Most business owners meet the website audit in one of two forms. An email out of nowhere offering a "free SEO audit", or a 60-page PDF full of red warnings that someone produced by pasting your address into a tool. Neither tells you what to do on Monday.
A real audit is a short, paid piece of work with one job: explain why the site isn't bringing in the work it should, and what to fix first. Here's what that involves, what it should cost, and how to tell a useful one from a sales pitch with a cover page.
What is a website audit?
A structured review of everything that stops a website being found and turning visitors into customers. That covers the technical side, like whether Google can find and index your pages, and the commercial side, like whether someone who lands on the page can work out how to contact you.
The output matters more than the checking. Google's own guide to hiring an SEO puts it plainly: an audit should give you realistic estimates of improvement, and an estimate of the work involved. A list of problems without either is half an audit.
What should a website audit include?
At least these six areas, checked against evidence rather than opinion:
| Area | What gets checked | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Indexing | Which pages Google has found, and why some aren't indexed | Search Console's Page indexing report |
| Speed | How fast pages load and respond for real visitors on phones | Field data in PageSpeed Insights, against Core Web Vitals |
| Structure | Titles, headings, internal links, duplicate pages, broken links | A crawl of the site |
| Content | Whether there's a page for each thing you want to be found for | Your pages against the searches that matter |
| Competitors | Who ranks where you want to, and what their pages have that yours don't | The actual search results |
| Conversion | Whether a visitor can see what to do next and do it easily | Walking the site as a customer, on a phone |
If you run Google or Meta ads, add a seventh: whether the budget is going to searches and people likely to become customers, and whether the pages the ads send people to are built to convert.
On speed, the benchmarks are Google's, not ours. Its Core Web Vitals guidance sets good as the main content appearing within 2.5 seconds, the page responding to a tap in under 200 milliseconds, and a layout shift score under 0.1. An audit should tell you where you stand against those, and which of them is actually costing you.
Why isn't a free automated report enough?
Because a tool can tell you what's wrong with a page, but not what's wrong with your business's website. Automated reports are genuinely useful as a starting point, and every decent audit uses them. They just aren't the audit.
A few limits worth knowing:
- They test in a lab. Google's own PageSpeed Insights documentation explains that lab data is collected in a controlled environment and may not capture real-world problems, while field data reflects what real visitors experience. Many free reports only show the lab score.
- They don't know what matters to you. A tool can't tell that your quote form is the only page that makes money, or that the product line with 40 errors is one you're discontinuing.
- They don't rank by impact. Two hundred warnings sorted by severity isn't a plan. Half are cosmetic, and the one that matters might be a single missing page.
- They don't have Google's data. Google notes that it doesn't endorse third-party SEO tools and that they have no access to its internal ranking data. A tool's "SEO score" is the tool's opinion.
Lighthouse, Google's free, open-source auditing tool, is where most of these reports come from. You can run it yourself in Chrome. If a paid audit is mostly a Lighthouse printout, you've paid for something you could have had for free.
How much should a website audit cost?
Free if it's an automated report, and real money if a person is doing the thinking. There's no industry price list, and quotes vary a lot depending on who's doing it and how big the site is.
Ours is $800 to $1,500, delivered in five working days. Where a check lands in that range comes down to how much there is to look at: the size of the site, and whether there are ad accounts to review as well. The price is fixed before we start, and if you don't find it useful, you don't pay.
When you compare quotes, compare what you get at the end, not the number of pages in the report. A two-page list of ranked fixes you can act on is worth more than a 60-page PDF you'll never open twice.
What should you get at the end of an audit?
Something you could hand to any competent developer or marketer and have them start work. At minimum:
- A ranked list of fixes, ordered by how much difference each will make against how much work it is.
- An estimate of effort for each one, so you can budget.
- The evidence behind each finding, so you can check it rather than take it on trust.
- An explanation you can follow. Ours comes with a short video walking through what we found and why it matters, because most people won't read a technical report twice.
What you shouldn't get is a report that only makes sense if you hire the same firm to fix it. An audit you can take anywhere is one you can trust.
What access does a website auditor need?
Read-only access, and nothing more. Google's advice is to grant an auditor read access to Search Console only, and not to give them write access at that stage. The same goes for analytics and ad accounts.
For ours, read-only access to your analytics and any ad accounts is enough. We don't need your website login or hosting details to do the check. If someone asks for admin passwords before they've found a single problem, ask why.
What are the red flags in a website audit?
Most of them are the same red flags as for any SEO work, and Google lists several itself:
- It arrived by unsolicited email. Google says to be wary of SEO firms that email you out of the blue, and treat those messages with the same skepticism as any other spam.
- It promises rankings. Google's guide says that if someone guarantees their changes will get you first place in search results, find someone else.
- It's all warnings and no priorities. Hundreds of issues with no indication of which matter is tool output, not advice.
- It only works if you hire them. Findings that are vague on purpose, so you need the same firm to interpret them, are a sales document.
Do you need an audit, or a new website?
If you already have a site and it isn't bringing in enough work, audit first. Sometimes the answer is a rebuild. Often it's a handful of fixes: a missing page, a slow template, a form that asks too much, a Google profile nobody finished. You want to know which before you spend five figures.
If you don't have a website yet, skip the audit. There's nothing to check, and the money is better spent on the build. Our post on what a small business website costs covers that side.
What can you check yourself before paying anyone?
More than you'd think, for free, in about half an hour:
- Run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights and look at the field data at the top, not just the score.
- Open Search Console's Page indexing report and see how many of your pages Google has actually indexed.
- Search Google for what you sell in your area and note who ranks above you.
- Open your site on your phone, on mobile data, and try to request a quote or book a call.
If those four turn up obvious problems, you may not need an audit yet. If they don't explain why the site is quiet, that's what a website health check is for.