What is an SEO audit?

If your website gets little traffic from Google, an SEO audit is how you find out why before you spend money on new content or links. This post explains what an audit covers, what it typically costs, the tools people use, and how to run a basic one on your own site this week.

What is an SEO audit?

An SEO audit is a review of your website and search presence that finds what is stopping it from ranking, then ranks the fixes by how much they matter. A good one ends with a short, ordered to-do list, not a 100-page export from a tool.

The reason to bother: most pages never get found. Ahrefs' 2023 study of about 14 billion pages found that 96.55% of them get no traffic from Google at all, and an audit is how you work out which of those reasons apply to your site.

Most audits look at four areas:

• Technical. Speed and Core Web Vitals, whether Google can crawl and index your pages, redirects, broken links, schema markup and how the site works on a phone.
• On-page. Titles, headings, content and internal links, and whether each page matches what people search for.
• Off-page. Backlinks and mentions from other sites, and how they compare with competitors.
• Local. For local businesses: your Google Business Profile, directory listings, reviews and location pages.

Some audits cover all four. A technical audit focuses on the first one, which is often where the most serious problems hide.

How much does an SEO audit cost?

An SEO audit costs nothing for an automated scan and is usually quoted as a project for a full manual review, with the size and complexity of the site driving most of the price. Small business sites usually cost less to audit, because there are fewer pages to review.

What moves the price:

• How many pages the site has, and how many page templates.
• Whether the audit includes local signals, links and competitors, or only technical checks.
• Whether you get a written report and a walkthrough, or just a list.
• Whether fixes are included or quoted separately.

Here is how we price ours, as one example. The free audit comes back in 24 hours with the biggest issues. If the site needs a deeper look, we scope a full technical audit and quote it first, and nothing is billed until you approve. That version is a written report in 10 business days plus a 60-minute walkthrough with your team or developer. The details are on our page for an SEO audit in Costa Mesa. If you are budgeting for ongoing work after the audit, our post on how much SEO costs covers monthly ranges.

How do I run an SEO audit on my website?

Work in this order: confirm Google can find and index your pages, check speed and mobile, review your most important pages, then look at local signals and links. Here is a version any owner can do with free tools.

1. Set up Google Search Console if you haven't. Open the Pages report and note which pages are not indexed and the reason Google gives.
2. Test speed. Run your home page and your top service page through PageSpeed Insights. Look at the real-user data section first when it is available, then the lab results. Google's Core Web Vitals targets are a Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, an Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less and a Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less. Plenty of sites miss them: the HTTP Archive's 2025 Web Almanac found that only 48% of mobile websites had good Core Web Vitals, against 56% on desktop.
3. Crawl the site. The free version of Screaming Frog crawls up to 500 URLs. Look for broken links, redirect chains, missing or duplicate page titles and pages with no H1. These gaps are common: the same 2025 Web Almanac found a meta description on only 67.7% of desktop pages and an H1 on 71%.
4. Find your closest wins. In Search Console's Performance report, sort queries by impressions and look for ones where your average position is roughly 8 to 20. Those pages are close to page one. Our guide to what on-page SEO covers explains how to improve them.
5. Read your service pages as a customer. Does each page clearly say what you do, where, and what it costs or how to get a quote?
6. Check local signals. Is your Google Business Profile category right, and do your name, address and phone match on the main directories?
7. Compare links. Search Console's Links report shows who links to you. Comparing that with the businesses that outrank you is the heart of an SEO competitor analysis.
8. Write it down. For each issue: the page, the problem, the fix, the impact (high, medium, low) and the effort. Do high-impact, low-effort items first.

A common example: a Westside contractor rebuilds their site, and the developer leaves a "noindex" tag on the service pages from the test version. Traffic drops, and no amount of new content helps until that one tag is removed. Step 1 catches it in minutes.

Which tools are used for SEO audits?

The core tools are free: Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights and a crawler. Paid tools add competitor data and save time on bigger sites.

• Free: Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights (which includes real Chrome user data when Google has enough of it), Google's Rich Results Test for schema, Bing Webmaster Tools, Screaming Frog's free version and Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for sites you verify.
• Paid: a Screaming Frog licence for larger crawls, Sitebulb, Semrush and Ahrefs for backlinks, keywords and competitor research.

For our own audits we crawl with Screaming Frog and Sitebulb and pull in Search Console, Chrome UX Report and PageSpeed Insights data, so nothing is counted twice. Tools find symptoms. A person still has to decide which issues actually cost you rankings and which are noise.

Is a free SEO audit worth it?

Yes, if a person looks at your site and gives you specific fixes. No, if it is an automated score sent to start a sales call. Plenty of free audits are just tool exports with a logo on top.

A free audit is worth your time when it:

• Names specific pages and specific problems, not "improve your content".
• Uses your own Search Console data, or tells you why it can't.
• Ranks issues by impact, so you know what to do first.
• Gives you at least one fix you can make this week, whether you hire anyone or not.

That last point is how we set up our own free audit: your Search Console baseline, the searches your competitors win that you don't, and one fix you can ship in under an hour. If the site needs more, the national page for our full technical SEO audit explains the deeper version, and you can talk it through with our Costa Mesa audit team at the Fischer Ave office.