SEO audit services that end in fixes and a one-page monthly report

Who are SEO audit services for?

An audit is worth paying for when search ought to bring in work and you can’t tell whether it does. Calls from the website have slowed. A service page that used to show up has gone quiet. A new site went live and nobody checked what happened to the old addresses. Our audits cover businesses across the US, run remotely from Valencia, California, and they weigh different things at each of three levels:

• Established local businesses: the service pages and the contact page carry the most weight, since a search for a service and a town should lead to them.
• Multi-location and regional businesses: each location’s page needs something true of that place, or the pages read as copies of one another.
• National businesses: large sites are built from templates, and a fault in one template repeats on every page made from it.

If your site is modest and the fixes are ones you can make yourself, we’ll say so on the call. The section on auditing a website yourself, further down, shows where to start.

What is an SEO audit?

An SEO audit is a review of a website against what search engines need in order to find its pages, store them and show them for the right searches. Google describes Search in three stages: crawling, where its programs find and download pages; indexing, where it works out what each page is about and stores it; and serving, where it picks the results for a search. Google also says that not every page makes it through each stage. An audit finds where your pages stop, and why.

A website audit service can range wider than search, into design, accessibility or how the forms behave. An SEO audit keeps to what search engines read and what decides whether a page is shown. Speed belongs to both: Google says its ranking systems use Core Web Vitals, its measures of how a page loads, responds and holds still.

A good audit ends in a list of problems in order of what each one costs, with the work each fix takes. With us, that list is where the monthly SEO work starts.

What should an SEO site audit look at?

An SEO site audit looks at six areas:

• Crawling: what robots.txt blocks, whether the sitemap is current and whether links reach every page. Google says robots.txt manages crawler traffic and won’t keep a page out of its results: a blocked address can still appear there.
• Indexing: which pages Google has indexed, and the reason it gives for each one it left out. Search Console’s Page indexing report lists both, and Google warns not to expect every address on a site to be indexed.
• Duplicates: the same page at several addresses, or two posts written for one search. Google chooses one version to show, and treats a redirect or a canonical tag as a strong signal of the one you prefer.
• The pages: titles, descriptions, headings, and whether the words answer the search each page is meant for. Our page on on-page SEO covers this part in depth.
• Speed: Core Web Vitals from real visits, on phones as well as desktops.
• Links: who links to the site, which links were lost, and whether the site’s own pages point to the ones that bring in work.

The list has gained a line this year. Since August 31, 2026, every website’s Search Console has carried a Search generative AI control. It is set to include by default, and a site switched to exclude is left out of AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover’s generative AI features, so an audit records which way it is set. Our technical SEO services page goes deeper into crawling, indexing and speed.

How do I audit a website for SEO myself?

Start with Search Console, which Google calls a free service for monitoring, maintaining and troubleshooting how a site appears in its results. Once the site is added and verified, a first pass takes five checks:

1. Read the Page indexing report: it shows which pages Google can find and index, with a reason for each page left out. Look for your service pages in the second group.
2. Inspect the pages that matter: the URL Inspection tool shows what Google holds for one address. After a fix you can ask Google to index the page again, though a request is no promise that it will, and the tool has a daily limit.
3. Open the Performance report: it gives clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position for the searches that show your site, over the past three months by default. A page seen often and clicked rarely may have a title or description that doesn’t match what people searched for.
4. Check Manual actions: this report says whether a reviewer at Google found the site breaking its spam policies. Pages on a site with one can rank lower or be left out of results.
5. Search like a buyer: on a phone, search for your main service and your town, and note who shows up and what their pages offer that yours don’t.

Write down the date of each change you make, so you can tell later what moved the numbers. What a first pass may not give you is the cause. The Page indexing report names a reason in a few words, and tracing that reason back to the fault on the site is the part an audit does.

How often should you do an SEO audit?

It depends on what changes. A full audit makes sense at four points: when SEO work starts, before a redesign, before a move to a new domain, and after a drop in calls or search clicks that nothing explains. After a drop, find the cause before anything on the site is changed, since the wrong fix can cost more than the drop itself.

