Every agency email promises an audit. The word covers everything from a robot PDF nobody reads to a person going through the site page by page. This is the actual list: what gets checked, why each item matters, and which parts you can check yourself before dinner.
The list, in one table
A real audit is not one tool run once. It looks at the website, the Google listing, the reviews, and the competition, because a customer meets all four before the phone rings.
| What gets checked | The question it answers |
|---|---|
| Every page: title, description, headings, images | What does Google read on each page, and is it right |
| Sitemap and indexing | Does Google know which pages exist, and are they fresh |
| Broken links and dead files | Is anything a visitor clicks going nowhere |
| Speed on a phone and on a desktop | How long does a customer wait |
| The Google Business Profile | Is the listing complete, correct, and current |
| Reviews on every listing | What do customers see, and does anyone answer |
| Directory and partner listings | Does the business show the same name, address, and hours everywhere |
| Analytics | Is anything counting visitors at all |
| Accessibility | Can everyone use the site, and is it costing search |
| Competitors | What do the other companies' sites and listings do better |
Most audit guides online stop at a list like this one. What matters is what the checks turn up on real sites, so here is what they turned up on real sites.
Every page, because the homepage is the best one
The homepage is usually the page somebody once polished. The problems live everywhere else, which is why an audit reads every page, not one.
The first full crawl of a Honolulu office technology dealer's site, 120 pages, found:
- 111 of 120 pages with no main heading at all
- the phone number rendered as a heading on every page
- 45 page titles too long for Google to show whole
- eight earlier title rewrites that had quietly reverted
- no analytics anywhere
None of that was visible from the homepage. Titles matter because the title is the blue line a searcher clicks, and when a title has a problem, Google may rewrite it from whatever else it finds on the page. You can see what that crawl led to in the office dealer case study.
An audit that runs on a schedule also catches what breaks later. The first Friday re-crawl of that same site, 123 pages by then, found four PDFs that had gone missing that week. Nobody had noticed.
What 12 Honolulu homepages showed last week
On September 28 we ran the homepage part of the audit on the websites of 13 air conditioning contractors in Honolulu, found through a Google Maps search. Twelve let the check run. Out of those 12:
- 7 have no analytics. Nothing counts their visitors.
- 1 has no title tag, and 6 of the 11 that do run past the roughly 60 characters Google shows.
- 1 has no description, and 3 run past the roughly 160 characters Google shows. The longest is 244.
- 4 have no main heading or more than one. Google expects exactly one.
- 56 of the 187 images across the sites have no alt text, the caption Google reads because it cannot see a photo. That is 30 percent.
- 2 have no business markup, the code that states the business type, address, and hours in Google's format.
- 2 have told Google about nothing new since last year or earlier, by the dates in their own sitemaps. A sitemap is the file that tells Google which pages exist and when they changed.
These are companies with real reviews and real customers. The pattern repeats trade by trade: we found the same problems on roofing and plumbing sites here in September.
Speed, and the number Google puts a color on
An audit runs Google's own speed test for phones, because most visitors arrive on one. The score comes back 0 to 100, and Google's documentation is blunt about the colors: 90 or above is good, 50 to 89 needs improvement, below 50 is poor.
The 12 air conditioning sites scored from 35 to 100, with a median of 73. Three of the 12 sit under 50, in the red.
A slow score is not a verdict on the business. It is usually oversized photos and plugins piled up over years, and it is fixable without a new website.
The catch with automated scores
Here is why a score alone is not an audit. Google's speed tool also includes its own basic SEO check, and one of those 12 sites scored a perfect 100 on it while still missing items from the list above.
That check does not look at analytics, at alt text on every image, or at business markup. A robot PDF built on scores like that one tells you the site is fine when it is not, or buries you in warnings with no order to them.
What should come back from a real audit is shorter and harder to produce: the list of what needs attention, in the order the fixes are worth doing, with what each one is worth. A person has read it before you do. And the list is yours whether or not you hire anyone.
The part you can run tonight
You do not need to request anything to start. The homepage items in this article are all checkable on screen, one at a time, with the free tools: the title and description as Google cuts them, the headings, the images without alt text, the sitemap and its dates, the business markup, and the phone speed score.
Ten minutes with those checks tells you whether the rest is worth a look. If it is, the free audit covers every page, the listing, the reviews, and the competitors, or you can book a call and go through it together.