How often should a website be audited?
Short answer
It depends on events more than the calendar. Audit before SEO work starts, before and after a redesign or migration, after an unexplained drop in calls or rankings, and when the business changes. Between those events, continuous measurement does the job, and a full audit repeated on a fixed schedule mostly repeats itself.
Audit a website when something changes, not on a fixed calendar: once before SEO work begins, and again around any event that could alter how Google sees the site. SEO here means search engine optimization. There’s no interval that is right for every business. A small service site that is measured continually and rarely changes can go a long time between full audits. A site that has just been rebuilt needs one now, regardless of the date.
The events that call for an audit
An audit is due whenever the ground has shifted under the site. The usual triggers:
- Before starting SEO work, or before changing who does it, so that a baseline exists.
- Before and after a redesign, a change of platform or a new domain name. Site migrations like these are when pages and web addresses get lost, and settings with them.
- After a drop in rankings or calls that has no obvious cause.
- When the business itself changes: a new service line, a new location, a move, a new name or a merger.
- When you take over a site or a profile and don’t know what was done to it before.
Why a calendar is the wrong trigger
Most of what an audit finds doesn’t change unless somebody changes it. If the structure of your site was sound in spring and nobody has touched it, repeating the full examination in summer will mostly reproduce the same findings. Audits sold on a fixed schedule are easy to invoice for exactly that reason. I’d rather tell you that you don’t need another one yet.
That said, sites drift. Software updates itself, staff add pages, a developer changes a setting, and Google changes how it reads things. So if a year or more has gone by with no trigger at all, a fresh look is a reasonable habit. Treat that as my rule of thumb and not as a requirement from Google.
Different parts go out of date at different speeds
A partial audit is often the right answer, because each part goes stale for its own reason.
| Part of the audit | What makes it go stale |
|---|---|
| Technical: crawling, indexing, speed | Changes to the site’s code, theme, add-ons or hosting |
| Local: Google Business Profile, listings, reviews | Edits to the profile, including ones suggested by the public or applied by Google, and competitors opening or improving nearby |
| Content | Changes to the services you offer or the cities you serve |
| Competitors | New companies, or existing ones investing in their own visibility |
After a new theme, a technical SEO audit is enough. After a roofing company in Poway adds solar, to take a hypothetical case, the pages are what need checking, which is the job of a content audit.
What to do between audits
Measure continuously, so that problems surface without waiting for an audit. That means the same few measurements taken on a regular rhythm: calls and booked jobs from search and a rank grid across your service area, along with the indexing and manual action reports in Google Search Console, which is where Google reports a problem it has found with the site. When one of those moves in a way nobody can explain, that is the trigger for an audit. If nobody is taking those measurements for you now, that gap is a better reason to act than the age of your last audit.