What a website audit should tell you (and what to ignore)

Most free website audits are a PDF from a tool with your logo on the front. They give you a score out of 100, a list of 340 “issues”, and a call to action. They are generated in eleven seconds and they tell you almost nothing you can act on. Here is what a real audit contains, and which parts of the automated ones are safe to ignore.

The test for a useful audit

A useful audit answers three questions in order:

1. What is stopping this site from being found?
2. What is stopping the people who do find it from enquiring?
3. Which of those should be fixed first, given what it costs and what it is worth?

If a document does not answer the third question, it is an inventory, not an audit. Anyone can produce a list of problems. Ranking them is the work.

What should be in it

A crawl, read by a person

The crawl itself is automated — that part is fine. What matters is that someone looked at the output and separated the things that matter from the noise. Real findings look like:

• Four pages all targeting the same search, splitting the signal so none of them wins.
• Service pages with no internal links pointing at them, so authority never reaches them.
• A redirect chain three hops long between your old URLs and your current ones.
• Titles that are duplicated across 30 pages because a template wrote them.

What happens on a phone, on mobile data

Not a score. An actual observation: the hero image is 2.4 MB, the page takes this long on a mid-range handset, and here is the screenshot of what a visitor sees after two seconds. Your customers are not browsing on office wifi, so a test run on office wifi is not a test.

The enquiry path, walked end to end

Someone should have filled in your form. It is remarkable how often this reveals that the form has been broken for weeks, or that the confirmation email goes to an inbox nobody opens, or that the phone number in the header is not a clickable link on mobile. None of this appears in a tool report.

What the three sites beating you are doing

Not a list of their keywords. A read of their structure: how many pages they have for the thing you both sell, what questions they answer that you do not, and whether they are winning on content or on links. That tells you what the gap actually is.

Your business profile versus your site

Google cross-checks your business listing against your website. If the name, address, phone number or hours disagree between them, local visibility suffers. An audit should state what each source currently says, side by side, so you can see the mismatch.

A prioritised list with effort attached

The last page should be short. Three to six items, in order, each with a rough sense of effort and what fixing it is likely to do. Something like: consolidate these four pages into one — half a day — should stop them competing. Not 340 rows sorted by colour.

What to ignore in automated reports

These regularly appear as critical and almost never are:

• “Missing meta keywords.” Google stopped using that tag long before most of these tools were written.
• An overall score out of 100. It is a weighted average of things with wildly different importance. A site can score 92 and be invisible.
• “Too many / too few words on page.” There is no correct word count. There is only whether the page answers the question.
• Every image flagged for a missing alt attribute. Decorative images should not have one. Only the ones carrying information need it.
• “Keyword density” targets. Writing to a density figure produces text that reads like it was written to a density figure.
• Hundreds of “broken” external links. Worth checking, rarely urgent, and often just a site that was slow to respond during the crawl.
• Backlink “toxicity” scores. Mostly a product being sold to you. Google is reasonably good at ignoring junk links on its own.

Questions that reveal which kind you are being given

Before you accept any free audit, ask:

• Did a person read this? Ask them to explain finding number one in their own words.
• What would you fix first, and why that? A real answer compares value against effort. A sales answer says “everything”.
• What is fine about my site? If nothing is, the document is a sales tool. Most sites have things working that should be left alone.
• Is a rebuild necessary? Honest answer is often no. An agency that says yes to every site is answering a different question.
• Do I keep this document if I do not hire you? It should be yes.

The uncomfortable part

A genuinely honest audit will sometimes conclude that your website is not the problem. If your enquiries dropped because a competitor started answering the phone faster, or because your prices moved, no amount of structural work will fix that. An agency whose only product is websites has an incentive not to notice this. Ask the question directly and see whether you get a straight answer.

How ours works

Send a URL. Within two working days you get a written document: what is wrong, what we think it is costing you, what we would do about it in order of value, and what is already fine. It is written by the person who would do the work, not generated and forwarded.

There is no pitch attached, and you keep the document whether you work with us or not. If we think the honest answer is “fix three pages, do not rebuild”, that is what the document will say.