What a website audit should actually check (and what most skip)

Plenty of audits stop at the website itself. You get an automated score, a long list of warnings and no sense of which ones matter. That kind of report is easy to produce and hard to act on.

This guide covers the seven areas an audit for a local service business should look at, the kinds of problems we find when we run them, and how to tell whether a report is worth your time.

What real audits turn up

We’ve prepared detailed audits for local businesses in healthcare, legal, auto repair and pest control. Those reports are private to the businesses involved, so we won’t name anyone here. The patterns, though, repeat often enough to be worth sharing:

• Basic business details missing from the website. No street address anywhere on the site, a full address missing from most pages, or no business hours listed at all.
• No structured data. Sites with no LocalBusiness markup at all, and service pages with a full FAQ section that had no FAQ markup behind it.
• On-page basics left undone. Generic page titles repeated across the site, missing meta descriptions on the pages that bring in revenue, and several H1 headings on one page.
• Broken or borrowed pages. Important pages returning “page not found” errors, and service pages carrying copy that referred to other businesses.
• Credentials hidden in the copy. Licenses, certifications and years of experience mentioned deep in a paragraph, or nowhere at all, instead of shown clearly and labeled for search engines.
• Leads with nowhere to go. No contact form, no online booking, no text back after a missed call, and no automatic follow-up after someone fills in a form.
• Nothing measuring results. No analytics installed, so nobody could say which pages or channels were producing calls.
• Email that may not reach the inbox. Missing email authentication records, which help mailbox providers confirm that email from your domain really came from you.

Not one of those problems is exotic, and most are cheap to fix. The reason they survive for years is that nobody checks them all in one place.

The seven checks, in plain English

Here is what each part of a good audit looks at, and why it matters to a business that depends on local customers.

1. 1.Google Business Profile. For many local searches, your profile on Google Search and Maps is the first thing a customer sees, before they ever reach your website. An audit should check your categories, services, hours, photos and reviews, and whether the profile is complete and current.
2. 2.Local listings. Your business name, address and phone number should read the same on your website, your Google profile and every directory that lists you. An audit should find old addresses, outdated phone numbers and duplicate listings.
3. 3.Speed and mobile. Many customers will find you from a phone, often in a hurry. An audit should test how quickly key pages load and respond on mobile, using the measurements Google publishes as Core Web Vitals (opens in a new tab), and flag anything that makes the site hard to use on a small screen.
4. 4.On-page basics. Every important page needs a clear title, a description, one main heading and copy that says what you do and where. An audit should also catch broken pages, redirect chains and leftover template text.
5. 5.Structured data. This is markup that labels your business name, address, hours, services and FAQs for search engines. Google documents how LocalBusiness structured data (opens in a new tab) works, and an audit should check whether yours exists, whether it is valid, and whether it matches what the page shows.
6. 6.Lead capture and follow-up. This check sits closest to revenue, and audits that only look at the website leave it out. What happens when someone fills in your form at 9pm, or calls while you’re on a job? An audit should test the path from first contact to booked appointment and point out where enquiries go quiet.
7. 7.Competitors. Your site isn’t judged in isolation. An audit should compare you with the businesses already showing up for the searches your customers make, so you can see what they have that you don’t, and where you’re already ahead.

Increasingly, an audit should also ask whether AI search tools can read and describe your business. We covered that in how AI search tools decide which local businesses to recommend. The good news is that most of the fixes overlap with the seven checks above.

What a good audit report gives you

The checks matter, but so does what you get back. A report worth your time has a few things in common:

• A ranked list. The fixes are ordered by impact, so you know what to do this week and what can wait.
• Plain-English explanations. Each problem says what it is, why it matters to customers and what fixing it involves.
• What is already working. Good audits list strengths too. Our audits regularly call out real assets, like a large base of genuine reviews or a library of useful articles, so they don’t get broken in a redesign.
• What needs your access. Some fixes, like Google Business Profile changes or directory claims, need the owner’s login or approval. A good report says so up front.
• No guarantees. Be wary of any audit that ends with a promised ranking or a guaranteed number of leads. No one outside Google controls search results.

Is an audit worth your time?

An audit is most useful at a turning point: before a redesign, before you start spending on ads, when calls have slowed for no obvious reason, or when you’re about to hire a marketing company and want an independent picture of where you stand first.

It is less useful if nobody will act on it. The value is in the fixes, so set aside time, or budget for help, before you ask for one. Several of the problems above, like missing hours or an outdated review link, take minutes to fix once someone spots them.

Get an audit that covers all seven

Our free audit reviews your Google Business Profile, your website’s SEO and technical health, your competitors, your AI search readiness and your lead capture. We then walk you through a ranked plan of the fixes that matter most, and the plan is yours to keep whether we work together or not.

If you’d rather see how we work first, browse our case studies or read about our SEO and local search service.