What an SEO audit is, and what an SEO checker is not
A free SEO checker, including the newer AI SEO checkers that promise to analyse your site for Google's AI features, scans your pages and returns a list of warnings. That list is useful, but it is not an audit. Tools find symptoms. They cannot tell you which of two hundred warnings actually costs you customers, which ones are harmless, and which important problems they never looked at.
A proper SEO audit adds the judgement. We look at your site the way Google and your buyers do: can the pages be found and indexed, does each page answer a real search, does the site earn trust, and does a visitor know what to do next. Then we weigh every finding against your business. A missing meta description on a privacy page is noise. A service page that Google cannot index is a leak.
The result is not a longer list. It is a shorter, ordered one, with reasons.
Technical SEO vs on-page SEO vs off-page SEO
People often ask about the difference between technical SEO and on-page SEO. The three terms describe layers of the same job, and a good audit covers all of them, because a weakness in one layer limits the others.
| Layer | What it covers | Typical audit question |
|---|---|---|
| Technical SEO | Crawling, indexing, rendering, redirects, canonicals, speed, structured data | Can Google reach, render and index every page that matters? |
| On-page SEO | Titles, headings, content, internal links, search intent per page | Does each important page answer the search it targets better than competitors? |
| Off-page SEO | Backlinks, mentions, reviews, Google Business Profile | Do respected sites and real customers vouch for you? |
Our audit framework: the 10-point website score
Every audit uses the same ten points, so you can compare your site against competitors and against itself a year from now. The framework is the same one behind all our SEO services.
- Technical foundation & indexing: crawlability, index coverage, redirects, canonicals, sitemaps.
- Speed & Core Web Vitals: loading, responsiveness and visual stability, measured on real data where available.
- Mobile experience: navigation, forms and tap targets on a phone.
- Keyword & content coverage: which searches you answer, which you miss, and where pages compete with each other.
- Local & international visibility: Google Business Profile, business details, and English and French versions where relevant.
- Authority & backlinks: the quality and relevance of sites linking to you, and risky patterns.
- Trust & E-E-A-T: who is behind the content, credentials, sources, policies, reviews.
- Conversion & user flow: the path from landing page to call, form or purchase.
- Brand & positioning: how clearly the site says who you serve and why you are the better choice.
- AI visibility: whether AI assistants and Google's AI features mention and cite you for your key questions.
Technical SEO: where we dig deepest
Technical problems rarely announce themselves. A site can look fine in a browser and still be partly invisible to search engines. In the technical part of the audit we check:
- Indexing. Which pages Google has indexed, which it has excluded, and why, using your Search Console data.
- Rendering. Whether content that loads through JavaScript is actually visible to Google.
- Redirects and canonicals. Redirect chains, old URLs from previous redesigns, and canonical tags that point the wrong way.
- Duplicate and thin pages. Filter URLs, tag pages, near-identical location pages.
- Structured data. Whether your markup is valid and describes what is really on the page.
- Language versions. For bilingual Canadian sites: whether English and French pages are correctly connected with hreflang.
- Speed. Measured against Google's Core Web Vitals, with the causes named, not only the scores.
Online stores get extra attention for faceted navigation, variants and product templates. If that is your situation, our page on ecommerce SEO explains what we look for.
What you receive
- A score on each of the ten points, so you see at a glance where the site is strong and where it is weak.
- Findings in plain language: what is wrong, why it matters, and what it costs you to leave it.
- A prioritized action plan sorted by impact and effort: what to fix first, what can wait, and what is not worth doing.
- A competitor comparison on the points where the difference is made in your market.
- A walkthrough call in which we take you and your team through the findings and answer questions.
The plan is written so that your developer, your marketing team or we can execute it. You are not locked in. If you want someone senior to guide your team through the work afterwards, that is what our SEO consultant work is for.
One clarification, because it is often asked: the audit is a project with its own fixed scope and price. It is not the same as the paid strategy session, which is a conversation about your ambition and fit, not a review of your site.
When an SEO audit makes sense
- Before a redesign or migration. Knowing what currently ranks, and why, prevents the most common and expensive SEO loss. See our website redesign approach.
- After a drop in traffic or enquiries that nobody can explain.
- Before investing in content or links. New pages and backlinks do little on a site with indexing problems.
- When you change provider and want an independent picture of where things stand.
- When you expand into new cities, into Quebec, or into the US.
Some sectors have their own specific risks. A dental SEO audit, for example, also checks whether treatment pages and reviews respect the advertising rules of the provincial regulator. We cover that on our dental SEO page.
Common mistakes after a website audit
- Fixing everything at once. A long list tempts teams to start at the top and run out of time halfway. Work in order of impact.
- Chasing a tool's score. A perfect score in a checker is not a goal. Enquiries and sales are.
- No owner per action. Findings without a named person and a date tend to stay findings.
- Ignoring conversion. More visitors to a page that does not persuade is a cost, not a result.
- Never re-measuring. Run the same ten points again after the main fixes, so you know what actually changed.
What drives the cost of an SEO audit
We do not publish audit prices, because a twenty-page service site and a bilingual store with thousands of products are different jobs. What drives the scope:
- The number of pages and templates.
- The platform, and how much of the site depends on JavaScript or apps.
- Languages and markets: English, French, US versions.
- Access to data such as Search Console, analytics and server logs.
- How deep the competitor comparison needs to go.
The path is the same for every project: a paid strategy session, then, if we are a fit, a proposal with a fixed scope and fixed price. More on our pricing page.