What Is an SEO Audit (and What Should It Include)?

20 October 2026

An SEO audit shows what stops your site being found in search. What a good report should contain, what UK providers charge, and how to check it yourself.

An SEO audit is a structured review of how well a website can be crawled, understood and found in search. It covers technical health, page content, and local and AI-driven visibility.

For a small business the value of an audit is not the document. It is knowing which of twenty possible problems is costing you enquiries.

TL;DR

- An audit reviews how a site can be crawled, understood and found in search. It reports; it does not fix.
- A useful report ranks findings by impact and effort, explains each in plain English, and names an owner.
- UK one-off prices run from about £150 to £2,500 or more. These are self-published list prices, not an average.
- An audit cannot create authority, better content, a stronger offer or a place in AI answers.

What an SEO audit actually is

An audit has two halves. The first is collection: a crawler records every URL, title, status code, heading and link. The second is analysis: someone reads that data and decides what actually matters — which is what you pay for. A crawler will list 1,400 "issues" on a 30-page site, and most are noise.

An audit is also a snapshot: it describes the site on the day it ran and changes nothing. Implementation is a separate and usually larger job.

What an audit is not

Not a tool score. A crawler health score out of 100 is not a Google metric and cannot be checked. Third-party tools "don't have access to our internal ranking data".

Not a ranking promise. Google's guidance is plain: "no one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google".

Not a guarantee of AI visibility. Google says there are "no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode" beyond normal indexing. No switch, no secret schema, no way to buy a citation.

Not a substitute for a plan. An audit answers "what is wrong", not "in what order, and who is doing it".

What an SEO audit should include

A serious audit for a small-business site usually splits into six parts. Not every provider covers all six, and the gaps are what you miss.

1. Technical SEO audit

The problems that quietly cap visibility: unfetchable pages, dropped pages, broken redirects. It should establish how much of the site is indexed and why not — Search Console's Page Indexing report gives Indexed or Not indexed with the reason, and validation "can take a week or two". Sitemaps cap at 50MB or 50,000 URLs and submitting one "is merely a hint"; robots.txt "is not a mechanism for keeping a web page out of Google". Plus canonical tags and Core Web Vitals.

2. On-page and content audit

What each page says, and whether it aims at one thing: titles, headings, thin pages, pages competing for the same search, alt text, and internal links that orphan useful pages. Google says E-E-A-T "isn't a specific ranking factor", so there is no score to optimise for and no preferred word count.

3. Local SEO audit

For a service business this often has the highest return. It checks your name, address and phone number are identical everywhere they appear — website, Google Business Profile, directories — that profile categories match what you do, and reviews are requested and answered.

4. Off-site SEO audit

Who links to your site, which sites mention your brand, and whether that has changed since last time. For most small businesses this is about whether the few local and industry links are relevant, and whether any are harmful.

5. AI search and GEO readiness

AI assistants and AI Overviews draw on pages that already work. Google requires a page to be "indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet", with "no additional requirements" beyond that. Its optimisation guidance adds that llms.txt is ignored and AEO and GEO "is still SEO". The check is unglamorous: are important pages indexed, crawlable and structured, and is there anything a machine can attribute? Our AI search visibility audit checklist has the specifics.

6. Competitor and SERP gap analysis

A good audit compares you with the pages ranking for the searches that matter: what they cover that you do not, and where demand goes unanswered. Be honest about the limits — no reliable public figure is available for search volume, keyword difficulty or cost per click. Google notes 15% of daily searches are new, so a snapshot of what you rank for is only part of the picture.

What a good audit report looks like

A usable report contains	A weak report contains
Findings ranked by business impact	Every issue weighted equally
Each issue in plain English	Technical shorthand, no explanation
Estimated effort alongside impact	No effort-to-impact signal
A named owner for every task	"Someone should look at this"
Dev-ready specifics: URL, fix, where	General advice to re-investigate
A prioritised first-30-days plan	300 recommendations, no start point
A statement of what it cannot fix	Silence on limits

Mark each finding by what it costs you and the work it takes, then fix the high-impact, low-effort items first.

How much does an SEO audit cost in the UK?

Prices vary enormously, and the difference is depth rather than cleverness. These are providers' own published list prices — no reliable UK market average is available.

Taieb SEO: £150 one-off audit (taiebseo.com)
Web Support Services: from £399 excl. VAT (websupportservices.co.uk)
Happy Webs: from £500 diagnostic, from £1,500 full audit (happywebs.co.uk)
Virtually Optimized: from £700 (virtuallyoptimized.co.uk)
Targeted SEO: £500–£2,500 plus VAT (targetedseo.co.uk)
Clear Click: from £2,000 plus VAT (clear-click.com)
Whitehat SEO: £2,500 and above (whitehat-seo.co.uk)

Three things drive the gap: how many pages get crawled, whether findings are dev-ready, and whether implementation is included. A £150 report leaves you with a list; a £2,500 report that gets fixed is a different product.

