The 7-day SEO audit every small business should run this quarter
Most SEO audits are long PDFs nobody reads. I'd run this one on any small business site instead: what to check, what to fix, and what to ignore.
This is the check I’d run on any small business website before spending money on SEO. You can do all of it yourself over a week, at about an hour a day, with free tools from Google and the phone in your pocket. None of it needs code.
The main tool is Google Search Console, which shows how you do in Google search. If you’ve never set it up, add your site and prove you own it before anything else. Google starts collecting data the day you add a site, and the first numbers take a few days to show up, so start with days 2, 5 and 6 while you wait. You’ll also want access to your Google Business Profile, the listing people see on Google Maps, and PageSpeed Insights, which needs no account. Keep notes as you go, because day 7 is where you’ll use them.
Day 1: Write down where you stand
Before you change anything, write down a few starting numbers, so that a few months from now you can tell whether your fixes worked.
In Search Console, open the Performance report. It shows the past three months by default. Write down your clicks, meaning the people who came to your site from a Google search. Then open the Queries tab. If most of your clicks come from people typing your business name, those people already knew you. The searches worth growing are the ones for what you do, like “emergency plumber Atlanta” or “car accident lawyer near me”.
Next, open your Business Profile and click Performance. Google shows how many people tapped your call button, clicked through to your website or asked for directions, along with the searches they used to find you. Write those down too.
The number that matters most isn’t in either tool. It’s how many calls and form messages your website brought in last month. If you can’t tell which calls came from the site, start asking new callers how they found you.
Day 2: Look at your site the way a customer does
Take your phone off Wi-Fi and open your homepage. Count the seconds until you can see what you do and how to reach you. Then look at the first screen as a stranger would. Can you tell what the business does and where it works? Is there a phone number you can tap without scrolling, and is anything covering it, like a chat bubble or a cookie banner? Can you read the headline over the photo behind it? Before you put the phone down, send yourself a message through your own contact form and make sure it arrives.
Plenty of sites stumble here. Between late September and mid-October 2026, we ran a controlled version of this test on 309 Georgia law firm websites and 328 Atlanta-area trades websites. We loaded each one the way Google’s Lighthouse test does for phones: as a mid-range Android phone on slow 4G, with an empty cache. Half the law firm sites needed 5.9 seconds or more to show their main content, and half the trades sites needed 7.3 or more. Google counts 2.5 seconds or less as good. On the first screen, 40% of the law firm sites and 25% of the trades sites had no phone number a visitor could tap.
For a closer look at speed, run your homepage and your main service page through PageSpeed Insights and find Largest Contentful Paint, Google’s name for the moment the main content shows. If the report opens with data from real visitors, that’s the data behind Google’s Core Web Vitals, its three measures of how a page loads, responds to taps and holds still. Sites with little traffic often have no real-visitor data, which is normal. I go through the fixes that move this number in Page speed: the 5 fixes that actually matter.
Day 3: Check that Google can find and read your pages
Open the Page indexing report in Search Console. It shows how many of your pages Google has indexed, meaning stored and able to show in results, and why it left others out. Google says not to expect every page to be indexed, so a few on that list are fine. Look for the pages that matter to you, like your services and your contact page, and read the reason given for any that are missing.
Then search Google for site:yourdomain.com, putting in your own domain. It isn’t a complete list, Google says, but it’s a quick way to see what Google has on file. Scroll through it for pages that shouldn’t be public. In our reviews we keep finding the same leftovers: test pages, demo pages that came with the theme, the “Sample Page” WordPress creates, old copies of the homepage, and on hacked sites, pages of casino spam.
While you’re looking at results, read your page titles. The title is usually the clickable headline Google shows for a page, so it’s often the first thing a searcher reads about you. Google’s own guide to titles says to skip vague ones like “Home” on your home page, and “Home | Business Name” is one of the titles we see most often in law firm reviews. A useful title says what you do and where, like “Water Heater Repair in Atlanta | Your Business Name”.
Last, tap every button and menu link on your homepage. If one of them leads to a “page not found” error, you lose the visitor who was ready to act.
