What's included in an SEO company's audit?

A full audit reviews your site’s technical condition, its pages and content, the links pointing to it, your local presence if you serve a local market, your measurement setup, and how you compare with competitors. Its output is a ranked list of findings, each tied to specific pages and evidence, with an estimate of the work needed to fix it. Google’s guide to hiring an SEO gives the test for the whole document: “An SEO audit should be about giving you realistic estimates of improvement, and an estimate of the work involved.” An audit that lists problems without either of those has stopped halfway.

Technical condition

This part checks whether Google can reach your pages, whether they load without errors, and whether their content can be indexed: robots.txt rules, the XML sitemap, status codes, redirects, broken links, pages built with JavaScript, duplicate versions of the same page, and the move to HTTPS. It also covers loading speed and Core Web Vitals. Google’s Core Web Vitals guide defines them this way: “Core Web Vitals is a set of metrics that measure real-world user experience for loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of the page.” The technical review also checks how the site works on a phone.

Pages and content

The on-page review looks at each important page: its title and description, its headings, its address, its images and their text alternatives, and the links between related pages. The content review asks harder questions: whether each page answers the search it is meant for, whether the information is accurate and current, which pages are thin or repeat each other, and which subjects your customers search for that the site does not cover. The recommendations here can include merging or removing pages, not only adding new ones.

Links

The link review describes the sites linking to yours, the pages they link to, and the anchor text they use, and separates links that help from links that may be a risk. It also shows where comparable sites have earned links that yours has not.

Local presence, if it applies

For a business that serves a specific area, the audit checks the Google Business Profile, whether the business name, address, and phone number match across the places they appear, location pages, and reviews. For a business with no local market, this section should be short or absent rather than padded.

Measurement

The audit confirms that Search Console and analytics are set up correctly, that the actions that matter, such as inquiries and purchases, are recorded as key events, and that the data is not distorted by duplicate tracking or missing pages. Without this, nothing that follows can be measured fairly.

Competitors

A few comparable sites are reviewed on the same points, so the findings can be read in context: where your site is behind, where it is ahead, and which gaps are worth closing first.

What each finding should contain

The usefulness of an audit is in the format of its findings. For each one, ask for the pages affected, the evidence (a report, a screenshot, a list of URLs), why it matters, the estimated effort, its priority, and who would implement it: the company, your developer, or you. An export from an SEO tool with hundreds of warnings is not an audit; it is raw material for one.

Seeing a sample before you commit

Ask for a sample audit, with the client’s details removed, so you can see the format. Ask which sections it covers for a site like yours, whether it includes estimates of improvement and of work for each finding, and whether a walkthrough of the findings is included.