Free options are useful for a first pass — a crawl tool, Search Console and PageSpeed Insights cost nothing but time. Between those and a paid audit sit cheaper freelancers who specialise, and agencies who can implement too.

We do not sell a standalone audit product. The site audit covering schema, metadata and structure sits inside the monthly plan, because an audit nobody implements changes nothing. See SEO & GEO pricing for the tiers.

Want to know what is wrong with your site before you commit to anything?

The Super Shoppe's SEO & GEO service includes a site audit of schema, metadata and structure, delivered inside a monthly plan rather than as a standalone document. See our SEO & GEO pricing for the tiers and the 90-day guarantee terms.

Run a basic audit yourself in about an hour

Google's guidance is that small local firms "can probably do much of the work yourself". You will get past the black box.

Search Console, index coverage and performance. Open Pages, filter to Not indexed, and read the reason against each cluster. Then check queries rather than totals: which pages appear, and which important page gets nothing.
Search Console, AI visibility. Compare the AI-driven queries against the rest. Our guide to reading the AI visibility data in Search Console covers that step.
PageSpeed Insights and URL Inspection. Test your homepage and one key template on mobile, then run the live test on a URL to see whether Google can fetch and render it now.
Your XML sitemap. Check the last modified date and the URL count against the 50MB / 50,000 limit.
Google Business Profile. Open it privately as a customer and check your name, address and phone against the website.
A keyword spot-check. Search your three most important service phrases and note who appears. Then work through our small business SEO checklist for the ongoing side.

What to do in the first 30 days after an audit

An audit changes nothing by itself. Implementation is the expensive part, and where the value is won.

Week one — triage. Put every finding into three piles: fix now, fix next month, ignore. Fix now should be the smallest set of items removing a real block: a page not indexed for a fixable reason, a redirect loop, a broken template.

Week two — delegate. Give every task one named owner. If you have no developer, this is the moment to talk to one. Google's guidance is to grant read-only Search Console access at the audit stage, so a provider sees what you see.

Weeks three and four — start and track. Deciding what comes first is the hard part when money is tight; our guide to prioritising SEO improvements on a limited budget has a workable method.

Do not expect one month to prove anything. Google's core updates "don't target specific sites or individual web pages", so month-to-month movement is rarely your work.

Who should do it: in-house, a freelancer or an agency

In-house if the site is small, one person can hold it in their head, and someone is confident editing a CMS.

A freelancer if you need one pair of hands on a specific problem and are comfortable directing the work.

An agency if several things need doing at once, or you want implementation handled too.

Our SEO freelancer vs agency comparison covers the trade-offs, including what to ask before you commit.

How The Super Shoppe can help

The Super Shoppe's SEO & GEO service covers technical SEO, content planning and AI/GEO visibility for small businesses. The Visibility plan at £399/month includes a site audit of schema, metadata and structure, 30 branded AEO/SEO articles a month, 10 AI prompts tracked across ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, $800+/month in backlinks placed inside real articles on 4,000+ partner sites, auto-publishing to WordPress, Shopify and Webflow plus eight more, Reddit and Quora agents, and weekly social posts. Every article ships with internal links, FAQ and JSON-LD schema, plus a per-article quality score out of 100 — a measure of that article, not your site's health. The Crowd plan at £899/month scales this to 120 articles a month across four languages, 50 AI prompts and $1,600+/month in higher-authority backlinks. The Bundle at £400/month adds a custom website and hosting. SEO & GEO pricing has the full breakdown.

The risk reduction, stated plainly: if the website shows no growth in organic clicks, organic impressions or Domain Rating after 90 days, the subscription fees paid for that period are refunded. Conditions apply, including an active subscription for at least three consecutive months and publishing every article produced.

Sources

Frequently asked questions

How do I tell a real SEO audit from a tool export?

Look for the signs above: findings sorted by impact, plain-English explanations, estimated effort, a named owner, dev-ready specifics, and a clear statement of what it cannot fix. If it opens with a health score out of 100 and no method, it is a tool export.

Will an SEO audit get me rankings?

No. Google's guidance is that "no one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google". An audit improves the conditions for a page to be understood and eligible to be shown; it does not buy a position, and it cannot manufacture authority, better content or a place in an AI answer.

Can I do an SEO audit myself?

Partly. Most of a first pass takes about an hour and is worth doing before paying anyone. What you cannot do alone is judge which findings matter for your business, or implement the fixes. Google's guidance for small local firms is that they "can probably do much of the work yourself".

Do I need an audit before a redesign, or before hiring an agency?

Before a redesign, yes — treat it as a baseline, so you know what was broken and can prove what was fixed. Before hiring an agency, not as a purchase: run your own hour first. One exception — a brand-new site with no impressions needs tracking set up first.

What access does an SEO provider need?

Read-only Google Search Console access is the useful minimum, granted at the audit stage so a provider sees what you see. Ask what else is requested — a CMS login, analytics access — and why. Never hand over your Google password.