In more detail

Audits vary in depth and focus, but most cover three areas:

  1. Technical: crawling, indexing, site structure, redirects, duplicate content, mobile parity, page speed and Core Web Vitals, structured data and security
  2. Content: whether important pages match search intent, thin or outdated pages, cannibalisation, missing topics, titles and headings
  3. Authority: the backlink profile compared with competitors, risky links, and local signals such as the Google Business Profile

Good audits use several sources: a site crawl, Google Search Console, analytics, and sometimes server logs. They put findings in business context. A broken link on an old blog post isn't as urgent as a template change that noindexed every product page.

Google's hiring guidance says an audit "should be about giving you realistic estimates of improvement, and an estimate of the work involved", and recommends granting only read access to Search Console at that stage (source). It also cautions that third-party tools don't have access to Google's internal data, so recommendations should be checked against official Google guidance.

Why it matters when hiring an agency

An audit is often the first paid piece of work, and a good way to judge an agency before committing to a retainer. Ask what it covers, what format you'll receive and whether it includes implementation support.

Judge the result on clarity and priorities. A 100-page report with hundreds of "errors" and no ranking of importance is hard to act on. Ask for a summary of the five to ten most valuable fixes. For a quick self-check of individual pages, try our Google Index Checker and Page Authority Checker.