Website Audit
Before Visarrow touches a single page on your site, we crawl every page of it with Screaming Frog, the same tool professional SEOs use, and score it across content, technical health, and off-site authority. On its own, this audit is a $500 CAD service. Not a generic checklist.
What Is Website Audit?
A website audit is a full crawl of your site, page by page, checking exactly what's helping you rank, what's quietly costing you visibility, and what your competitors are doing that you aren't. We run it through Screaming Frog first, then layer in Google Search Console, Ahrefs, and PageSpeed data on top, and for Toronto trades and home-service businesses, we extend that same rigour to your Google Business Profile and citation consistency. Every finding gets ranked by actual impact, not just listed, so you know what to fix first and why.
What We Actually Check
Every factor below gets reviewed on every website audit, broken into the areas that actually move rankings.
On-Page & Content
What's actually written on your pages, and whether it's built to rank for what your customers search.
Keyword Focus
We check whether your pages are actually built around the terms that drive local traffic, like "emergency plumber Scarborough," not just the broad, easy terms that sound right but rarely convert. A site with no clear keyword focus struggles to rank for anything specific.
URL Structure
Every URL gets checked for length, lowercase formatting, and hyphen use instead of underscores. We also confirm the keyword and service area show up in the URL itself, since a clean URL is one of the first things both Google and a searcher read.
Title Tags
Title tags are measured against Google's pixel-width truncation limit, not just a character count, since a title that looks fine in a text editor can still get cut off in search results. We check every page for uniqueness and correct keyword placement near the start.
Meta Descriptions
We review length, uniqueness across every page, and whether each description is written like real ad copy with an actual call to action, not just a restated title tag. A missing or duplicate meta description quietly costs you click-through rate.
Heading Tags
Every page needs exactly one H1, with the keyword placed near the beginning and never built as an image. We check that H1 through H6 tags are nested in the correct order, since skipping levels confuses how search engines read the page's structure.
Content Depth
We check word count per page, run a spelling and grammar pass, and flag content that's thin, duplicated, or copy-pasted from a template across multiple location pages. Search engines treat duplicate content as a real negative, not a shortcut.
Internal Linking
We look at anchor text quality, how many links live on each page, and whether your related service and location pages actually link to each other. Pages that sit isolated with no internal links rarely rank as well as pages woven into the site's structure.
Image Names & ALT Tags
Every image gets checked for a descriptive, keyword-relevant file name and a written ALT tag, both for accessibility and because missing ALT tags are one of the most common issues we find on trade business websites.
Technical & Indexing
Whether Google can actually crawl, index, and load your site the way it's supposed to.
Robots.txt & Meta Robots Tags
We confirm your robots.txt file and page-level meta robots tags aren't accidentally blocking anything important from being indexed. This is a quiet, common mistake that can keep an otherwise solid page invisible to Google entirely.
XML Sitemap
We check whether a sitemap exists, whether it's current, and whether it's actually been submitted to Google Search Console. An outdated or missing sitemap makes it harder for new pages to get discovered and indexed quickly.
Redirect Audit
Every redirect gets checked for 301 versus 302 usage, since a 302 doesn't pass ranking value the way a 301 does. We also confirm your non-www and www versions redirect consistently to one canonical version of the site.
Duplicate Content
We identify pages that are quietly competing with each other for the same rankings, and check whether canonical tags are implemented correctly to tell Google which version of a page is the real one.
Broken Link Crawl
The full Screaming Frog crawl surfaces every 404 and dead internal link on the site. Each one gets mapped to a fix, since Google can reduce crawl depth on a site with too many broken links, which quietly limits how much of your site gets indexed at all.
HTML Code Validation
We run the site through the W3C validator to catch markup errors that can confuse how crawlers parse your content. Not every error needs fixing immediately, but a high error count is worth knowing about.
Page Load Speed
Tested with Pingdom for request count, total page size, and image compression. We compare your actual load time against Google's benchmark, since page speed has been a direct ranking factor since 2010 and matters even more on mobile.
Off-Page & Authority
What the rest of the internet says about your site, which search engines treat as a trust signal.
Inbound Link Quantity & Quality
We check how many external sites link to yours through Ahrefs, and just as importantly, whether those links come from real, relevant sources rather than low-quality directories that add little to no ranking value.
Linking Root Domain Count
The number of separate domains linking to you matters more than the raw link count. Ten links from ten different websites carry meaningfully more weight than ten links from a single site, so we check domain diversity specifically.
Anchor Text Distribution
We review whether your backlink profile looks natural or over-optimized around one exact keyword phrase, since Google can treat an unnatural anchor text pattern as a red flag rather than a ranking boost.
Domain Authority & Trust
We benchmark where your site's authority and trust metrics sit relative to the competitors actually ranking above you in your service area, not against some abstract industry average.
Social Visibility
We check whether your business has a findable, active presence on the platforms your actual customers use, since social signals contribute to the same trust and authority picture search engines look at.
Competitor Link Gap
We identify which competitors currently outrank you and what their link profile has that yours doesn't, so link building work targets a real, specific gap instead of link building for its own sake.
How We Prioritize What We Find
| Severity | What It Means |
|---|---|
| Critical | Actively costing you rankings or blocking indexing. Fixed first. |
| Needs Attention | Holding back performance but not urgent. Addressed in the early months of work. |
| Minor | Worth cleaning up, but low impact on rankings on its own. |
See A Real Audit
15 real Screaming Frog audits we’ve delivered to real clients across trades, home services, and local businesses, not a demo template. Open one to see exactly what your report will look like.
What’s Included
- A full Screaming Frog crawl of every page on your site
- A written report scoring content, technical, and off-page factors separately
- Every finding tagged Critical, Needs Attention, or Minor, so you know what actually matters first
- A competitive gap analysis showing what's ranking above you and why
- A review of your Google Business Profile and citation consistency, alongside the site audit
Frequently Asked Questions
What tool do you actually use for the audit?
Screaming Frog SEO Spider for the full site crawl, which is the same tool most professional SEOs use rather than an automated one-page scanner. We layer Google Search Console, Ahrefs, and PageSpeed Insights data on top of that crawl for the technical, off-page, and speed sections.
Is the website audit really free, or is it a sales pitch?
The audit itself is normally a $500 CAD service on its own. We offer it free as the first step before any paid work, with real findings delivered whether or not you decide to work with us afterward.
How do you decide what to fix first?
Every finding gets tagged Critical, Needs Attention, or Minor based on actual ranking impact, not just severity in isolation. A single missing ALT tag and a blocked robots.txt file are not treated the same way.
How long does a website audit take?
Most audits are completed and delivered within a few business days of receiving your business details, though sites with more pages or more technical complexity can take slightly longer to fully crawl and review.
What happens after the audit is done?
You get the findings either way. If you want to move forward, the audit becomes the starting roadmap for the work, with Critical items addressed first. If not, you still walk away knowing exactly what's costing you visibility.
Ready To Get Started With Website Audit?
Get a free audit of your Google Maps, Search, and AI visibility, or book a consultation to talk through your specific business.
Or call or WhatsApp us at +1 (437) 524-6641 to talk it through first, or email hello@visarrow.com.