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What an SEO audit of a small business site actually checks
This page is for an owner who has been told the site needs an audit and wants to know what that means. After reading it you will know which checks matter, what a findings sheet looks like, and how to run the main checks yourself.
In one paragraph
An SEO audit is a page-by-page check of whether Google can find, read, and trust your site, and it produces a list of specific defects with a fix for each one. On a small business site the checks that matter are indexing, titles and descriptions, headings, duplicate pages, broken links, speed on a phone, whether the business name and phone match everywhere, and whether each service has its own page. A good audit is a numbered findings sheet, not a score. A report with a grade out of 100 and no list of pages to change is not an audit.
What an SEO audit is
An SEO audit is a review of every page on your site against a fixed list of things Google needs in order to find the page, understand it, and show it for the right search. The output is a findings sheet. Each line names a page, the defect on it, and the change that fixes it.
The checks fall into a few groups. Indexing checks ask whether Google has kept the page at all. On-page checks look at the title tag, the meta description, and the headings. Structure checks look for duplicate pages, broken links, and pages with no links pointing at them. Technical checks cover speed on a phone, whether the site is served securely, and whether your robots.txt lets the AI assistant crawlers reach the pages. Local checks confirm that your name, address, and phone match your Google Business Profile and that each service you sell has its own page.
An audit is not a score. Automated tools will give you a number out of 100, and that number will move when you fix things that do not matter. The list of pages to change is the deliverable.
What an audit finds on a physical therapy clinic site
Portneuf Valley Physical Therapy runs two clinics, one in Pocatello and one in Idaho Falls, and sees about 140 patient visits a week between them. The site has 41 pages. It looks fine on a phone, and the owner was surprised to hear there was anything wrong with it.
The audit found that both clinic pages carried the same 300 words with only the address swapped, so Google had indexed one and ignored the other. Nine pages shared the title “Portneuf Valley Physical Therapy” with nothing else in it. Fourteen pages had no meta description. The Idaho Falls clinic listed a phone number on the site that did not match its Google Business Profile, because the clinic had changed lines a year earlier. The dry needling page, the practice’s fastest-growing service, was not in the index because the only link to it was inside a PDF brochure.
None of this was visible to a patient. Every one of these problems lived in the parts of the page a visitor never sees, which is why an audit reads the HTML rather than the screen.
A worked example: the findings sheet for a two-clinic practice in Pocatello
The full sheet ran to 32 lines. These are the ten findings that carried the most weight, with the count of pages affected and the fix applied.
| Check | Found | Pages | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pages in Google’s index | 23 of 41 | 18 | Build-time noindex tag removed from 11 pages, 7 unlinked pages added to the menu |
| Duplicate titles | Nine pages titled with the practice name only | 9 | One title per page naming the service and the city |
| Missing meta descriptions | Fourteen blank | 14 | Written for each page |
| Duplicate location pages | Pocatello and Idaho Falls pages 91 percent identical | 2 | Each rewritten with its own staff, hours, parking, and services |
| Phone number mismatch | Idaho Falls number differed from the Google profile | 1 | Corrected on the page, the footer, and the schema |
| Broken links | Six links to a retired booking system | 6 | Pointed to the current scheduler |
| Mobile speed | Largest Contentful Paint 4.9 seconds on the homepage | 5 | Hero image cut from 2.4 MB to 180 KB, unused slider plugin removed |
| Heading structure | Twelve service pages with no H1 | 12 | H1 added naming the service and the city |
| LocalBusiness schema | None on the site | 41 | Added for each clinic with matching name, address, and phone |
| Service pages | Dry needling, vestibular therapy, and pelvic health on one Specialties page | 1 | Split into three pages |
Every line named a page and a change, so the owner could hand the sheet to whoever maintained the site and get the same result. The index line is the one to read first. Eighteen pages that Google had never kept were the reason the practice was invisible for most of its services, and no amount of work on the 23 indexed pages would have changed that.
How to check your own site the way an audit does
- Count your pages in the index with
site:yourdomain.comand compare the number with the Pages report in Search Console. The guide to how Google sees your site explains each reason listed there. - Install the free Screaming Frog SEO Spider on a computer, enter your domain, and let it crawl. The Page Titles and Meta Description tabs show duplicates, blanks, and over-length entries in one list.
- In the same crawl, open the Response Codes tab and filter to Client Error 4xx to see every broken link and the page it sits on.
- Run your homepage and your busiest service page through PageSpeed Insights on the Mobile tab and note the Largest Contentful Paint figure. Google’s line is 2.5 seconds.
- Open your Google Business Profile and your site’s footer side by side and compare the name, address, and phone character by character. The citations and NAP guide covers why an exact match matters.
- Write your services on paper and open your site’s menu. Any service without its own page is a finding.
What we do about SEO audits
An audit from us is a findings sheet with a line for every defect on every page, the fix for each, and the order to do them in. You will see the same categories shown above with your own page addresses in place of the examples, and nothing graded or scored. When we do the fixing, the sheet becomes the checklist, and the index count is reported before and after so you can confirm the change in your own Search Console. We work with a two-clinic physical therapy practice whose clean addresses went from 21 to 807 of 1,281 in two days once the sheet was worked through. The audit is the first month of the SEO work we do for local businesses.
Questions people ask about SEO: what an SEO audit of a small business site actually checks
What does an SEO audit include?
An SEO audit includes an indexing check for every page, a review of each title, description, and heading, a search for duplicate pages and broken links, a mobile speed test, and a comparison of your name, address, and phone against your Google Business Profile. It ends with a findings sheet that names each page and its fix. Anything that ends in a score and no page list is a scan, not an audit.
Can I do an SEO audit myself?
Yes, the main checks can be run with Google Search Console, the free Screaming Frog crawler, and PageSpeed Insights, all at no cost. The steps above cover the checks that catch most problems on a small site. Reading the results and knowing which findings matter is the part that takes practice.
What is the difference between an SEO audit and an SEO score?
An SEO score is a single number produced by a tool from a weighted list of checks, while an audit is a list of specific defects on specific pages with a fix for each. A score can rise from fixing things that do not affect search. The page list is what changes where you show up.
How often should a small business audit its website?
Once when SEO work starts, and again whenever the site is rebuilt, moves hosts, or gains a new section. Between those points a monthly check of the Search Console Pages report catches most new problems. Adding pages and installing plugins are the two events that most often introduce new defects.
What is the most common problem an audit finds on a small business site?
Pages missing from Google's index, most often because of a noindex tag left on from the build or because nothing links to the page. Duplicate titles and blank meta descriptions are the next most common. All three are invisible on the screen and are found only by reading the HTML or the Search Console reports.
This page is part of the The SEO guide for local businesses. The other guides: SEO, AEO, GEO.
Have us do this on your site
Send the address of your site. We fetch every page from outside, the way Google does, and send back the list: every page, every flag, and what we would fix first. Then we fix it, verify each change from outside, and report it in plain language every month.
