An SEO audit checks six things: whether Google can crawl and index your pages, whether those pages match what people actually type, whether the site holds up technically, whether your local signals are consistent, whether your content covers the topic, and whether you can measure a lead when one arrives. Everything else is detail.
Most audits handed to business owners are a tool export with a severity color on every row. That is not an audit. An audit is a person deciding what matters on your site, in what order, and why. Below are the twelve checks we run first, what each one is looking for, and what failure actually looks like.
Group 1: Can Google See You?
Nothing else on this list matters if the answer is no. Google is blunt about this. Its documentation states that Google doesn’t guarantee that it will crawl, index, or serve your page, even when you follow every published rule. Indexing is earned, not automatic.
1. Are your pages actually indexed?
We compare the pages you think you have against the pages Google actually has. The URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console reports whether a specific URL is on Google, when it was last crawled, whether anything blocked it, and which URL Google chose as canonical.
What failure looks like: You publish twelve service pages and Google has four. The other eight earn nothing, ever. Nobody notices, because nothing throws an error.
2. Do robots.txt and noindex contradict each other?
This is the quiet killer. A noindex rule tells Google to drop a page from results entirely. But Google is explicit: if the page is blocked by robots.txt, the crawler never sees the noindex rule, and the page can still appear in search results if other pages link to it.
What failure looks like: A staging site goes live with the block still in place. Or the page you wanted hidden stays visible, while the page you wanted ranking is walled off from the crawler.
3. Are duplicate URLs consolidated?
The same page can live at four addresses: with and without www, with and without a trailing slash, HTTP and HTTPS, plus whatever your filters and tracking parameters generate. Your rel="canonical" tag is a strong signal, not a command — Google still decides which version to show.
What failure looks like: Authority splits across near-identical URLs, and none of them perform as well as a single consolidated page would have.
Group 2: Does the Page Match What People Search?
4. Title tags
Google’s generation of title links is completely automated. It reads your title element, but also your H1, prominent on-page text, anchor text, and other sources. If Google detects a problem with your title, it may generate a better one from those sources instead.
What failure looks like: “Home | Welcome.” The same title on nine pages. Or a title Google keeps rewriting — which is Google telling you yours does not describe the page.
5. Meta descriptions
Meta descriptions do not rank you. They earn the click, which is a different job and still worth money. Google says it sometimes uses the meta description when that description gives users a more accurate summary than text pulled from the page.
What failure looks like: Blank descriptions sitewide, so Google grabs whatever sits near the top of the page. Often that is a cookie notice or a navigation menu.
6. Intent match and heading structure
A page targeting “emergency plumber Henderson” needs to answer that query in the first screen, not open with company history. We check whether each page’s headings carry a reader from question to answer, and whether the page type matches the query type. Someone researching how a process works does not want a sales page, and someone ready to buy does not want a 2,000-word explainer.
What failure looks like: Traffic that never converts. People arrive, recognize the wrong kind of page, and leave. This is the finding that most often sends a project to our Las Vegas SEO company team rather than a developer.
Group 3: Technical Health
7. Core Web Vitals
Three measurements with published thresholds you either clear or you don’t, assessed at the 75th percentile of page loads:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) — should occur within 2.5 seconds. How fast the main content appears.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP) — 200 milliseconds or less. How fast the page responds when someone taps.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) — 0.1 or less. How much the page jumps around while loading.
Google confirms that Core Web Vitals are used by its ranking systems. It also says there is no single page experience signal, and that good scores alone will not put you at the top. Read that as: fixing speed removes a handicap, it does not win the race.
What failure looks like: An uncompressed hero image, a chat widget that shoves the page down after it loads, and a theme carrying scripts nobody uses. Most of these are a Las Vegas web design fix, not a content fix.
8. Mobile rendering
Google uses the mobile version of a site’s content, crawled with the smartphone agent, for indexing and ranking. That is mobile-first indexing. The phone version is the version that counts.
What failure looks like: Content that exists on desktop but is hidden or stripped on mobile. If the smartphone crawler cannot see it, it effectively is not on your site.
Group 4: Local Signals
Google names three factors for local results: relevance (how well a Business Profile matches what someone is searching for), distance (how far each business is from the searcher), and prominence (how well known a business is, influenced by things like links to your business and your number of reviews).
You cannot move your building. You can improve relevance and prominence starting this week.
