Free SEO audit: what you should get and what is bait

A useful free SEO audit shows you, using your own site's data, which 3–5 problems are holding you back in Google and in what order to fix them. If all you get is a score from 0 to 100 and a long, automatically generated PDF, you have received sales bait, not an audit.

A free audit is not a bad thing in itself. It is how a provider shows you how they work before you pay them anything, and you are entitled to use it exactly that way. Only one question matters: once you have read it, do you know what to do on Monday morning?

What a useful free SEO audit should contain

A free audit cannot be complete, and it does not need to be. But even a short one should include these things:

• Data about real searches, not just an automated scan. A tool that crawls your site finds technical errors, but it does not know which searches you appear for. Google Search Console shows you that: the searches, your positions and your clicks. If the provider did not have access to it, the audit should say so. If you have never used it, read how to use Google Search Console.
• Indexing status. How many pages your site has, how many are in Google and why the rest are missing. If your important pages are not indexed, the rest of the audit barely matters; see also why your site is not showing up on Google.
• Problems tied to a specific page. "The /services page has a title Google cuts off, and it does not mention your city", not "12 images missing alt text".
• An order. What to fix first, why, and roughly how long each item takes.
• Content gaps. What your customers search for and cannot find on your site. A missing page for your main service is almost always a bigger problem than 40 technical warnings.
• For a local business, the Google Business Profile: the primary category, plus a name, address and phone number identical to the ones on your site.
• What it did not check. An honest audit tells you where it stopped and what still needs a look.

What is just bait

The 0–100 score. An audit tool's score counts the technical errors a robot can detect. It does not measure domain authority, the quality of your copy, or whether you have the right page for what the customer is searching. Our own example: mpowebstudio.com reached a health score of 100/100 in Ahrefs Site Audit, and yet, in our September 2026 data, for highly competitive national searches such as "preț site web" (website price), we were still around position 85. A new domain needs time and links, and no technical score changes that.

The 40-page PDF. If the same warnings appear for every site (text-to-HTML ratio, "keyword density", the meta keywords tag, which Google does not use), the report was generated, not read by a person. A simple test: cover up the site's name. If the report would fit any other site, it is generic.

Manufactured urgency. "87 critical errors" sounds serious, but it can mean 87 images without alt text. What matters is how many problems cost you customers, not how many lines the list has.

The conclusion written in advance. Every problem leads to "you need our monthly plan", and nothing is marked as something you could fix yourself in ten minutes.

Ranking promises. "Page one in 30 days." Google does not sell positions, so nobody can guarantee them.

Requests for passwords. A free audit does not need your site's admin password. In Search Console you can add someone as a restricted user: they can see most reports but cannot change anything. That is also what Google's guide to hiring an SEO recommends: for an audit, read access only.

How to judge an audit in five minutes

If the audit passes four of the five questions, it deserves to be taken seriously, even though it is free and even if you buy nothing afterwards.

What a paid audit adds

A paid audit has the time to do what a free one only touches on:

• Every page, not a sample, including redirects, duplicate content, pages no internal link points to, and how Google sees the site on a phone.
• Analysis by page type. Not just a total number of clicks, but which types of pages bring clicks and which only bring impressions. On our own site, for example, the city × industry pages had, as of 24 September 2026, an average position of 15.6 and a click-through rate of about 2.6%, roughly four times that of the blog articles (0.7%). A figure like that tells you where it is worth investing next.
• Keyword and competitor research: which searches you have a real chance at now, and which are still too early.
• Links: who links to your site and what you are missing compared with the sites on page one.
• A plan with timelines: what gets done in the first month and what in the next three.

In Romania, an audit for a small site usually costs €200–300, based on the price lists we checked in how much SEO costs in 2026. Always ask whether the price includes the fixes or only the list of them. A good list that nobody acts on changes nothing in Google.

What to do with the findings

• Fix what blocks first. Pages accidentally removed from the index, wrong redirects, a missing sitemap. Until these are solved, the rest matters very little.
• Then the pages that already get impressions. A page that already appears on Google's first two pages but has a cut-off or vague title is often a quick win: Google already shows it, and a clearer title can bring more clicks.
• Then the missing pages. A service without its own page has no way of appearing for its search.
• Write down the date of every change. Otherwise you will not know what worked. After 24 September we rewrote 5,703 article titles that Google was showing cut off; we have not measured the effect yet, and we are not drawing conclusions until we have the data.
• Measure in comparable three-month windows in Search Console. As a reference, our technical fixes usually take 2–4 weeks, and rankings usually move within 3–6 months.

As an example, this is what our own three-month Search Console windows looked like, on a new domain:

In absolute terms the clicks are still modest, and most of them come from our articles in other languages. We show them so you can see how to read a trend, not as a promise.

Disclosure: we offer a free mini-audit too

MPO Web Studio, the Cluj-Napoca studio that publishes this guide, does a free mini-audit on WhatsApp. Apply the same criteria to it as to any other audit. If you want us to do the fixes, the SEO Foundation package is a one-off payment from €240 (€440 with optimization for AI search), and the monthly plans start at €120/month (Local) and €240/month (Growth). Billing is monthly, with no minimum term and 30 days' notice; a month in which we did not deliver what was agreed is refunded. We do not guarantee rankings. The details are on our SEO services page.