Day 4: Find the searches you almost win
Go back to the Queries tab and sort by impressions, the number of times your site appeared in results. Then split those searches into groups by their average position:
| Average position | What it means | What I’d do |
|---|---|---|
| 1 to 5 | You’re near the top already | Keep those pages accurate and current |
| 6 to 20 | You show up low on page one, or on page two | Spend most of your time here |
| Past 20 | Google rarely shows you | Leave these for later |
For each search in the middle group, ask whether you have a page built for it. If people find you for “water heater repair” and Google sends them to your homepage, you probably need a water heater page.
It’s worth reading the searches themselves, too. A plumber who shows up for “how to fix a leaky faucet” is mostly reaching people who want to do the job themselves, so put your effort into the searches a paying customer would type.
Day 5: Give each service and each town its own page
List every service you sell and every town you want calls from, then check that each one has its own page with enough on it to help a customer decide. A list of towns in the footer doesn’t do that, and neither does one page with ten services crammed onto it.
Read each page as a customer would. It should say what the service includes, who does the work, what happens after someone calls, and how to reach you. A heading and two short paragraphs won’t cover that.
Be careful with town pages. One shortcut we’ve found in reviews is a single page copied over and over with only the town name changed, and Google’s spam policies call pages made to rank for many similar searches “doorway abuse”. Write each town page with something true about working there, like the neighborhoods you cover or how far it is from your office.
We did this kind of work for Dante Law, a Florida injury firm, including 15 city pages, as one part of a bigger program. The firm went on to reach page one of Google in 27 practice areas, though I can’t promise anyone the same result.
Day 6: Tune your Google Business Profile
Google says its local results are based mainly on relevance, distance, and how well known the business is. You can’t change the distance. You can make your profile match what people search for, and you can work on how well known you are.
Start with the basics. Your main category should match your main service, and your hours should be right, holidays included. The phone number on the profile should match your website and ring at your business. Check that the website link goes to the right page and that the photos show your own team and work. Use your real business name, since Google’s profile rules don’t allow extra keywords in it.
Then search for your main service and your town on your phone and look at the businesses in the map. Note which categories they use and how their reviews compare with yours, since those are the businesses competing with you for that call.
Reviews come next. Google says more reviews and positive ratings can help your local ranking, and that replying shows customers you value what they said. Ask every customer. Google’s review policy forbids asking only the people you expect to be happy, and it forbids offering anything in exchange for a review, like a discount. Its own help page suggests sending customers a review link or a QR code. Law firms should check their state bar’s advertising rules before quoting reviews on their own website, and if you run one, I go further in How law firms can get into the top three on Google Maps.
Day 7: Turn your notes into a short list
Turn your notes into five to ten fixes, in order. For each one, write the fix in a line, then ask two questions: does this stop people from calling, and how much work is it?
Anything that stops a call goes first, like a number you can’t tap or a form that doesn’t send. Pages Google can’t find or read come next. Missing service and town pages come after that, because they take the most work. Fix them in order, then check your day 1 numbers again in three months. Google’s SEO starter guide says some changes take effect in a few hours and others take several months, so give each fix a few weeks before you judge it.
Leave these off the list
SEO tools flag plenty of things that won’t change your calls, and Google’s starter guide names several it says not to worry about. Google Search doesn’t use the meta keywords tag. The length of a page alone doesn’t matter for ranking, so there’s no word count to hit. Keywords in your domain name have hardly any effect. The guide also says E-E-A-T isn’t a ranking factor on its own, though Google’s systems look for the things it describes, which I explain in What Google means by “trust”.
I’d add two of my own. Don’t chase a perfect speed score. Aim for main content that shows up fast on a phone, since Google shows the most relevant page even when page experience is weak. And ignore scores like “domain authority” or a letter grade for your site, which come from the tool companies rather than from Google.
If you’d rather have us take the first pass, ask for our free website review. It’s one page in plain words: the 3 to 5 specific things on your website and Google listing that are costing you calls, and what fixing each one would do.