99creatix Book a 15-minute fit call
Glossary · Agency & pricing

SEO audit

Also called website audit

Reviewed 31 Oct 2026 By Madiha Fatima 4 min read Check it yourself: yes, free

4 min
Definition

An SEO audit is a structured review of a website's technical health, content and links that ends in a prioritised list of what to fix first. A good one tells you what is broken, why it matters for your leads or sales and what each fix would take. A poor one is an automated report with a sales call attached.

The word covers everything from a free tool's crawl, run in a minute, to a two-week review by a person who reads your pages. Ask which one you are being offered and what the output looks like.

Short version: a prioritised list of what to fix, not a score.
Why it matters for your business

The audit is where
the proposal comes from.

Almost every SEO engagement starts with an audit, and the audit decides what you are then sold. If it was a software crawl with a red score on the cover, the proposal will be a list of warnings dressed up as a plan. If a person read the site, opened Search Console and looked at who outranks you and why, the proposal will say which five things matter and which fifty do not.

A fair audit has three qualities: it is prioritised, it explains each finding in terms you can act on and it is yours to take elsewhere. A free audit that exists only to open a sales conversation is a lead magnet, which is fine as long as you know that is what it is. Paying for an audit and then being told the findings are only revealed once you sign a retainer is not fine. Ours is a priced item with its contents on the price list.

The useful question is not how bad the score is but what fixing the top three would change. Indexing problems and broken canonicals on a law firm's practice-area pages cost cases. A missing alt text on the team photo does not. An audit that cannot tell the two apart is not finished.

Example

Two audits of the same
law firm website.

The automated one

A forty-page PDF with a health score on the cover and a few hundred warnings, led by missing alt text, low word count and duplicate H1 tags. Every warning is weighted the same. A fix-everything proposal is attached, priced by the month.

The one a person wrote

Three pages. Finding one: the six practice-area pages are not indexed because the theme points every canonical at the homepage. Finding two: the contact page takes several seconds to load on a phone. Finding three: nobody links to the firm except its own social profiles. Each finding has what it costs the firm, what the fix is and who should do it. The first two are a developer's afternoon. The third is the actual SEO work.

How to check it on your site

Four ways to judge an audit before paying for one.

Tick each one as you go. 0 of 4 checked on your site.

  1. Ask for a sample

    A fair agency will show you an anonymised audit from a past client. Look for priorities and plain sentences. If every page is a screenshot of a tool with a score on it, that is what you will get.

  2. Ask what you keep

    The audit should be yours in full, whether or not you hire them afterwards. If the findings are "presented on the call" and the document stays with the agency, you are paying for a sales meeting.

  3. Run the free checks yourself first

    Open Search Console, read the Pages report for what is not indexed and run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights. If the audit you then receive does not mention what you found, it did not look.

  4. Check it against the price list

    An audit should be a priced item with a stated output, not a free hook for a retainer. Ours is month one of the SEO service and its contents are on the price list.

Related terms

Usually in the same sentence.

Read next

Where this shows up in practice.

SEO explained What technical SEO actually means

The technical half of an audit in plain English, so you can tell a real finding from a tool warning.

 SEO explained Why your website is not showing on Google

The indexing problems an audit should catch first, and how to find them yourself in Search Console.

 Service SEO & AI search

The audit is month one of the rolling SEO work, and you keep the document whatever you decide next.
Related service

The technical and content audit is month one of the SEO service, and you keep the document whatever you decide next. Prices are on the price list, not on a call.

See the SEO service
Reviewed by Madiha Fatima, founder of 99creatix

Every entry in this glossary is written and checked by the person who runs the agency, reviewed at least once a quarter and dated. Last reviewed 31 October 2026.

Spotted an error or a term we are missing? Tell us and it is fixed within the week.

Did this explain it?
Next step

Been handed an audit
you cannot act on?

Bring it to the fit call. In fifteen minutes we will tell you which findings matter for your leads, which are noise and what the first three fixes would involve.

Book a 15-minute fit call Back to the glossary