What is an SEO audit? What a proper one checks, what it costs, and how to read the report.

An SEO audit is a structured examination of why a website does or does not appear for the searches its owner cares about, and it has to answer four questions: can Google reach and index the site, does the content answer what people in Cardiff, Swansea or Neath actually type, does anyone credible link to it, and does a visitor who arrives do anything. In the UK a proper manual audit typically costs £300 to £2,000 depending on the size of the site; the free ones you are emailed are usually a sales letter with a score on it. This guide sets out what a real audit checks, what it should cost, and how to read the report, using the audit we ran on our own site this month as the worked example.

The four questions every audit has to answer

Most "audits" are a tool run and a PDF. A useful one is organised around four questions in a fixed order, because each only matters if the one before it passes. Crawlability first: if Google cannot fetch, render and index the pages, nothing else counts. Intent second: whether the pages that exist match the searches that exist. Authority third: whether other websites vouch for yours, which decides how high a matching page can climb. Conversion last: whether the traffic you do get turns into calls and enquiries, because ranking a page nobody acts on is a hobby.

Question	What is actually checked	Where the evidence lives	A genuine red flag
Can Google reach it?	Indexing status, robots rules, canonicals, sitemap, redirects, Core Web Vitals, mobile rendering, HTTPS	Search Console pages report, URL inspection, PageSpeed Insights	Important pages "Crawled, currently not indexed"
Does it answer the search?	Which searches each page earns impressions for, position, duplication between pages, thin or template content	Search Console performance report, Keyword Planner	Two of your pages competing for one search; pages with no impressions at all
Does anyone vouch for it?	Linking domains, what kind of sites they are, which pages they point at	Search Console links report	Links from one type of source only, all to the homepage
Does anyone act?	Enquiry paths, phone and form tracking, page-level conversion	Analytics, form logs	Traffic with no measured enquiries

The free tools, and what they cannot tell you

Everything in that table is checkable for nothing. Google Search Console, which every business should have connected, holds the indexing, impression, position and links data. PageSpeed Insights measures Core Web Vitals on the exact page you give it. Keyword Planner shows how many people actually search a phrase. If an auditor's report contains nothing you could not have pulled from those three, you have paid for formatting.

What the tools cannot do is judge. A crawler will flag a missing meta description on a page that should not exist at all, and pass a page that is technically perfect but answers a question nobody asks. The score-out-of-100 widgets that agencies embed on their websites are built to generate leads, not insight: they weight things that are easy to measure, ignore intent and authority entirely, and the "critical errors" they find are chosen to sound alarming. A 62 out of 100 from one of those is not a finding. It is a pitch.

If you would rather have the judgement than the widget, our SEO and performance service audits the sites we build and manage every month, against published prices, and reports what moved in plain English.

The technical audit, and why passing it is not a result

The technical half checks that the site is indexable, fast and correctly described: every important page indexed under the address you intend, one canonical version of each, a sitemap that lists only pages worth indexing, redirects intact from any old addresses, Core Web Vitals in the green on mobile, structured data that validates, and HTTPS throughout. It is the part tools are good at, and it is the part most reports spend forty pages on.

Here is the thing the reports rarely say: passing the technical audit is table stakes, not an outcome. Our own site scores 100 out of 100 on the technical checks, loads in under a second, carries schema on every page, and until this summer earned fewer than two clicks a day. Technically flawless and commercially invisible are entirely compatible, and an audit that stops at the technical pass has explained nothing about why the phone is quiet.

Content and intent: the half the tools skip

The intent audit reads the Search Console performance report page by page and asks two questions of each one: which searches does this page appear for, and are those the searches we want. Three patterns turn up over and over on small business sites.

Pages that exist but earn no impressions, because they were written from the inside out: a "services" page describing the business rather than answering "emergency plumber Bridgend". Pages competing with each other, where two addresses appear for the same search and Google splits the credit; on our own site we found the SEO service page linked from six places internally while a blog post on the same subject was linked from forty-eight, so the blog was outranking the page we actually sell from. And template pages, the most damaging pattern of all. We once generated town pages by swapping the place name in a shared template. Google indexed a handful and quietly dropped the rest as scaled content, and the fix was to rewrite every one by hand with genuine local substance; when we resubmitted them, all 26 were re-crawled the same day. No tool flagged the original problem. Reading the pages did.

Authority: the finding most reports bury

The links report in Search Console tells you how many domains link to your site, and a good auditor reads what kind of domains they are rather than counting them. Ours was instructive. Fifty-two linking domains sounds respectable until you notice that 39 of them are our own clients' websites, linking from a footer credit, and that Google discounts exactly that pattern. The thirteen independent domains, mostly directories, all pointed at the homepage rather than at the service pages we needed to rank. We had also syndicated fourteen articles to a developer community site, only to find nine of them served with tags telling Google not to index or follow them. Three findings, all sitting in a free report, none visible from a score.

That is the section that usually explains a site earning impressions without clicks, and it is the one that sets the honest timescale. Content and technical fixes move things in weeks; authority takes months, as our guide to how long SEO takes sets out clock by clock.

An audit that ends with a score has told you how the site feels. One that ends with a list of what to do next, in order, has told you what it is worth.

The local half: the Google Business Profile audit

For any business that serves an area, half the audit happens outside the website. The profile check covers the primary and secondary categories against the businesses actually appearing in the map results, the consistency of the name, address and phone number everywhere it is listed, review count and response habit, and, bluntly, geography. Map results are decided partly by where the searcher is standing relative to where the business is registered, and no amount of optimisation moves a Glynneath address into the Cardiff city-centre pack. An honest audit says so rather than selling you a plan to try. Our Google Business Profile guide covers the checks in detail.

What an SEO audit costs in the UK

Kind of audit	Typical UK cost	What you actually get
Automated tool report	Free	A crawl and a score; useful for spotting broken links, blind to intent and authority
Freelancer manual audit	£150 to £500	A person reading Search Console and the pages, usually with a prioritised list
Agency audit	£500 to £2,000 and up	Fuller coverage including competitors and links; often the opening move of a retainer pitch
Within a monthly plan	Included	Continuous checking rather than a one-off document, which is how audits are most useful

The one-off document has a shelf life. Search Console data moves weekly, Google changes what it rewards, and a list of fixes nobody implements is the most expensive kind of free. That is why we do not sell audits as a product: our SEO and performance service includes the technical audit and the monthly re-read for every site we build and manage, so the finding and the fix happen in the same month.

How to read the report you are handed

Whoever wrote it, read an audit in this order. First, anything that stops pages being indexed: those items are urgent and usually cheap. Second, the intent findings: which pages need rewriting or merging, and which searches have no page at all. Third, authority: what links exist, what kind, and a realistic plan for earning more, with realistic timescales attached. Last, the long tail of technical tidy-ups, which most reports put first because they are easy to list.

Then ask three questions of the auditor. What are the five things that would change enquiries, not scores? What would you do first, and why that? And what will this look like in Search Console in three months if it works? An auditor who can answer those has read your site. One who points you back at the score has run a tool.

What to do next

If you have a report and cannot tell what matters, send it to us with your Search Console access and we will tell you, plainly, which findings would move enquiries and which are padding. If you have no report and a site that was built by us, the audit is already part of your monthly plan. If the site was built elsewhere, the honest position is that we audit it as the first step of a rebuild conversation rather than as a standalone document, because fixing a site we cannot control never works out well for anyone. Get in touch and you deal with Jack directly, against published prices, with no obligation to go further than the conversation.