Anyone can produce a two-hundred-item audit. Tools generate them. The value is not in the list; it is in knowing which eight items matter and which hundred and ninety-two are noise.
What to examine, in order of usual payback
- Conversion path — where enquiries are lost between arrival and contact, measured per template.
- Handover — time to first contact and routing logic, which is where most deals quietly die.
- Attribution integrity — whether spend can be connected to booked revenue at all.
- Technical access — crawlability, rendering and whether AI retrieval agents can reach you.
- Entity consistency — whether your organisation is described identically across sources.
- Content decay — pages that used to perform and quietly stopped.
- Lifecycle gaps — onboarding, renewal and reactivation that nobody owns.
What a good audit refuses to do
It does not list every warning a crawler emitted. It does not recommend everything the auditor happens to sell. And it does not present findings without saying which are causal and which are correlational — a distinction that determines whether a recommendation is worth acting on.
Why automated audit reports mislead
Automated reports rank by detectability. They surface what tools can see — missing meta descriptions, image alt text, minor speed warnings — and are structurally blind to the expensive problems: an undefined qualified lead, a handover with no owner, an entity nobody can resolve. The report looks thorough and misses the money.
What this means for your business
When commissioning an audit, ask for findings ranked by recoverable value and an explicit list of what was examined and dismissed. Our guide to building a growth strategy covers turning findings into a sequence.