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What an SEO audit should tell you, and what it cannot.

Most of what gets sold as an audit is a crawler's output with a cover page. The difference is visible in about thirty seconds if you know which part to read first.

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What does an SEO audit actually check?

Whether Google can read the site, whether each page states what it is for, whether your own pages compete with each other, and whether the Business Profile matches the business.

Those four questions cover most of what is wrong with most local sites, and they are checked in that order because each one makes the next one meaningless if it fails. A beautifully written page behind a stray noindex tag is not a content problem.

A written audit should end with the findings in the order they should be fixed, with the reason attached to each. A list sorted by severity as judged by a crawler is not the same thing, because a crawler cannot know that your Business Profile category is costing you more than every technical warning combined.

Why can't an audit tell you your exact ranking?

Because there is no single ranking to report. Google personalises by location, device and history, and the same query pulled repeatedly does not come back in the same order.

We measured this on 2026-08-31. Three pulls of one query, minutes apart, from the same location: the three result sets agreed on between 38 and 58 percent of the top ten, and almost never on the exact position of a given page. Which sites appear is reasonably stable. The order they appear in behaves close to a coin flip.

So an audit printing 'you are number 7 for plumber Calgary' has taken one sample of a moving number and presented it as a measurement. What can be reported honestly is whether you appear at all, repeatedly, across separate checks on separate days. Absence is measurable. Position is not.

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The same checks this page describes, run against your own site. About 30 seconds.

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What does a bad SEO audit look like?

A score with no findings, an unranked list of hundreds of issues, exact ranking positions, and no mention of your Google Business Profile.

Each of these is a tell that a tool was run and nobody read the output. They are also all easy to spot before you pay for anything.

A score out of 100 with no findings
The score comes out of a crawler in seconds. As an opening to a conversation it is fine. On its own it is a sales device.
Hundreds of issues, unranked
A real audit orders them by what moves the business. Four hundred undifferentiated warnings is a raw export.
Rankings quoted to the exact position
One sample of a number that changes between refreshes, presented as though it were fixed.
No mention of the Business Profile
For a local business this is usually the single largest lever, and a website-only audit misses it completely.

Should an SEO audit cost money?

An automated check should be free and takes seconds. A written audit by a person costs money because it takes a day, and it should be in your hands before you commit to anything ongoing.

The free version tells you whether anything is obviously broken. It cannot tell you which of the broken things matters for your business, because that requires knowing what your business sells and to whom.

The paid version should arrive before the first invoice for ongoing work, not after it. An audit delivered after you have signed is a description of what you already bought. Run the free check first.

Can you audit your own site?

Most of it, and it costs an afternoon. Four checks find the majority of what is actually wrong on a local site.

Open yoursite.com/robots.txt in a browser and look for Disallow: / under User-agent: *, which asks search engines to stay away from everything. View the source of your homepage and search for noindex. Search Google for site:yoursite.com plus one of your services and see whether several near-identical pages come back competing with each other. Then open your Business Profile and read the primary category out loud.

One finding worth checking while you are in that robots.txt file, because it is invisible and increasingly expensive: sites behind Cloudflare can have its managed robots.txt setting switched on, which disallows AI crawlers by default. On 2026-08-30 we found GPTBot and ClaudeBot blocked on a client site whose owner had never heard of the setting, at a moment when a growing share of people ask an assistant before they open a search engine.

Common questions

How long does an SEO audit take?
About a day of work on a normal local site, and longer on a site with hundreds of pages. Anything delivered within an hour is a tool's export with a cover page on it.
Do I need an audit if my website is brand new?
Less than an established site, because there are fewer accumulated mistakes to find. The Business Profile check still matters on day one, and so does confirming the staging site's settings did not go live with it.
Will an audit tell me what my competitors are doing?
It can name which sites keep appearing for your terms and roughly what they have that you do not. Treat any figure for their traffic as an estimate from a third-party tool, because that is exactly what it is.
My site does not appear in any SEO tool. Is something broken?
Usually nothing at all. Those tools list a domain once it holds a top-100 position for keywords they happen to track, and they do not track every phrase people type. Our own site had no row in one of them on 2026-09-01 while Search Console showed 33 queries and 283 impressions over the previous 28 days. For your own site, Search Console is the source of truth.

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Find out if something's broken before you spend anything.

The free check takes about 30 seconds and asks for nothing — not even your email. From $499 a month if you want it fixed.

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