Between audits, a fault that hides pages can arrive with any change to the site: a page set to noindex by an update, a sitemap that stops updating, a redirect that loops back on itself. Checks on a schedule can find those sooner than the next audit would. In our monthly work, the site is checked every week and its links every month, and each quarter brings a review.

If nobody watches your site between audits, plan the next one for when the site next changes: a redesign, a new section, a move to new hosting.

What should an SEO audit report include?

A useful audit report reads like a work order. In its guide to hiring an SEO, Google says an audit should give you realistic estimates of improvement and an estimate of the work involved, and it suggests checking a third-party tool’s audit against Google’s official guidance before making big changes to the site. A report built on those lines has four parts:

• What was checked: the pages, the tools and the dates, so anyone can repeat the checks later.
• What was found, in order: each problem, the pages it touches and what it costs, with the ones that hide pages from search at the top.
• What each fix takes: who makes it, how much work it is and what it should change.
• The starting numbers: indexed pages, search clicks and leads on the day of the audit, so the months after have something to be compared with.

A crawler’s export of hundreds of warnings, with no order and no estimate, leaves you to do the audit yourself.

Google’s guide also advises giving an SEO only read access to Search Console at the audit stage, and that suits a one-off audit. Ongoing work needs more: a restricted user in Search Console can only fetch in the URL Inspection tool, and asking Google to index fixed pages is part of our monthly work.

What does a monthly SEO report show?

Good SEO reporting answers one question before any other: did search bring in work this month? So a monthly SEO report should open with leads: calls, quote requests and bookings. Analytics sees what happens on the site, and only the business’s own records show which enquiries became jobs, so a report that counts leads needs both.

After that, a useful report keeps the same order each month, so one month reads against the next:

• Search: clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position from Search Console, with the dates the numbers cover.
• What moved: the searches, pages and links that changed, with a source for each figure.
• The work: what was done that month, and what comes next.
• What’s needed from you: the answers or approvals the next month’s work waits on.

Ours fits on one page, arrives as each month closes, and puts leads first.

What happens after the audit?

The audit’s findings become the fixes: titles and descriptions rewritten where they’re missing, repeated or off the search; structured data added or corrected; posts that compete for one search merged into one page; and fixed pages sent back to Google with a request to index them again.

Alongside the fixes, the site keeps growing: pages for new services or kinds of job, marked up for search; a run of articles every month; a location page wherever demand and local proof support one; earned links from other sites; and a monthly count of how often AI answers mention the business. Link building, local SEO and AI visibility each have a page of their own. What US agency price pages and guides show for that monthly work, and for a setup fee where one applies, is on our SEO pricing page.

The fixes are made on sites in our own system. A site built somewhere else moves into that system first, its addresses kept or redirected; for a WordPress site, WordPress SEO explains that move. And when an audit shows SEO isn’t where your money should go yet, we tell you.

What can’t an SEO audit tell you?

It can’t tell you where the site will rank once the fixes are in. Ranking also depends on the other pages competing for the same searches, and those change too. So we don’t promise rankings, traffic or leads, from the audit or from the monthly work: our search work is reported against targets, never promised.

An audit can’t see inside your business, either. It doesn’t know which services pay well, which areas you want more work from or which jobs you’d rather not take. Those answers come from you, and they should shape which fixes come first.

Nor can an audit make up for pages with little to say. Google’s guidance on helpful content asks whether a page offers original information and a complete description of its topic, written for people. Where a page fails that test, the fix is better words, and the audit names the pages that need them.

Should you audit a site before a redesign or a move?

Yes, and early. Google’s guide to hiring an SEO names a planned redesign or a new site as a great time to bring one in, and says the earlier the better. An audit done before the new site is planned shows which old pages bring in visits and links, so the plan keeps them.

Before a move to a new domain, the audit lists every address worth keeping, and that list becomes the redirect map. Google’s guidance on site moves says to map each old address to its new one, and to expect some movement in rankings while Google processes the move. When we rebuild a site, the work starts with research and a page plan, and the rebuild includes redirects for the old addresses. Website redesign covers that work.

If calls from search have slowed and you’d like to know why, book a 15-minute call. Say what changed, and we’ll tell you whether an audit is the place to start.