"Free audit" often gets used as a thin excuse for a sales call. It's worth knowing what a genuine one actually involves, so you know what to expect and what to be suspicious of.
A real audit covers more than just rankings
- Technical SEO: site speed, crawlability, faceted navigation, and platform-specific issues
- Product and category page quality: content, structure, and whether pages target genuine search demand
- Structured data: whether schema is present, accurate, and actually working
- Competitor benchmarking: how you genuinely compare to whoever's currently outranking you
- GEO and AI visibility: how your store currently shows up, or doesn't, in AI-generated answers
What the output should actually look like
A genuine audit produces specific, prioritised findings, not a generic checklist that could apply to any store. You should come away knowing exactly what's wrong, roughly how much impact fixing it would have, and what order to tackle it in.
Why priority matters as much as the findings themselves
Not every issue carries equal weight. A missing meta description on one page matters far less than your site taking eight seconds to load on mobile. A genuinely useful audit tells you what to fix first, not just everything that's technically imperfect.
Why this matters before committing to ongoing work
An audit should be the starting point for deciding whether further work is worth it, and where the priorities genuinely sit. Committing to a retainer without first understanding your actual starting position means trusting someone else's judgement without being able to check it yourself.