Buy the audit before you buy the retainer. It is the cheapest way to find out whether an agency can think.
What an audit is for
An audit answers three questions: what is wrong with the site, what it is costing you, and what to do first. Everything else in the document is supporting evidence.
Most audits fail on the third. Two hundred pages of crawler output with no opinion is not a plan, and it puts the hardest decision, what to fund first, back on the person who commissioned it.
What it should contain
- Technical: crawl errors, indexation, duplication and speed, checked against your logs and Search Console rather than a tool default
- On-page: content, headings, metadata, keyword mapping and internal linking
- Off-page: link quality, toxicity and the gap between your profile and the ones above you
- Competitors: who wins which searches and what closing the distance would take
- A ranked plan: effort and expected impact next to every item
The detail is set out under SEO audit and reporting.
Use it to compare agencies
Give every agency on your shortlist the same brief and the same access. Then compare three things only: what they identified as the main problem, what they would do in the first ninety days, and how they would know whether it worked.
Price is the fourth question. It only becomes meaningful once the first three have been answered, and an audit is what makes answering them possible.
Then keep reporting against it
The audit is the benchmark. Without one, improvement is an opinion. With one, you can put four numbers in front of your board every month: positions on the searches you chose, organic sessions to the pages worked on, conversions from organic, and the share of total leads search is now producing.
Disclosure. This site is published by Dubyte AI Solutions, a Dubai agency that sells the services described here. We say so on every page rather than pretending to be an independent directory.