What Should an SEO Audit Actually Deliver?

By Ryan Goering, founder and CEO of BaaDigi, a contractor marketing agency. Last updated: September 2026.

What access and scope should you agree first?

Define the site, page groups, locations and business goals under review. Identify which data is available and which findings will rely on a limited public crawl. Read-only access is appropriate for diagnosis where supported. An audit does not automatically authorize changes to pages or accounts.

Google’s SEO hiring guidance recommends asking about methods, prior work and measurement. Apply those questions to the audit itself: who reviews the evidence, what is delivered and whether implementation is included. Use the agency comparison checklist when evaluating competing offers.

What should a useful finding contain?

Illustrative finding: a water-heater service link leads to a removed page. The work order names the broken link, checks whether a relevant replacement exists, updates the source and tests the destination. It does not invent a monthly revenue loss from the broken link.

Which technical problems deserve attention?

Inspect access, indexing instructions, redirects, canonical choices and internal links on important pages. Google’s canonical guidance explains how publishers signal preferred versions of duplicate or similar pages. A canonical hint is not a substitute for deciding whether two pages serve the same customer need.

Test performance and mobile usability where they affect the experience. Core Web Vitals cover loading, interaction responsiveness and layout stability. Distinguish real-user data from a single controlled test. Do not translate every slow measurement into an automatic search penalty or treat a perfect laboratory score as proof of business success.

Basic hygiene is not universal either: in the same audits, 93.7% of sites used HTTPS and 73.9% had a robots.txt file, and the median mobile PageSpeed score was 61 against 83 on desktop. Those are cheap findings; the audit earns its fee by saying which of them touches a page customers use.

Check contact actions separately from search access. A page can load and be indexed while its form sends nothing to the office. Use an agreed test procedure and keep test inquiries out of production lead totals.

How should content be evaluated?

Compare the intended query or customer need with what the page actually answers. Verify prices, service claims, credentials and case-study evidence. Identify useful material before recommending a rewrite. Google’s helpful-content guidance supports original information, clear sourcing and visible responsibility; it is not a required word-count formula.

A content gap is a question worth investigating, not automatically a new page. Check existing coverage, actual business relevance and available demand evidence. A longer keyword phrase is not necessarily easier to rank for or more profitable. Report measured search data with its source and date; do not fill missing volume with an estimate.

When should an old article be kept, merged or retired?

Keep and improve a page when it serves a distinct useful purpose. Merge overlapping material into an appropriate stronger page when that preserves the reader’s intent. Retire content when it no longer belongs and there is a documented reason. Review traffic, relevant links and historical context before changing URLs.

Map any redirect to a genuinely relevant destination rather than sending every retired post to the homepage. Update internal links and index references as part of the same work order. Preserve backups and record why the decision was made. The home service SEO plan helps position retained articles around the services they support.

What should a local and AI review add?

Local review should start by confirming the profile exists: the audit found a Google Business Profile for only 57.9% of the 1,047 businesses. Then verify the real business identity, hours, coverage and profile eligibility. The business-information checklist separates incorrect facts from minor formatting differences. Do not recommend a fake office or expose a private address merely to satisfy a tool.

An AI review should save the question, product, answer and linked sources. A missing mention alone does not identify a repair. Inspect a demonstrated factual error or access problem and distinguish a business name from a direct website citation. The AI visibility check guide defines that separate evidence record.

How should price and completion be evaluated?

BaaDigi publishes a $497 AI Visibility Audit for one business and one market; that is its diagnostic offer, not a quote for every technical audit or the implementation behind it. For an ongoing program, the Stability Engine is $497 monthly plus $995 setup, ad spend separate, with up to $1,600 per month of Google spend managed inside it. Get a scope that matches your actual problem.

Accept the audit when findings are understandable, supported and prioritized, with owners and completion checks. Accept repairs only after those checks pass. Evaluate later search and inquiry changes over comparable periods while noting other changes; a repaired issue and a future commercial result are different milestones.

How does LLM SEO change an SEO audit?

An audit written for LLM SEO checks whether each important page can be quoted, not only whether it can be crawled. That adds four findings to the report: does the service page open with a direct answer, does it publish a real price or the conditions behind one, are services, area and hours stated as plain structured facts, and does the page say anything an engine would cite over a competitor’s. It also adds a saved prompt record with the engine, date, answer and cited sources. The baseline is worth writing down: in 254 BaaDigi audits that ran the check, Perplexity named the audited business for its own service-and-city query 23.2% of the time. The LLM SEO glossary entry defines the term.