What do I need to provide for an SEO audit?
Short answer
Mostly access and a few facts. I ask to be added as a user on Google Search Console, Google Analytics and your Google Business Profile, never for your passwords. I also need your services, the cities you serve, your most valuable jobs, and the history of the site, including past agencies and redesigns.
For an SEO audit, I ask you for access to a few accounts and for some facts about your business that no tool can look up. The accounts let me read your own data instead of estimating it. The facts tell me which searches and which cities are worth measuring. You don’t need to prepare a keyword list or know anything technical.
The accounts, and why each one matters
A missing account changes what I can measure but rarely stops the audit, because each one holds a different part of the picture.
| What I ask for | What it tells me | If you don’t have it |
|---|---|---|
| Google Search Console | The searches your site appears for, the clicks, and whether your pages are indexed | It can be set up. Don’t count on it showing much history from before that. |
| Google Analytics | What visitors do after they arrive, and which pages lead to inquiries | It can be installed, but it only records from that day forward. |
| Google Business Profile | Categories, services, service area, reviews and the profile’s own performance figures | If you can’t get into your own profile, recovering access comes first. |
| The website’s admin area | How pages are built, and which settings affect indexing | Much of the site can still be examined from the outside. |
| Call or lead records | How many inquiries you get now, and from where | A rough count from your office is still useful. |
How to give access without giving away control
Add me as a user under my own login, and don’t send your password. Search Console, Analytics and Google Business Profile each let an owner invite another person by email address and choose a limited role, and for an audit a role that can read the data is enough. You stay the owner, and you can remove the access whenever you like.
This step can turn up a problem of its own: the accounts belong to a former agency or a past employee, and the business has no owner-level login. That’s worth fixing no matter who you hire. These accounts hold your history, and they should sit under an email address the business controls.
The facts only you can supply
No tool can tell me what you sell and where, or which work is worth the most to you. I ask for:
- The services you offer, and which ones you want more of. A company in El Cajon that does both drain cleaning and repipes may care far more about the second.
- The cities and neighborhoods you really send trucks to, and any you’d rather not.
- Where your trucks leave from, since map rankings are tied to location.
- A few competitors you keep seeing above you.
- Roughly what a booked job is worth, so findings can be ordered by value and not by how alarming they sound.
The history that explains the data
Tell me what has been done to the site and the profile before, including the parts you regret. A redesign, a change of domain name, a move to a new address, a profile suspension, a past agency that built links or listings: each can explain a pattern that would otherwise look like a mystery. If an agency worked on the site, any list of what they changed helps. So does knowing whether paid ads are running and whether call tracking is in place, because both affect how the call numbers read.
What you don’t need
You can get in touch before you have everything on this list. Missing access is a finding in itself, and I can tell you what can be measured with what you have. If the first row of the table is new to you, Google Search Console is the account that shows the searches your site appears for and whether your pages are indexed. The accounts and facts above feed the SEO audit, and for a company that depends on the map results, the local SEO audit is the part that draws most on your Google Business Profile.