Free Website Audit

What a Free Website Audit Should Tell You (and What to Do With It)

Plenty of tools will give you a free website audit in seconds. You type in your address, wait a moment and get a score out of 100 with a long list of red and amber warnings.

That can be useful. But it often leaves you with more questions than answers. Which of the 140 issues actually matter? Will fixing them bring in more enquiries? Where do you start?

A good audit should answer those questions for you. Here's what to look for and what to do once you've got one.

Bigfoot Agency

Article Summary

As a 5-Star SEO Agency, we believe in 100% transparent reporting. Here is what you need to know:

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The problem with most free audits

Automated tools are good at spotting technical issues. Missing page titles, broken links, slow images. They're less good at telling you what matters for your business.

A plumber in Barnsley and a national online shop get the same checks and often the same score. But they need completely different things. The plumber cares about the map pack and reviews. The shop cares about product pages and category structure.

So a score on its own isn't the goal. What you want is a short, clear answer to "why am I not getting more enquiries, and what should I do about it?"

What a useful audit should cover

1. Can Google find and index your pages?

If Google can't crawl or index a page, it can't rank it. That also rules it out of Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, because Google says a page has to be indexed and eligible to show in normal search to appear there.

A good audit checks for pages blocked by mistake, pages missing from Google's index, broken links and redirect problems. Google Search Console is free and will show you a lot of this yourself.

2. Is your site fast and usable on a phone?

Google's Core Web Vitals measure loading, responsiveness and visual stability. Google's own guidance on good scores is:

2.5s

Largest Contentful Paint

within 2.5 seconds

200ms

Interaction to Next Paint

200 milliseconds or less

0.1

Cumulative Layout Shift

0.1 or less

An audit should tell you whether you pass and, more usefully, what's causing it if you don't. Our technical SEO page covers how we fix these.

3. Where do you rank for the searches that bring in work?

This is where many free audits fall short. Knowing your site has 30 missing image descriptions doesn't help much. Knowing you're on page three for "accountant Sheffield" while two competitors sit in the top three does.

A useful audit picks out the searches your customers actually use and shows where you stand for each. For a local business, that should include the map pack as well as the normal results.

5. How do you compare with competitors?

Your rankings only make sense next to the businesses you're up against. A good audit compares you with a few real local competitors: their reviews, their content and where they show up that you don't.

6. Is your Google Business Profile set up properly?

For local businesses this is often the biggest gap. Sometimes there's no profile at all.

Client story

That was the case for one of our catering clients. They served customers across the UK, so they'd assumed they didn't need a Google Business Profile, and they had no visibility on Google Maps at all. Fixing that was part of what took them from around four enquiries a week to several a day, with search visibility up 313% year on year. The full story is in our catering SEO case study.

7. What should you do first?

This is the most important part and the one most often missing. An audit should end with priorities, not a pile of findings. Ideally:

  • The three biggest things holding you back
  • One quick win you can do this week
  • A plan for the next 90 days

If an audit doesn't tell you where to start, it hasn't done its job.

What to do with your audit

Once you've got it, don't try to fix everything at once. Here's a simple way through.

Do the quick win straight away. It might be claiming your Business Profile, fixing a broken contact form or unblocking a page. Small fixes often matter more than they look.

Sort the rest into three piles. Things you can do yourself, things your web developer needs to do and things that need an SEO specialist. Most audits mix all three together.

Ignore the noise. Plenty of warnings in automated reports make little practical difference. If it doesn't affect whether customers can find you, trust you or contact you, it can wait.

Check again in 90 days. Run the same checks and see what's moved. SEO builds over months, so give changes time to show.

Our article on common SEO mistakes is a good companion read if you want to spot the usual problems yourself. For the more technical side, see our guide to technical SEO audits in the age of AI.

What's in our free audit

We built our free website audit around the questions above. It's a written report, put together by our team using a mix of people and AI tools, and you'll get it within one working day.

It covers:

The real answer ChatGPT and AI search give when a customer asks for a business like yours, and who they recommend instead

Where you rank in Google and the map pack for the searches your customers use

How you show up across Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Bing Copilot

Your Google Business Profile

How you compare with your competitors

The three biggest things holding you back, one quick win and a 90-day plan

When you request it, you tell us what you're hoping to get from it, such as more enquiries, showing up in AI search or winning more local traffic. That way the audit answers your actual question.

If you just want a fast technical check, our instant SEO audit tool gives you an automated report straight away.

FAQ

FAQ

Get your free audit

If you want to know why your site isn't bringing in more enquiries and what to do about it, request your free written audit. It's free, it lands within one working day and there's no obligation.

A person pointing at printed charts and graphs on a desk, with a laptop showing a report in the background
Get your free website audit

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Rated excellence in SEO services

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