A free SEO audit worth your time covers five areas: the technical state of the site, the keywords you already rank for, what your direct competitors are doing, your local visibility, and a prioritised action plan with some sense of the effort involved. Allow five to ten pages of reading and a thirty-minute conversation to walk you through it. Anything that arrives as an automated forty-page report with a score out of 100 and two hundred errors is not an audit: it is a tool export, produced in four minutes.
The question is not whether it is free — it always is, and for a good reason. It is whether the document leaves you with something usable even if you never sign. This piece gives you the grid. It belongs to our series on pricing: the wider context is in what web marketing costs in Quebec.
Why it is free, and what that implies
A free audit is a sales tool. That is not a flaw, it is its nature: the supplier invests a few hours to show they understand your situation, hoping for a mandate. We do them too, for exactly that reason. What to take from it is a reading rule: a serious audit is useful to you even if you buy nothing, because it teaches you things you can fix on your own.
The counter-example is easy to spot. An audit whose every conclusion leads to the same place — you need our package — and none of whose recommendations can be carried out without the supplier is not a diagnosis. It is a brochure with your domain name on it.
The five areas it has to cover
One. Technical state. Display speed on a phone in real conditions, pages indexed or not by Google, broken links, heading structure, the mobile version. This is the easiest area to produce, because tools do it. Its value lies not in the list of problems but in the sorting: which ones actually cost you visits, which ones are noise.
Two. The keywords you already rank for. The most revealing area, and the one most often missing. You need to know which queries your site appears on today, at what position, and with what click-through rate. Positions between fifth and fifteenth place are almost always where the quickest gains sit: the work there is improving an existing page, not creating one.
Three. A comparison with two or three real competitors. Not the market, not a sector average: the businesses you run into when quoting. Which queries do they beat you on, which pages do they have that you do not. An audit that names no competitor has not looked at your market.
Four. Local visibility. For an SMB serving a territory, this is often the area that pays off fastest: the state of the Google Business Profile, consistency of your details across directories, volume and recency of reviews. The detail is in our guide to the Google Business Profile and in the piece on local search.
Five. A prioritised plan. The four areas above produce findings; this one produces an order. Three to five actions, ranked by expected effect against effort, with some indication of timing. Without it you have a list of problems and no idea where to start — which in practice means doing nothing.
An audit listing two hundred problems without ranking them has taught you nothing. It has given you two hundred reasons to do nothing.
The signs of a worthless audit
The overall score out of 100 comes first. No such score exists at Google; it is a tool invention, useful for selling, useless for deciding. Second is the complete absence of your own data: an audit produced without access to your Search Console is guessing at something you could know exactly. Third is a promise of position — nobody can guarantee a first place, and anyone promising one is selling something other than search.
Two quieter signals. An audit that only discusses technical matters and never content misses most of the real work. And an audit delivered minutes after your request was generated automatically: nobody looked at your site.
What a free audit cannot do
It does not replace full keyword research, which takes days and gets billed. It does not judge the editorial quality of your pages one by one. And it cannot measure what happens after the click: a site receiving traffic and not converting has a problem search will never fix — the causes lie elsewhere.
One common blind spot, finally: visibility inside generated answers. Being cited by ChatGPT or in a Google summary is not measured with the same tools, and most audits do not mention it yet. It is a field where SMBs are still barely present.
What to do with it afterwards
Take the top two or three actions and do them, with the supplier or without. Then fix the measurement before you start: positions on a handful of queries that genuinely matter to you, and the number of requests received per month. Not total traffic, which rises and falls for all sorts of reasons unrelated to your revenue. The five numbers a business owner should track apply here too.
And let time do its work: the effects of a search fix are measured in months, not weeks. One audit re-read six months later, against the same indicators, beats three audits from three different suppliers in three months.
Our full five-area audit is described on the SEO and GEO page, and the thirty-minute call is when we walk you through it — including when the conclusion is that search is not your problem.
Website speed and Core Web Vitals — the technical half of the audit, in detail.
Site migration without losing your SEO — what to record before any rebuild.