9. Google Business Profile completeness
Primary and secondary categories, the services list, hours, service area, photos, Q&A, and review cadence. Google ties relevance directly to providing complete business information, so every empty field is a relevance signal you chose not to send.
What failure looks like: A Summerlin contractor with one category, no service list, and photos from years ago, wondering why the map results skip them. Fixing that is the core of our local SEO services in Las Vegas.
10. NAP consistency across the web
Name, address, phone — identical everywhere they appear. Google’s representation guidelines require your name to reflect your real-world name, used consistently on your storefront, website, and stationery. Inaccurate or misleading information can lead to changes to your information, or removal of your business information from Google.
What failure looks like: “Ste. 320” on your site, “Suite 320” on one directory, no suite number on another, and a retired tracking number on a fourth. Each mismatch is a small doubt, and they compound.
Group 5: Content and Authority
11. Topic coverage and internal linking
We map the pages you have against the questions your buyers actually search, then check whether your own site points at your own money pages. Internal linking is the one ranking input you control completely — no outreach, no waiting on anyone else.
What failure looks like: Dozens of blog posts, none of them linking to a service page. That is traffic with nowhere to go. It is also the cheapest thing on this entire list to fix.
Group 6: Can You Measure a Lead?
12. Conversion tracking
Form submissions, phone-number clicks, chat starts, and booking events — tracked, attributed to a source, and landing somewhere a human actually reviews. Without this, every other finding on this list is unprovable, and you are optimizing on vibes.
What failure looks like: Analytics counting sessions and nothing else. You cannot tell your best channel from your worst, so budget goes to whatever felt good last quarter. Connecting the form to a system that follows up is where marketing automation and CRM setup earns its keep.
What an SEO Audit Can’t Tell You
Here are the honest limits, because the checklist-spam version of this article will not give you any.
- When you will rank. Google says it plainly: no one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google. Anyone selling you a date is selling you something other than SEO.
- Exactly why a competitor outranks you. We can see their signals. Nobody outside Google sees how those signals are weighted for a given query.
- Whether rich results will show. Correct structured data makes you eligible. Google states it does not guarantee that features which consume structured data will appear in search results.
- Today’s Core Web Vitals. The Search Console report is built on real-world usage data from actual Chrome visitors, so improvements register after real people experience the faster page — not the moment you deploy.
- Whether your offer is any good. An audit fixes visibility. It does not fix pricing, positioning, a weak guarantee, or a phone nobody answers on Saturday.
An audit that pretends otherwise is a sales document wearing a lab coat.
How to Get an SEO Audit Run on Your Site
You can start alone. Google Search Console is free, and it will show you index coverage, Core Web Vitals, and the queries you already appear for. Verify your property today if you have not. That single step answers checks one and seven.
What is harder alone is sequencing. Twelve findings arrive at once, and three of them matter this quarter while nine can wait. Ordering that list correctly is most of the value.
MCNM Marketing has designed and built 100+ websites since 2004 and currently manages 45+ client websites across Southern Nevada, Southern California, and Northern Arizona. We run these same twelve checks on every site we take on, as a digital marketing agency in Las Vegas serving Henderson, North Las Vegas, Summerlin, Spring Valley, and Boulder City, and remotely nationwide.
Our free marketing audit covers all twelve. You get the findings in priority order, in plain language, with the specific fix and who needs to do it — not a PDF of red squares. If the fix belongs to your developer, we will say so. Explore the full range of digital marketing services if you want context on what happens after the audit.
SEO Audit FAQ
An SEO audit is a structured review of everything that decides whether your site earns search traffic: indexing, on-page relevance, technical health, local signals, content coverage, and tracking. It finds what is broken, what is missing, and what to fix first. The output should be a prioritized action list, not a score.
A focused audit of a small business site usually takes a few business days, because the crawl, the Search Console review, and the local checks all happen separately. Larger sites with thousands of URLs take longer. The fixes take longer still. An audit tells you what to do, not when Google reacts.
Run a full SEO audit once a year, and a lighter check every quarter. Also run one after any event that changes your URLs: a redesign, a platform migration, a domain change, or a move to new hosting. Those are the moments sites quietly lose indexed pages.
Yes, partly. Google Search Console is free, and it will show you index coverage, Core Web Vitals, and the queries you already rank for. What is harder alone is interpretation: knowing which findings actually move revenue, and which are noise a tool flagged because it flags everything.
Questions about your own site? Call (702) 608-4226 or learn how we work.
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