An SEO audit is a structured check of why your site isn't ranking or converting as well as it should. For a local service business it comes down to four areas: your Google Business Profile, your pages, your technical site health, and your reviews and citations. The good news is you can do a useful version yourself for free, and the most common problems it surfaces are cheap to fix.
We run our own home-service companies — a cleaning company in Tucson and an HVAC company in Sacramento — and audit them constantly. Here's the checklist we actually use, the free tools, and the honest line on when paying for an audit is worth it.
The biggest local ranking factor. Is it claimed, complete, in the right categories, with services, photos, and replies to every review? Most local wins start here, and it's free to fix.
Does each service and area have a clear, honest page with a unique title and an answer to the searcher's question? Missing or thin pages are the most common reason a site can't rank.
Mobile-friendly, fast, indexable, no broken links, and clean titles and headings. For a small site this is usually a short list, not the months-long project agencies imply.
Enough recent reviews and a name, address, and phone that match across directories. These move local rankings more than most technical tweaks, and reviews are free to earn.
Open Search Console — confirm your pages are indexed and see what queries you almost rank for.
Run PageSpeed Insights on your homepage and one service page — fix anything red on mobile.
Score your Business Profile for completeness and recent reviews. This is usually the biggest lever.
List every service and area you sell. If it doesn't have a page, that's your build list.
If you finish that and the gaps are obvious — three missing pages and ten more reviews to earn — you don't need to pay anyone for a report. You need to do the work.
We don't post stock testimonials. On a 15-minute call we screen-share the real dashboards behind our own businesses — live leads, rankings, and the exact page that produced each one. See the proof →
Plenty of "audits" are an automated report dressed up as a service. Skip paying if:
Hire out when the audit is real, prioritized, and followed by someone shipping the fixes. We start every client with that check, then our Grow in Google plan at $597/month does the ongoing work — the missing pages, the profile management, the review system, and attribution so you see which change moved the calls. You own the site and the work. Lighter need? The $249/month plan covers the site and AI lead capture; the full CRM and reputation stack runs from $1,750/mo.
Keep reading: SEO for home services, SEO for contractors, what local SEO costs, is local SEO worth it, and SEO for plumbers.
Search Console for indexing, PageSpeed Insights for speed, your Business Profile for completeness, and a manual check that every service has a page. That covers most of what holds a small site back.
Usually $300 to $1,500 for a one-time audit. The value is in the prioritized fixes and someone doing the work after — not the length of the report.
For local businesses, almost always the same three: an incomplete profile, too few recent reviews, and missing service or area pages.
Send your company name and city — we'll confirm your market is open and build a working demo within 48 hours. Free, no card, no commitment.
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