the company fixed points at which to find problems before your customers do.