What an SEO audit should include

An audit is the best first purchase in SEO. It costs a fraction of a year’s retainer, it produces something useful whether or not you hire the agency, and it tells you more about how a team thinks than any pitch.

What should be in it

1. Business and market context. What you sell, who to, what a customer is worth, and who genuinely competes with you in search. An audit that skips this is a tool export.
2. Technical. Crawling, indexing, speed, duplicates, structure and mobile. Covered in technical SEO explained.
3. Keyword and content. What you rank for now, what you should target, and which pages are competing with each other. See keyword research basics.
4. On page. Titles, headings, internal linking and how well each page matches its intent.
5. Links and authority. What you have, what your competitors have, and anything carrying risk.
6. Local. For any business serving a place: profile, citations, reviews. See the local SEO guide.
7. A prioritised plan. The section that makes the rest useful.

The part most audits get wrong

Tools produce hundreds of findings, most of which do not matter. The value an experienced practitioner adds is deciding which five things would change your results and which ninety can be ignored. A good audit therefore ends with a short list, each item marked with expected impact, effort, and who needs to do it.

What a free audit is worth

Free audits are almost always an automated crawl with a logo on it. They flag generic issues that apply to nearly every site, and they exist to open a sales conversation. That is not dishonest, but treat it as marketing rather than diagnosis. Cold emails offering one belong with the other SEO agency red flags.

What is genuinely worth asking for free is twenty minutes of observations. A capable agency will happily tell you two real problems with your site, and their willingness to do so tells you a great deal.

Using an audit as a trial

Paying two shortlisted agencies for an audit each costs less than one month of a retainer and produces a genuine comparison: two diagnoses of the same site, side by side. Differences in what they prioritise are more revealing than any proposal. Combine it with the interview questions and you have a proper selection process, as set out in how to choose an SEO agency.

To find agencies offering it, see SEO audit Bristol, or request quotes and specify that you want a paid audit rather than a retainer.