SEO Audit: What We Check and What You Get

What is an SEO audit?

An SEO audit answers one question: what is stopping this website from being found by the people who'd buy from it? It looks at your site the way search engines and AI assistants do, compares you with the handful of competitors you actually face, and turns what it finds into a prioritized plan.

A good audit is short on jargon and long on decisions. If you finish reading one and still don't know what to do on Monday, it wasn't a good audit.

We run SEO and AI search visibility as one audit. Google has said optimizing for its AI features is still SEO. So we check both surfaces in one pass and don't charge separately for the AI part.

What does our audit cover?

1. Technical health

• Indexing: which important pages are indexed, which aren't, and why
• Crawl access for Googlebot, Bingbot and AI search bots (robots.txt, CDN and firewall settings)
• Stray noindex tags, canonical errors and duplicate pages
• Snippet controls that would prevent AI Overviews from quoting you
• JavaScript rendering: is your content in the HTML?
• Core Web Vitals from real-user data, on your key templates
• Mobile usability
• Structured data: present, valid and matching the page
• Redirects, broken links, redirect chains and soft 404s
• XML sitemap accuracy

Details on all of these are in technical SEO.

2. Content and topic coverage

• Which pages bring traffic and leads, and which do nothing
• Pages competing with each other for the same queries
• Thin, outdated or duplicate content
• Gaps: important buyer questions you don't answer anywhere
• Whether key pages answer their question directly or bury it
• How original your content is compared with what already ranks
• Internal linking between related pages

3. Local presence (for local businesses)

• Google Business Profile completeness, categories and activity
• Review volume, recency, rating and reply rate versus competitors
• Name, address and phone consistency across major directories
• Location and service page quality

See local SEO for what good looks like.

4. Authority and brand

• Who links to you and whether those links are relevant
• Where competitors are mentioned and you aren't (directories, roundups, publications, communities)
• Author and business information that establishes who's behind the content
• Consistency of your business description across the web

5. AI search visibility

• Whether AI Overviews appear for your priority queries, and whether you're cited
• A prompt test across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Claude using real buyer questions, logging who gets named and which sources get cited
• Search Console generative AI data and Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance data, where available
• AI assistant referral traffic in your analytics

The method is explained in generative engine optimization.

6. Competitors

We benchmark you against three to five real competitors, the businesses your customers actually compare you with, not the biggest names in your industry. Where do they show up that you don't, and why?

What you get

• An executive summary. One page. What's working, what's broken, what matters most.
• A prioritized action list. Every recommendation scored by expected impact and effort, so the quick wins and the big wins are obvious.
• Exact fixes. Not "improve page speed" but "resize the home page hero image, which is the largest element on the page, and remove the unused chat script."
• An AI visibility baseline. Your prompt set and results, so future progress can be measured against something real.
• A walkthrough call. We go through it with you and answer questions.

You own the audit. Hand it to your developer, your in-house marketer or another agency. We'd rather you fix the problems than pay us to admire them.

What a typical audit finds

Every site is different, but the issues we find most often on small-business sites are depressingly consistent:

• A plugin or CDN setting blocking AI crawlers
• Service pages that never actually say what drives the cost, how the service works or who it's for
• A blog with dozens of posts and no clusters or internal links
• Two or three pages competing for the same main keyword
• Google Business Profile in the wrong primary category
• Huge images slowing the mobile home page
• No author information anywhere
• A redesign that broke old URLs without redirects

Most of these aren't expensive to fix. They just need someone to find them and put them in order.

How the audit runs

1. Kickoff. We learn your business, your best customers, your competitors and what success means to you.
2. Access and data. You grant read access to Search Console, analytics and your profile.
3. Analysis. Crawl, data review, competitor benchmarking and AI prompt testing.
4. Report. Summary, prioritized actions and baseline.
5. Walkthrough. A call to go through it together and agree next steps.

Proof that audits lead somewhere

Syssero's engagement started with an in-depth SEO audit that identified technical issues and site structure problems. Fixing those, rebuilding service pages and adding structured data led to a 330% increase in organic traffic within 12 months and first-page rankings for high-value keywords. Read the Syssero case study.

How much does an SEO audit cost?

It depends on the size of the site, whether you're a local or national business, and how many competitors and AI platforms we benchmark. We'll scope it on a free call. For context on how agency pricing works generally, see how much a marketing agency costs.

The audit is the first step of our SEO, AEO and GEO engagement, and it stands on its own if that's all you need.