The 7-day SEO audit every small business should run this quarter.

If you run a small business and you've ever hired an SEO agency, you know the drill. A week after kickoff, a 78-page PDF lands in your inbox. It's full of words like "canonicalization." You skim the first five pages, flag the email for later, and never open it again.

Six months go by. Your rankings haven't moved. The agency sends another 78-page report. You fire them. You hire a new one. Repeat.

Here's the thing: a useful SEO review doesn't need to be long. It needs to answer three questions: where you stand, what's broken, and what to fix first. That's it. The rest is noise dressed up to justify a retainer.

At Metro Media, we run the same 7-day review on every new client before we write a single line of strategy. It takes about 12 hours of senior time. It uses tools you can mostly get for free. And by day 7, we know exactly what will move the needle for that business and what won't.

Here's the playbook.

Day 1: Know where you stand

Before you can improve anything, you need to know where you are. Pull your last 90 days of data from Search Console and Analytics and write down four numbers:

These are your baseline. You'll compare every change you make against these four numbers for the next 90 days. If a search isn't in the top 10 yet, it's a goal, not a result. If more than 70% of your traffic is people searching your name, your SEO problem is really an awareness problem.

Day 2: Technical check (only what matters)

Skip the 400-point checklists. Most of the value comes from five checks:

• Can Google reach your pages? Run Screaming Frog (free up to 500 pages) and look for orphan pages, broken links, and redirect chains.
• Speed. Open PageSpeed Insights and check your top 5 pages. Anything in the red goes on the fix list.
• Is Google indexing the right pages? In Search Console, check Pages > Not indexed. If pages you care about are missing, note why.
• Structured data. Are your key pages marked up? Run them through the Schema.org validator.
• Phones. Everything has to work on a phone. Everything.

Fix these five things and nothing else, and you're already ahead of 70% of small businesses in your market.

Day 3: Keyword reality check

Open the Performance report in Search Console. Sort by impressions. Look at the top 50 searches you're already showing up for.

For each one, ask: is this something a customer would actually search? If your roofing business shows up for "roof" but not "roof repair near me," you have an intent problem, not a keyword problem. Fix the page, not the keyword.

The three-bucket sort

• Winners: ranking in the top 5 and getting clicks. Protect these.
• Contenders: ranking 6–20, getting impressions but few clicks. These are the fastest wins in the whole playbook.
• Long shots: ranking 20+, low volume, low intent. Ignore for now.

Your roadmap for the next 90 days lives in the contenders bucket. Every hour you spend there is worth ten hours spent on long shots.

Day 4: What competitors rank for

Pick three competitors, the ones who consistently outrank you for the searches that matter. Run them through Ahrefs Site Explorer (the free tier works). Look at two reports:

• Top Pages: what's bringing them traffic?
• Content Gap: what do they rank for that you don't?

Export both. Keep only the searches with real buying intent. Those are the pages you should write next. Not "thought leadership," not "brand awareness." Specific pages answering specific searches that turn into customers.

Day 5: Content review

Open your top 20 pages by Google traffic. For each one, check:

• Does the page title match what the searcher wants?
• Is the main heading clear and on-topic?
• Is the content genuinely better than what's ranking #1?
• Is there a clear next step for the reader?

Most small business websites fail the third question. Their content is "good enough," but good enough doesn't rank anymore. You need to be the best answer for the search or it's not worth publishing.

Day 6: Google Business Profile

If you're a local business, this is the most valuable day of the week. Open your Google Business Profile and check:

• Are all your service categories filled in?
• Are you posting weekly?
• Are your photos recent (within 90 days)?
• How many reviews have you gotten in the last 30 days?
• Are you replying to every review within 48 hours?

A well-run profile with steady reviews and fresh content can outrank a website ten times its size in the Maps results. For local businesses, the profile is the game.

Day 7: Write the 90-day plan

By now you have a baseline, a list of technical fixes, a list of search opportunities, a competitor gap report, a content review, and a local review. Your job on day 7 is to prioritize.

Pick 10 things. Not 100. Ten. The ones most likely to move the needle in the next 90 days. Rank them by effort versus impact. Do them in order. Re-check at day 90.

That's the whole playbook. No 78-page PDFs, no made-up metrics, no jargon designed to make SEO sound harder than it is. Just the same seven days we run for every client before we touch a single line of strategy.

Try it. You'll learn more in a week than most agencies will tell you in a year.